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Kirk took a moment there, at the viewport, to consider how truly beautiful the stars were. He had spent most of his life, now, among these very stars. It was easy to take them for granted.

His mind drifted back to his childhood; one warm, crystal-clear, late-summer evening, and how his father, George Kirk, had taken him and Sam out into the large front yard, where he’d set up a telescope.

The old house in Riverside, Iowa; a solid, clapboard farmhouse built in 1887, had been well near 400 years old at the time. It had survived countless violent storms and tornadoes, and even a nuclear exchange during the Eugenics War, which became the Third World War. The blast had been sufficiently distant that all that had happened was that the windows had been blown out, and the house had shifted just a bit on its foundation.

The home had been in his mother, Winona Kirk’s, family for generations, built by her several-times great-grandfather, Hilbert Clovis, a farmer and decorated veteran of the American Civil War. Sergeant Clovis had been wounded—having nearly lost a leg, or so family lore told; it was said that he had walked with a pronounced limp, and with a cane on cold or rainy days, until the day he died—at the battle of Cold Harbor, in Virginia. He had died of influenza in 1918 at the well-advanced age, for the time, of 78. Old Hilbert was buried on the property along with his wife, Julia, and a daughter, Polly, who had sadly died of some ailment in childhood, as was common in that era.

When Jim Kirk was about five or six, on what was still observed as Memorial Day, George had taken him and Sam out to the grave site, then long-unattended, lonely, overgrown and barely visible on the edge of a smallish, encroaching thicket. George had stood gazing at the decrepit headstones, hands on his hips, and had shaken his head sadly. George Kirk had always had a deeply patriotic heart; a trait he had worked hard to pass on to his sons.

They had pulled weeds and cut back the thicket, so that the stones stood somewhat apart from the wooded patch; they had cut the grass and cleaned the stones. Flowers were planted.

Not long after, George had had a heavy, steel replica of the Grand Army of the Republic medallion made. Having placed it on a long metal rod, he explained its significance to his sons and, with some reverence, inserted it into the ground beside the ancient, weathered gravestone of Hilbert Clovis. Every year thereafter, on Memorial Day, the Kirks would make sure that Sergeant Clovis’ grave was well-maintained, and a fresh, grave-sized American flag—of the proper era, mind you, George always insisted—was installed beside the GAR medallion, which was itself taken up, properly polished and replaced. It was a beloved family tradition which Jim Kirk himself kept up, at least when home, and passed down to Peter and his sons when he wasn’t. In fact, he’d recently received a message from Peter, that it was probably time to get a new GAR medal. One day, Kirk was sure, old Hilbert and Julia’s graves would once more stand unattended, abandoned and forgotten; but not for some time, now, and not just yet.

The huge old farmhouse itself sat on ten acres, and was surrounded on three sides by hundreds of acres of farmland owned by their Amish neighbors, so there was almost no nearby artificial outside lighting. Therefore, the darkness on that long-ago evening had been nearly absolute.

George had pointed out the gossamer cloud of the Milky Way, arching across the clear summer night; he pointed out some of the stars he himself had visited. He then briefly outlined some constellations, relating the ageless legends behind them, and then took the boys over to the telescope.

It was there that James T. Kirk, age 7, had first clearly seen the rings of Saturn. And he was hooked.

He wanted to see them with his own eyes and, looking up from the eyepiece, had asked his father if he thought there was a chance of that. George had smiled and said "of course, if you want it bad enough", and tousled his youngest son’s hair.

After that, George Kirk’s Starfleet career became much more than an annoyance that kept young Jimmy Kirk’s father away for extended periods. Jimmy began asking questions. The rest was, quite literally, history.

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