The Tribbles with No Troubles

I don't feel qualified to give an epitaph of Leonard Nimoy when so many have already done it better than I would. I mean, dude got this from the International Space Station: 

(image source)

So I'll just tell a little story.

After connecting on Match.com, Arizona and I did the long-distance thing for more than a month before we met in person--I'm not a phone person (as in, actively phobic; I can count on one hand the people I will voluntarily speak to by phone, and that includes the pizza place), he hates Skype (says it makes his nose look like it needs its own zip code), so we emailed fast and furious leading up to that momentous first date. 

He arrived bearing gifts. Not flowers and chocolate, but a pocket knife and a fur-lined hat to match the one he was wearing, it being December and frigidly cold. Which pretty much sums up his lovely approach to romance: You are mine, and therefore I want to keep you safe and warm. A couple of weeks later, he brought me a Christmas gift in a paper bag--a life jacket, which took it to the next level, not only saying he wanted to keep me safe, but also that he fully intended for us to be together come boating weather, and that he wanted to include me in that part of his life. 

I'm sad to report that I lost that pocket knife to the TSA, having forgotten to unload it from my purse before a flight. I still have the hat, though. In fact, our household is home to six or seven of those fur-edged hats, as Arizona tends to find clothing he likes and buy multiples. (When we were first dating, I thought he only had two shirts and one pair of pants. It turned out that he had three of everything.) 

So there we were one day, in the little apartment we shared part-time back when he was still working in NYC, when I noticed that all but one of our hats had wound up sitting in the corner of our beat-up sectional sofa, mostly fur-side up, looking like a chinchilla den or something.

Me (pointing out the conjunction): Wonder what they're doing?

Arizona (takes his hat off, tosses it into the mix): Tribble orgy. 

It was one of those couple moments that makes you think, 'yes, this is the one.' How could you not love a guy who's mind immediately goes to a Tribble fur pile? I mean, really. 

Indeed, our first few messages back on Match.com had invoked red shirts, Vulcan mindsets, and a variety of other geek-isms that proved we had a shared language. Do we share everything? Hell, no. That'd be boring. But the love of good (and bad) sci-fi is a tie that binds. Just like that old saying … Live long, and prosper.