There is so much to say about Britt, whose life was so vast.

But there’s one thing that I need to say:

Britt and I are total nerds, and it is Star Trek that has makes this so.

Before we knew that, she was my student in AP European History at Arroyo Grande High School. That’s when I realized, in reading her essays, that she was gifted beyond measure.

I was adamant about writing clear essays. It brought out my Napoleonic Complex, and maybe Mussolini, too.

When you have seventy history essays to grade, you play a trick on yourself. You grade in a nice coffeehouse with a latte nearby. And you bunch essays in groups of five so you can take a moment for a break at the end of each group.

On your break, you take a sip of your latte and glare poisonously at the other people in the coffeehouse because they are having fun.

And at the bottom of each group of five essays you insert one that you know will be good. They are the correctives to the bloopers you can find in student essays, like the classic Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin he built with his own hands.

Britt’s essays were always at the bottom.

She sat in the first desk in the third row from the bank of windows in Room 306 at AGHS. She was quiet. When she asked a question, it would be a zinger, albeit one marked by guileless curiosity. The question revealed, too, that her mind traveled at warp speed in galaxies far beyond ours.

But a Britt question could take me in a different direction, far beyond my lecture notes. Suddenly, she reminded me, it was story time. This was why I became a history teacher.

So we might leave London in 1666 to visit London in the summer of 1944. There, on a barstool in his favorite pub, was Lt. Dad, enjoying a pint of Watney’s Red Barrel.

There was an air raid going on.

In between the wails of the sirens, you might hear the ugly growling cough of a V-1 flying bomb high above Regent’s Park. But my father refused to take shelter. It was a matter of principle. He refused to abandon his pint to Nazi Terror.

And so he won an honorary commendation for Meritorious Drinking Under Fire.

I think Britt liked that story.

Here are Lt. Dad, 1944 and Mom with my big sister, Roberta, 1943.

Her fifth-grade teacher, Mary Hayes, told my wife Elizabeth that she’d had the identical experience. Britt was quiet in class and then she’d ask a question that left Mrs. Hayes, just like me, gobsmacked. Both of us adored her.

Years after high school, Britt and I found each other on Facebook, my preferred method for procrastinating. That’s when I began to follow her writing career. I found out, too, that we were brother and sister Trekkies.

The breadth of Britt’s writing, from political commentary to gender issues to the arts, was vast. She was insightful, funny, and, when it was deserved, she could use ink to draw blood.

She had discovered her voice. Rather, she had revealed the voice that had been there all along.

And she was wicked funny.

–She described the barren planet where Luke Skywalker grew up as “the Modesto of the Star Wars Universe.”

–Excited by the prospect of a film that would reunite the original cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, she wrote “That’s right, everyone. Set your phasers to ‘cry’.”

–She wrote about Kyrsten Sinema, “our manic-pixie senator from Arizona,” and archly compared her to Veruca Salt, the brat who disappears down a garbage chute in Willy Wonka.

She interviewed actors and writers and producers in the Star Trek franchise we both loved. So we remember together Tribbles, Romulan Ale, Jefferies Tubes, McCoy snapping “I’m a doctor, dammit, not a coal miner!” and Picard snapping “Shut up, Wesley!”

We were both big fans of Captain Janeway from the series Voyager.

We admired her love of coffee. When Voyager’s food replicator broke down, Janeway, in her withdrawals, wanted to strangle the ship’s cook, who’d offered a kind of interstellar Sanka. The cook was irritating, so we empathized with Janeway.

Britt did a piece on the Star Trek Series and ranked them from worst to best. “Best” Honors, according to Britt, went to Deep Space Nine, about a space station that was kind of a 24th Century Dodge City,with Avery Brooks’s Benjamin Sisko and Terry Farrell’s Jadzia Dax.

What stunned me is that this was my favorite, too, but I never had the courage to come out and say it. Britt did.

But it was Gates McFadden, Dr. Beverly Crusher in The Next Generation, who sent Britt a video message of comfort that comforted me, too.

I’ve taken comfort, too, in two Star Trek films. In The Wrath of Khan, memorable for Ricardo Montalban’s impressive pectoral muscles, Spock saves the Enterprise.

He does so by jump-starting the warp drive, which involves inserting himself into the matter-anti-matter chamber. And so he dies.

They shoot Spock out into space in what looks like a jumbo Prozac capsule.

And, of course, in the next film, The Search for Spock, he comes back, all of him, including the arched eyebrow.

Elizabeth and I were watching 2013’s Star Trek: Descent into Darkness, in which Khan is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who looks and sounds nothing like Ricardo Montalban.

However, since Cumberbatch was once spotted country-western line-dancing at the Madonna Inn, near where both Britt and I grew up, I will let this go.

This time, to save Enterprise, it’s Chris Pine’s Kirk who likewise enters the matter-anti-matter chamber, which in my mind resembles an immense and lethal lava lamp. And so he dies.

It’s Bones, of course, who saves him. It’s complicated, but essentially he revives Kirk with the help of—wait for it— a tribble.

Coming back to life after death isn’t confined to altar boxes or the toolboxes of science fiction writers.

Five years ago, I lost another student, Dawn, to cancer. In my heart, she is Britt’s twin. They share the same audacity.

Both grew up in small towns, but both made careers in L.A., Dawn in film casting and Britt in writing about film.

I heard this at Dawn’s memorial. This is a true story.

Just before she died, a visitor wheeled Dawn into the garden. It was a sunny day and there were two dragonflies flitting among the flowers. Her friend pointed them out, but Dawn had seen them first.

They were her father and grandmother, she explained, come to be with her.

A few days later, when it was over, the visitor left Dawn’s darkened sickroom and walked into the sunlit garden.

Just above her shoulder, there was a dragonfly.

“Hello, Dawn,” the visitor whispered.


Hello, Britt. Your life was vast. So is our love for you.