I don't remember when I first thought about going to the stars.

    I do remember lying on my back when I was very young and staring up into the endless blue depths of the sky and wondering if all went on forever...

    Of course, when I was growing up, it was the moon: beating the Russians, you know, and there it was, right in our own back yard. It was our night light, our neighbor, that last undiscovered country... And we were going to go there. Someday. In my own lifetime, I might be able to scuff my bootprints in its ancient dust.

    So I read every book I could find in the library, moving from the children's section to the adult's by the sixth grade and emptying the sci-fi shelves before the seventh was done.

    I watched John Glenn orbit the earth on my birthday and I dreamed...

    When I was twelve, the dream grew bigger: it reached beyond the moon, to the stars! And television threw the gates wide open with a new show--a spaceship and crew that visited strange new worlds, sought out new life forms and new civilizations...

    But the euphoria didn't last. The people I thought I cared about became cardboard props for vaudevillian sketches in outer space. Dr. Smith and the robot presaged Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple," and I despaired of ever finding a vision like my own.

    A year passed. I was thirteen. Rumors of war sounded like far-off rumbles of thunder. Kennedy was dead and the golden days of Camelot were three years distant now and The Great Society didn't seem so great from where I sat, earthbound, trapped where all the bright vistas and new frontiers were a hundred years gone or a century away in the future.

    But one night a light appeared--not in the infinite darkness of the night sky but in the muddy depths of my parents t.v. set. There was a spaceship--a starship, really--and it was something beyond anything remotely imagined in the NASA scrapbooks I had kept. And there were people--real people with real passions--living out flesh and blood adventures beyond the narrow little neighborhoods that made up my own confined little world.

    Best of all, perhaps; it was forbidden. I was growing up in the conservative Midwest and my middle-class, churchgoing parents felt that maybe this new show was a little too adult for someone my age--or at least theirs, anyway. Not that they remembered it from week to week: everything was fine as long as they weren't in the room because there was only one television in our house then and the adults got first choice. (Isn't there something good on? they would wonder and reach for the T.V. Guide.)

    It was a black-and-white world and suddenly here was one of the few shows in color. And not just color but COLORS that reached out and put noogies on your retinas! The costumes, the sets, the ALIENness of it all!

    But again, the people...

    People we wanted to be, people we wanted to know, people we wanted at our side or guarding our back when things got rough. These were people who made it possible for us to boldly go and go without fear or uncertainty.

    The captain taught us how to be bold and to stand up for what was right, no matter what the odds and damn the consequences.

    The alien knew what it was really like to be us, each separate and alone, each wearing our mask; he taught us that pain could be embraced and that, by daring to be different, we could be cool beyond the cookie-cutter sameness of our old idols.

    The doctor showed us how to be passionate and taught us to question EVERYTHING; to doubt so that we could find different standards, consider the paths less taken.

    And the rest were parts of us, as well: our better parts that we might someday grow into if we were worthy. They showed us a dream that could not be confined by dimension or distance or time. Each week was one brief, shining hour of time that could fuel our dreams for days at a time as we coasted through the greyness of mundane life in the burbs.

    And then they killed it.

    They tried after two years and finally succeeded in the third. It was easy: they had already killed John and Bobby and Martin; hell, killing Jim and Spock and Leonard had to be a lot easier--they weren't real and they didn't have anything to do with everything else on the boob tube. It was 1969 and killing things was an American industry by then...

    But dreams die hard.

    Funny how you never met anyone else who watched the show...until it was gone...

    There were rumors, at first. Then stories. Amateur efforts, but who cared! It was odds and ends of the dream poking up out of the grave like something taking root and starting to grow.

    I grew. And so did television: the three networks found themselves surrounded by independents popping up on the UHF band like wild mushrooms. And then came cable.

    Old dead shows came shambling out of the network crypts to populate these new electronic neighborhoods and, guess what, Kirk and Spock and McCoy were still out there on their original five-year mission!

    But something had happened while they were out of communications range. Someone had tampered with the stories! They seemed to be the same ones I had watched just a few years before...but...now they were about... things...stuff...that we didn't remember being there before.

    So we watched them again! And again! And something happened: the people we admired, the people we wanted to be like, the people who traveled at the other end of the galaxy--became our family. We knew them better than our own parents, sisters, brothers, friends. They taught us more abstract values, now. And, at a time when we were learning to distrust our own government, they showed us that there might someday be a government and a military force that truly could serve and protect, heal and rebuild.

