A belated farewell to a Vulcan.

When I was a young boy, every week I would spend a particular evening with my family gathered in the living room. My mother would be sitting on the sofa, my father in his recliner with a jar of planter roasted peanuts. My younger sister and brother would be laying on the floor with me, all of us at my father's feet.

At the designated magical time, the TV screen would go black, then we'd see a few stars appear, moving, then that familiar music followed by a young William Shatner's voice, "Space... the final frontier...".

As I was too young to have been witness to the original airing of the series, Star Trek was rerun for many years during most of the 1970s. My exposure to Sci-Fi, Star Trek, and the varied personalities, as well as philosophical concepts and questions began at an early age. It would seem I may have paid attention more than I realized at the time. My way of thinking began to change, grow. Not simply with age, but in my perception of the universe at large, the people within it, why things were the way they were, and how they could be made better.

One of the key figures in my birth of knowledge-seeking was a strange and (mostly) stoic character many have come to revere as an icon of intellect we should all strive to become. A human-vulcan hybrid named Spock.

Admittedly, when I was young, Kirk was my hero, as he was to most boys of that time and culture. However, as I aged, and my interest in science and astronomy began to develop, I came to notice Spock more and more. When I reached adulthood, and some level of maturity in both physical, as well as mental capacity, I found myself drawn to a new series. Star Trek The Next Generation. In it, I found myself drawn to Captain Picard and Data, as they seemed to be the more intelligent, honorable, and philosophically/logically inclined. But always in the back of my mind, I thought of Spock. That's what Spock would say, or That's what Spock would do. Somehow, sometime during my life, Spock had imprinted something into my thought process that stuck and began to shape how I processed most of my intellectual patterns and inner debates.

I imagine it was this imprint that led me to develop a more logical means of thinking and living my life, in general. My love of philosophy grew from this, I posit, as well. I studied the subject intently, for six years, while attending my state university. Logic and Critical Thinking were the first fields, but then I soon branched out into Existentialism, Ethics and Morals, Religious, Feminist, Ancient, and a few others. The scope of my thinking and perception of how everything 'is' expanded beyond my limits, for a time. I gained a much more holistic view of the universe. My life had been changed forever, just as my thought process.

If you were to ask me twenty years ago who my heroes were, I would have said something like Spider-man, Robin Hood, the Lone Ranger, Luke Skywalker. Ask me now and I'd say Robert E. Howard's Conan, Nietzsche, Picard, Sun Tzu, Plato, Socrates, Sartre, and Spock.

I realize Leonard Nimoy was simply an actor (as well as being very talented in many other fields), but the life he breathed into a character for a dated scfi series back in the 1960s propelled him, as that character, into legend. He became immortal. He became Spock. And he provided us with one of the greatest icons for logic, peace, and intellectual advancement we could have ever asked for.

We will miss Mr. Nimoy, greatly. But We will miss Spock even more.

Live long and prosper, Leonard.