Mr. Spock Saved Me

You might say I have two totems. They are diametrically opposite of each other. Both represent me at my most extreme.

One is the Incredible Hulk. He is the rage that burns inside me. All the anger that has no outlet in a civilized world.

The other is Mr. Spock who was masterfully portrayed by Leonard Nimoy. He died this last Friday. When certain actors pass away I'm hurt because of what they meant to me. I may have loved their work or a particular character. It depends.

Mr. Spock is someone I identified with. He was among them but not part of them. He was always the outsider to some degree. It was his alien DNA and his alien upbringing which set him apart from his crewmates.

I was born in December and that always makes for a difficult choice. Do you put the child in school at 4 1/2 or 5 1/2? I got put in kindergarten at 4 1/2. So compared to everyone else, I was younger, smaller, and less emotionally mature than most of my classmates. This made me a target for bullies. Pick on me. Make me cry. It must have been a fun game for the mean kids. Apparently society figured out that bullying is bad and it is not the problem it used to be. But when I was a kid, I ended up getting picked on. I was constantly in the principal's office as a victim.

Mr. Spock was salvation for me. Since I was like him, among them but not of them, I decided to emulate him. I became logical and unfeeling. Or not unfeeling, but I damped down my feelings and didn't let the bullies see they bothered me. I didn't cry anymore. It made them leave me alone. If they got no reaction, they lost interest.

I remember one Halloween I dressed as Mr. Spock. The kid up the street was Kirk. My blond hair was dyed black with shoe polish and styled like his. Then when it dried, it became a helmet of black. It took many shampooings to make that learning experience go down the drain.

In some ways I'm still a bit like Spock. I keep my feelings pretty close to the vest. But, Oh, the things that boil inside me.