    They wore like a pair of comfortable slippers.

    I went to college. And found myself glued to the dorm t.v. on Saturday mornings with a bunch of bleary-eyed frat boys who should have been sleeping in, watching a CARTOON! The Enterprise was charting new courses, now--never mind that the plots were a little simpler, the animation rather wooden--the dream was starting to grow again!

    There were books, now! And rumors of a new t.v. series! No, a movie, instead! No, it was going to be a t.v. miniseries! A miniseries pilot for a t.v. series! They had most of the cast signed! Someone backed out! A network got cold feet! The rumors continued for years...

    And then, somewhere in a dark theater, a light glowed...two moons appeared...and a craggy, familiar face half hidden by long, black hair, gazed back at us from across the light-years. The dream was bigger, now.

    Never mind that the plot was recycled hash: "Star Trek the Motionless Picture" we called it, "Where Nomad Has Gone Before..." Never mind that Kirk had shed his velour shirt and naval pants for baby-blue jammies with a suspicious belt buckle. And never mind that everyone was growing older, warping toward their own individual mortality. The dream was alive, it was growing, and--if it seemed to lack the flash and verve of its youth--well, some of us were starting to see our own lives settle into slots of numbing predictability, as well. All good things...as they sometimes say--we didn't know how many more years would pass before we would see those words used for closure. And premature closure, at that!

    Even holding tight to the dream, we couldn't imagine what was going to happen next...

    Boom! Nick Meyer rides to the rescue: Khan is back and Kirk's got him!

    Shields up, photon torps armed: Trek is back with a vengeance!

    It was the Star Trek I knew and loved over a decade earlier with bright colors and grand, glorious tales of man against man, man against God, man against nature...

    And man against himself.

    Kirk needs glasses, discovers that he has a son.

    And Spock...

    He's come to the end of his journey. Half human, ever fearful of the debilitating effects of emotion, he has found closure in the V'ger mindmeld. He sees the sterility of cold, machinelike logic divorced from the balance of humanity and its gifts of friendship, love, devotion--the only things that bring real meaning to existence. He has embraced his human side, no longer divided, no longer separate, alone, incomplete...and so he has arrived...and exits, making the final sacrifice for his friends.

    We wept as the credits rolled. This was not some pastel rehash of old storylines with the reset button conveniently placed at the end. This was real to us: there were consequences to be faced for every action, every decision, both old and new. Trek had returned to its roots and it had gone beyond them to a new place. And while we mourned for Spock, we also thought about that dark obelisk nestled among the protoferns of the Genesis planet: we caught a glimpse of light through the cracks of that closed door...perhaps there would be another voyage and we might still go places where none of the past episodes had gone before...

    We searched for Spock and, tho we found some semblance of our Vulcan friend, there was more loss, now. Kirk lost his son, a chance to continue into the future beyond his own mortality. We lost Saavik, the fiery half-Vulcan/half-Romulan protege portrayed by Kirstie Alley and got Saavik the anemic, PC, proto Vulcan in her place.

    And we lost the Enterprise.

    After all the years of capture, surrender, cat-and-mouse--in the end there was no ploy, no bluff, no reversal of fortune: she was gone. The Enterprise would fly again, with new letters, configurations, and, ultimately, new captains, but there was a definite break with the past, now. The name and spirit of the Enterprise would continue, would still be honored.

    But something was left behind me, now. And I was learning that life and dreams are both like that.

    Of course, Trek was more than a ship: ST IV proved that. We saved the whales and the planet with a ridiculous piece of space flotsam that wasn't even Federation Starfleet. The crew were reunited after wandering through separate orbits in the previous movie. Spock, was starting to sound more like himself, tho there was a sadness here, as well: he had completed the journey begun in 1966 by embracing his human/emotional side and becoming fully integrated and actualized--where could he go, now? So, he was killed, resurrected, and taught to swear. Funny, yes. But sad that he had no sooner arrived at the real closure and was sent off to do the vaudeville circuit in the Alpha Quadrant. Once we had smiled at Spock's excess of dignity, now we laughed at its loss.

    It got worse.

