The ship is anchor’d safe and sound.

Sir Patrick Stewart has died. I don’t really know what to say — words really are failing me right now. So I’ll start here: I grew up on Star Trek. When I call up fond memories from my childhood, the happiest all involved watching the original series with my dad. Every week we’d huddle up around the television — either the one in our family room in the basement, or the small one perched in my parents’ bedroom — and settle in for an hour of space fantasy. It was the first time I remember being transported by television, thrown into a future arrayed in vivid, almost psychedelic colors, all flashing across our tiny TV set as this weird and motley crew traipsed about space. I didn’t get The Next Generation when it first came on the air. I was just a kid, mind, but if I’d had the vocabulary at the time I probably would’ve said it felt too calm. Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard couldn’t have been more different from William Shatner’s James T. Kirk if he’d tried. Where Kirk was daring and…