Star Trek

I was not and still not a fan, but watching the Star Trek movie flipped that switch in my mind that turned on the light on most of my childhood memories. There's this scene in the movie where Leonard Nimoy, looking really aged and slightly withered, meets the young Kirk. They talk a bit and before Kirk left, Spock looks at him and said very gently, very matter-of-factly, very Spock-ly, "Live long and prosper" with the Vulcan handsign. I couldn't help it, everything came rushing back, just like how it is in the movies where one flashback after another fires in your mind. Memories of my childhood in M.H. del Pilar washed over me like a great flood, too much that I couldn't help but tear up. I remember watching Star Trek in my Nanay's TV room, a space just outside her bedroom that opened to the veranda with heavy swinging glass doors. I'd marvel at the show on her enormous colored console TV that looks like a sideboard and after watching, you could draw the cabinet together and hide the TV screen. I remember doing the Vulcan handsign so easily while my sisters and other playmates would struggle keeping their middle and ring fingers separate. I thought then that if I was able to do that easily, then I must be Vulcan. I really, seriously thought that I came from a distant planet and I had to keep it to myself, otherwise, I'd be sent back. I gather that was the time that I thought that there's something special in me that's struggling to get out at the right time. I remember reading an article about Leonard Nimoy in one of my Dad's Reader's Digest from the 60s or 70s -- I forget, and getting endeared with him. I remember seeing ads of him in the other Digests hawking men's socks or something like that. It just made me sad seeing him now looking so wrinkled and frail because I know, somewhere deep inside me, my childhood memories will also wither and become a faint impression of its former greatness.