    Three men approaching their golden years hunched around a campfire, singing children's camp songs. Nothing really wrong with that except there was a stagey silliness that seemed forced, contrived. False. I cringed in my seat feeling the embarrassment that people feel when they see friends or people that they love and admire make fools of themselves in public. Was this how the dream finally died, not with a bang but a whimper?

    Hope dawned anew.

    A century passed and the Enterprise still flew! There was a new crew but it was still Trek and this time around Roddenberry had the money and the clout to do it right.

    But wait, something wasn't right. Maybe a lot of things.

    The captain is a short, old, bald guy who's supposed to be French with a British accent. He drinks tea, hates kids, and never ever beams down because that's too dangerous for a Federation starship captain.

    The ship's counselor is an empath and in the 1st episode she feels "PAIN!" Before she's done I do too!

    The science officer is an emotionless android: it this going somewhere new?

    The chief engineer is the rotating walk-on of the week.

    Where is the cultural diversity of the 1st bridge crew? They look like central casting for white people in space: of the only two black actors, one is supposed to be an alien who gets beat up every week and the other is a blind guy who drives the ship!

    Where are the Vulcans?!!

    In the first few weeks, Roddenberry settles a few old scores, rehashes some old plots, Picard reads a computer report that references a Captain James T. Kirk like he's some kind of obscure footnote that has dropped off the pages of the history books.

    The difference seems to coalesce quickly: The Original Series was about the men who went down to the sea in the tall wooden ships and sailed into the unknown. The Next Generation seemed, by contrast, to be today's nuclear powered navy doing milk runs around the Mediterranean. Space had become well-lit and organized into zip codes...

    Was this what the dream had come to? No new frontiers? Mundanity? Would Star Trek TNG last a whole season?

    Okay, this was "not your father's Star Trek."

    It was different.

    We had groused about how stupid it was for the captain to beam down to a strange and potentially hostile planet each week and leave the expendable people behind. The Next Generation fixed that with an older, wiser, father figure to stay in the captain's chair while the young, virile, Kirk-in-training beamed down to fight alien monsters and woo alien women.

    We had griped about how most of the shows were about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and ignored the rest of the bridge crew, not to mention the other interesting people who had to be aboard the Federation flagship. TNG fixed that, as well.

    And, with time, the actors fixed things, as well. Funny how that short, old, bald guy with the prickly attitude became far more interesting (and sexier according to most polls) than Will (Beefcake) Riker.

    An emotionless, android science officer? Ho-hum...until Brent Spiner and the writers made us ask ourselves which was more poignant: the Vulcan who didn't want to be human, or the clockwork mechanism who so desperately wanted to be real?

    An empath as ship's counselor? An intriguing concept that had it's finest moments but missed, I felt, its full potential most of the time. The hard part for me was seeing Troi in her non-regulation(?), low-cut, cleavage-enhancing outfits leaning forward in therapy sessions saying "Tell me, crewman, what are you feeling right now?" 8-{)

    I was ambivalent about Pulaski. I loved the character and the actress (a 2-time veteran of TOS) but, come on: a crusty Starfleet physician who hates the transporter and loves to bait the ship's science officer? Let's break some new ground.

    Geordi found his focus when he stopped being the bus driver and began putting the engineering department in order. The others took time as well and fixing the uniforms didn't hurt, either.

    The biggest adjustment? I lived on the other side of the mirror universe, now: the sixties had given way to the eighties, idealism lost out to cynicism; my sense of wonder had lost its virginity. We were a generation that no longer bought into uncomplicated, happy endings.

    Kirk had probed the frontier for a fledgling federation of planets. Picard was ambassador at large for a maturing and Machiavellian complex of politics and alien gestalt.

    The ground had shifted under their feet and ours.

    As an adult, I often long for the simplicity of my youth--times seemed so uncomplicated then. And since Kirk and company were a part of that time of simplicity, discovery, and seeming clarity, classic Trek has become an icon for my own youth, for the time of enthusiasm and creativity and reminds me that a sense of wonder is something to cling to when the rest of the world seems to suggest that Dr. Kervorkian should make more house calls.

    Picard reminds me that I am an adult. That there are fretful responsibilities and that one must work at persevering. That victories come in all sizes and packages, that integrity must sometimes suffice in the face of loss.

