Friday, December 19, 2008

I've been trying

I've been trying to think what to say.

Yesterday was my cousin's seventh birthday, and I didn't allow myself to dwell. Now I don't have that excuse and, yeah.

Sad.

So I decided to let Majel do the talking for me.

"Star Trek will live because - look around you."

"Star Trek is Gene Roddenberry's. No one else's."

Those were the only quotable things she said at our one encounter. Rod did a lot of talking for her. I think it annoyed her.

The woman had spunk.

Actually, it wasn't our only encounter. I was in the vendor's room and there she was, right next to me, in a wheelchair.

She looked right at me, just for a second. For a moment I was in the gaze of someone who was not just an actress or the wife of a producer but a symbol. And she knew it. I don't know what she saw in me. No words were exchanged. It was over in a second and she was gone.

But I felt, in that moment, something we all should know, that the thing that has comforted her through the last twenty years of Gene's demise and death was knowing that his legacy will continue. She was a symbol of his legacy, and now she is dead and we are left to carry on without her. In that second, she unspeakingly charged me and all those like me - not by words or actions, but by the simple act of her being - with the duty and responsibility and honor of carrying on that legacy in her name, as she has carried it in Gene's. She didn't need to speak more at that convention. It has all been said. Her feelings, her thoughts, and her desire for the future of Trek have been made clear. The torch has been passed, her approval of J.J.'s movie has been firmly stamped by a computer voice, and today a thousand, a million, a hundred million fans cry out the words with which our lives began -

"There's still something out there."