Oh, Sure, NOW Spock Is Cool

I have pointy ears.  There, I said it.

Your ears are rounded on the top.  Mine come to a point.

My mother says that when I was born, the doctor said that my pointy ears could be “fixed” through some combination of baby oil and bandages.  Mom took a pass.  Thanks, Mom!

I was teased mercilessly about my ears throughout childhood.  “Hey, Spock ears!” was a pretty popular taunt.  “Look, it’s Mr. Spock!” was another.  You get the idea.

I did my best to hide my deformity.  Whenever I wore a baseball cap, I tucked the points of my ears under the rim.  On the rare occasion when my hair grew a bit long, I would try desperately to pull a piece of my hair over the points of my ears.

When I was in college, I worked as a lifeguard at the swimming pool in the condominium where I grew up.  I thought I was pretty cool and had attracted a following of young kids who hovered around me all day, waiting and hoping that I would go into the pool and horse around with them for a while.

Jonathan was one of my favorite kids.  He was maybe seven or eight and just a very sweet, smart boy.  One day he was sitting next to me on a pool chair.  He sat up with a bit of a start.

“Do you know that your ears are pointy?” he asked me.

It was very much like that scene in “The Sixth Sense” when Haley Joel Osmet reduces his teacher to mush by screaming “Stuttering Stanley!” over and over again until the poor man has, indeed, regressed back to his childhood and can barely spit out the words, “Shut up!”

“Yes, Jonathan, I know my ears are pointy,” I said as calmly as I could. 

There would be no horsing around in the pool that day.

Today, many, many years later, I love my pointy ears.  I know now that they add character to my ugly mug and, besides, what the hell am I going to do about it anyway?  I wear my hair short and when I wear a baseball cap, the points go on the OUTSIDE, baby. 

All this has come back to me recently with the opening of the new “Star Trek” movie, where Mr. Spock – and everybody else in the film for that matter – seems to reek of a cool that I never could have imagined way back when.

My son, Christian, has one ear that’s a bit pointy.  Son, you are the coolest kid in the galaxy.

Tags: mr. spock, pointy ears, sixth sense, star trek, zachary quinto