    And that you can be a grownup with a thousand responsibilities nipping at your heels and still boldly go...that you can still have the wonder and the adventure.

    The cowboy and the diplomat, which is more important? Both are necessary to the building of an empire. Might as well ask: the apple or the orange, which is the better fruit? Or better, yet: which are the better stories? The ones they told us, week after week?

    Or the ones we told ourselves and each other when each week's episode was over?

    Still, I chafed a bit. Roddenberry felt that mankind would have overcome his aggressive tendencies by the 24th century. In college lit. they taught me that conflict was the essence of good storytelling. There were a number of episodes where we seemed to *blandly* go where no one had gone...for a little while, at least.

    Maybe I was spoiled. We had been served the best food and the best wine over the years but now we knew the menu before it was even placed before us.

    The Klingons seemed to have been tamed, the Romulans were a half-forgotten memory, the neighborhood bullies were either put in their place or avoided in future episodes. Occasional shows either had you glued to your chair like "Yesterday's Enterprise" or opened up new places in your head like "Darmok" or reached up and smacked you when you least expected it (the late, great John Anderson as the human seeming life form who exterminated an entire race in revenge for the death of his human wife). Almost every episode was thoughtful, done with quality, and would have made me weep if it had aired ten years before.

    TNG was thrilling a whole new generation of fans who missed the first go-round. Many of them were catching TOS in syndication, but it wasn't the same as having been there the first time. I'm not indulging in intellectual snobbery or saying that we had it better--just different. When there was nothing else available on the electronic wasteland and the movies and a second series an unimaginable future, the first time was different. We were all alone in the dark and could only hope that there were others somewhere in the dark with us.

    We saw the first interracial kiss on prime-time television, heard Kirk say "let's get the hell out of here" after Edith Keeler died--something that wasn't said on t.v. in 1967. Trek took us places that we could barely imagine even after the fact. It unfolded in realtime for us--it was not yet video history, something to look back to after the fact.

    Now that there was a New Generation and another feature film every two years, some of us old-timers grew complacent, even critical: been there, done that, got the T-shirt. What was once alien seemed more and more familiar.

    I still watched. Trek was probably better than ever. But I was jaded: what once was meat and drink, a weekly feast, was now ritual-- pleasurable, to be sure--but more hobby than lifeline, now. In 1966 we had never heard of VCRs but now we could tape, rent, borrow, or steal a hundred different visions, a thousand different stories. We were no longer hicks to be dazzled at the county fair. We had choices and the means to make comparisons.

    We could be critical. Trek was a part of us and we were a part of it and we felt that we could speak up and speak our mind. And speak our hearts, as well.

    Perhaps we were jaded. Perhaps we just set our standards higher.

    The Borg kicked our complacency out from under us.

    I sat on the edge of my seat and wondered what the hell was going on?

    I admired TNG, found my intellect challenged, my emotions stirred, my soul touched...

    But now I was breaking into a cold sweat and little cattle prods of adrenaline were goosing my heart.

    It finally dawned on me as the Enterprise D broke free of the tractor beam and skidaddled for home with the Borg ship on its tail like a giant rubric's cube from Clive Barker's hell. It was classic TOS from the 1st season--back before Roddenberry had defined his universe, when the Vulcans were an enigma wrapped in mystery, and the grips used key lighting on Kirk's eyes as he prowled a dimly-lit Enterprise.

    TNG had finally found a dark, unexplored corner of the Trek universe and, suddenly, the unknown was bigger and stranger and more alien than I had imagined for a long, long time. Here there be dragons.

    And what had been pretty good to begin with just kept getting better and better. Perfection on a weekly basis is elusive, you're lucky to find it on prime-time television even once during a given season. TNG was on-target more often than it missed the mark.

    TOS was a little threadbare by the time it limped to its third season conclusion. The blame could be laid elsewhere but episodes like "Spock's Brain" and "Where The Children Shall Lead" were painful enough that we could understand and accept a little more when the network axe fell for the last time.

    TNG, it seemed, went out with it's head held high. A guest who chose to leave the party before the rest of the guests became tedious, not a reveler who was asked to leave because their behavior was an embarrassment to others.

    But even before All Good Things "lied" about coming to an "end" we saw the dream open some new doors and windows.

    Nobody needed to say: "Space, the final frontier..."

    Besides, we had already figured it out: it wasn't about outer space at all. It was all about charting the inner terrain. People, the human condition: WE were the final frontier.

    So maybe we didn't need stories about The Little Starship That Could, anymore.

    How about a claustrophobic tale about a bunch of misfits thrown together and stuck out in a dead-end post at the hind end of the known universe? Not everyone has a starship to fly them to wondrous new adventures every week: maybe that was everything when I was thirteen and acceptable when I hit my thirties. But now I'm stuck in a career path and I'm too old and obsolete to dream the dreams I once held for my own future.

    Oh, I haven't done too badly. I teach at a university and manage a radio station. I still play guitar and do occasional paying gigs. I've resisted the MUNDANE Collective and their attempts to assimilate me. Instead of playing golf, I write science fiction and fantasy--my third novel was published last May--not bad as hobbies go. But I *know*, now, I'll never walk on the moon, much less fly between the stars. The things I thought I might do to change the world are neatly folded and locked away in a trunk with the rest of my childhood trophies and youthful expectations. The dream has not died--but I no longer feel it singing in my blood; it has settled into my bones. And, though I know my body will be forever earthbound, I can still dream the dream for those that will come after me.

    The dream has not lost its possibilities, I simply know, now, the limitations on my own possibilities. And for those of us who find themselves trapped in the backwaters of life, stuck in our own, dead-end posts, forced to deal with the same conflicts, week after week, year after year, Trek has given us a new arena that resonates personally. Powerfully.

    Pogo said: "We have met the enemy and he is us." The Bajorans, finally free of the tyranny of the Cardassians are finding that their most formidable enemy may be themselves. A disillusioned commander who has had his career and his family ripped to shreds comes to DS9 to lick his wounds. A former crew member of the Enterprise is left behind to clean up other people's messes. A Bajoran officer who has spent her whole life making war must come to terms with the unpleasant task of making peace. The ultimate alien in every sense of the word--he doesn't even know who he is and where he came from--tries to find his place, not knowing that the truth will ultimately rob him of any hopes of home with kith and kin. The disillusioned, the disenfranchised, the unwitting, the unwilling, unaware that war is coming toward them from both sides of the wormhole...

    They teach us how to be strong when circumstance binds us and injustice grinds us down: as Hemingway wrote in ancient times, "If people bring so much courage to this world, the world has to kill them to break them...

    "For the world breaks everyone and, afterward, many are the strong at the broken places...

    "But those who will not break, it kills...

    "And it kills the very good...

    "And the very brave...

    "And the very gentle...

    "Impartially."

    I'm old enough, careworn enough, with my own "command" responsibilities to have been bent occasionally and broken rarely. I've learned, as Sisko and Kira and Odo and O'Brien have, that you can be bent and snap back, you can break and heal. You can be stranded, surrounded, outnumbered, and fight back. That you can be your own worst enemy and hate and fear your very best friends. That life is not simple and that integrity can be complicated. That it's not the number of blows that you take or the number of times you fall to the mat, but its whether you stand up

    just

    one

    more

    time

    again.

    And so a life and a dream run its course.

    It starts with an unimaginable light in the darkness.

    It grows to show us ever-expansive possibilities.

    It deepens inward even as it flares outward.

    And, as it redefines everything within its reach, it guides each of us on different journeys within the same light.

    We travel the arc.

    And, eventually, come to a place where we can look back and say it is done and it was good, despite the stumbles, the missteps, the odd twists and turns, the mistakes, the blunders, the pratfalls. For that is life and reality and the nature of the universe. Can the dream really be that much different?

    And so it eventually must end.

    Or must it?

    As one generation passeth away, another comes to find its own way...

    Blaze new trails and walk old, familiar paths...

    Win glory and fail miserably...

    Live and love and lose and win and go on...

    We haven't opened all of the doors nor opened all of the windows, and those we have are worth a second, third, or even fourth look.

    I've raised children and, even now, watch them stumble and fail and succeed only to stumble again. They're trying out their own lives but they're still young enough to make all of the mistakes that I made.

    So is Trek.

    So is Voyager.

    I wish her well.

    May she lead a new generation to the stars and remind us old farts who've been around too long to be easily satisfied that the dream flies in directions that dismay or even offend us.

    That doesn't mean they aren't worthy.

    Live long...

    And prosper for us all.