The Revelations of Bones

The morning of Friday, June 11th, 1999 began unlike any other morning in my life to that point. I thought nothing of it at first, but all these years later I remember waking that morning more than I can recall any other awakening in my life.

I was living in a tiny efficiency in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the morning light beamed bright against the wall which hosted my bed. Before I could even identify that it was morning – or that I was human, for that matter – a prophetic three-word thought appeared in my mind. I might have even said it aloud, I’m not sure, but if I did, there was no one else there to hear it:

DeForest Kelley died.

It was as random a thought as I’d ever had: a matter-of-fact notation to myself. Anyone who knows me understands that non sequiturs and comically outlandish situations are very much a part of me, but the rudely direct “DeForest Kelley died” was one that had even me doing that head-tilted Labrador retriever thing, you know, the look Fido gives you when you explain to him how to install sheet rock. It was a very clear, definitive thought, however, and it stuck with me through my first and second coffees as I got ready to leave for work.

My commute was a brisk fifteen-minute jaunt to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I worked in a tiny development office above a gift shop. I was heading south past Bloomingdales when the thought resounded in my head once again. “DeForest Kelley… what a twisted thing to think,” I said to myself, smirking, “why the hell would that be the first thing to come to mind?”

I had been a Star Trek fan since I was not even four years old, watching re-runs on the carpeted floor of my parent’s Lawrence, Massachusetts apartment, always sitting too close to the TV for the health of my eyes according to Mom. The triumvirate of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were the fantastic holy trinity of sci-fi to me since before I knew what NASA was, before anyone knew what a “Watergate” was, and long before anyone could Google the names of the actors who played the captain, the science officer, and chief medical officer of the Federation starship, “Enterprise.” I could tell you that DeForest Kelley’s character, Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, was the guiding conscience of Captain James T. Kirk, and the captain almost always referred to McCoy by the nickname, “Bones.” I grew up with Bones. The whole crew.

“Deforest Kelley died.” What the hell was wrong with me?

After punching in and making my way to my desk – packed into a room that dreamed of being a utility closet in another life – I logged in to my computer to collect my email, hoping to see a small workload going into the weekend. Before the ozone-smell of the bulky white CRT monitor firing up on my desk could fade, my office phone rang. My dear friend and fellow ‘Trekkie’, Kathy Meddings, from my home state of New Hampshire, greeted me on the line, and I’ll be darned if she didn’t get right to the point.

“Don! Did you hear that DeForest Kelley died?” she asked anxiously.

I am pretty sure I accidentally broke wind at this point. The moment might have been the most interesting my brain has ever experienced, so the common courtesies of bodily function were temporarily suspended.

There were all kinds of reactions manifesting in my melon simultaneously. One was lightning fast, telling me “holy mackerel, I’ve had some kind of legitimate telepathic thing happen! Or something!” and another, a glacially-moving, stinging grief rose to a sizzle in my forehead: one of the cornerstone icons of my life had passed away. Meanwhile, in another hemisphere of my brain, a giddy he-child was jumping up and down saying “tell Kathy! Quick! Tell Kathy!” It took a twentieth of a second after she broke the news for me to gasp aloud, and then try to tell Kathy that her friend in the big city hadn’t heard that, no… but he somehow knew that news the very instant he awoke. So as I attempted to speak, my overloaded neurons broke my mouth. The outgoing sentence must have sounded as if I had just taken a hard-hit ground ball to the groin. It was more of a long sneeze than English, actually, but thankfully Kathy knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t having a stroke. She knew that, in fact, I merely had something really, really important to tell her.

“Kathy, the first three words in my mind this morning were ‘DeForest Kelley died!’” I insisted. “Honest to God, I can’t explain it, but before I even realized I was awake, that was my very first thought.”

And that was the problem I suddenly realized, wiping a bead of drool from my chin: I had absolutely no way to prove my telepathic event had really happened. It was impossible to prove, unless I had told someone about it immediately after waking, and that person had been in the room and watching me very clearly not learn about Kelley’s death from any other source. So, yes, there was no way for me to ever prove that I had foreshadowed the sad news.

I was too submerged in frustration to absorb Kathy’s response, but I do recall that, as always, she was completely supportive. To this day, coming up on a quarter-century later, the closest I can come to proving my claim is what I told Kathy mere seconds into our conversation. My response to her news came in such a rapid exclamation that it was far too quick for me to manufacture such a story. How could someone possibly decide to respond instantly to such information with such a story?

Nonetheless, the only real comfort I’ve ever received from this conundrum is that Kathy believes my confession.

Over the years, I have diligently tried to find a scientific explanation for my experience. The closest I have come to a credible theory is this: while I was sleeping, a neighbor’s television or radio was tuned in to the news, and it was playing loud enough for my subconscious mind to receive the information that Mr. Kelley had passed away. That way I wouldn’t remember receiving the news, but it would have been shocking enough so that my first thought of the day – and my first memory – was that tragic loss. Occam’s razor would suggest that this is the simplest and therefore the best explanation.

You know, of course, I never really believed that, though.

So, at the conclusion of that June day near the end of the twentieth century, my wait began. Eventually, if there was something legitimate in the supernatural origins of that occurrence, would it not be reasonable to propose that one day it would happen again? When Leonard Nimoy or William Shatner passes, would I not have the same strange wake-up foreshadowing? I didn’t believe it would, but much in the same way you don’t dare look under the bed once mom tucked you in, I’d just have to wait it out. And I never really wanted to find out that way because I wanted Leonard Nimoy and Bill Shatner to live forever. Long live Spock and Captain Kirk! And prosper!

Twelve years later, guess what? It happened again.

Well, almost. A little.

May 6th, 2012. I had been married for more than seven years, living in New Hampshire again, and I was now a dad. We had a small house on a dead-end street and no neighbors nearby, so therefore there were no nearby radios or televisions to subliminally hear while sleeping. I didn’t own an alarm clock set to a news channel. So on the Sunday morning of 6th May 2012, my first thought of the day was another three-word realization about someone specific’s extremely recent doom.

“Gomer Pyle died,” it said. Seriously, yes. That Gomer Pyle.

My initial reaction was a serious one, at least to a person groggy, uncaffeinated, and not really wanting to deal with death. “I must have been visited by the ghost of television past again,” I thought, and only when I became properly caffeinated did I realize that the reaction was actually fairly witty, and when the third ghost of death revelations appeared in the future, I should use that one again.

My next thought was that I should email Kathy Meddings to let her know about my morning mourning premonition before I did anything else. Again, this wouldn’t actually prove anything as I theoretically could have seen the news already on television or online, but it would still be a written receipt of something to document my odd, infrequently sporadic supernatural ability.

I didn’t get the opportunity to email Kathy.

When I logged into my desk computer (with a flatscreen this time, so no ozone smell), the bulleted news item was present before I could get to the ‘compose’ button:

Beloved Andy Griffith Show Star Dead at 83.

No, no way. No way, right? Where’s the phone? Do I even have Kathy’s number? Did I fart this time? Wait, where’s my wife? No, she wasn’t home, either: she was at church. For a moment, I thought about convening my six cats for a conference because by golly, if every thirteen years my morning breath was a harbinger of doom for some poor unfortunate 1960’s television personality, someone had to hear it.

But I had to be reasonable. The logical thing to do in regard to this phenomenon, obviously, was to look up which network The Andy Griffith Show was on. Star Trek was on NBC, so if Andy was on NBC as well, there was one common link at least. If that tested positive, then maybe my sleeping brain had been tuning in to old NBC shows for a while... thus I looked up what network the show was on.

And it was CBS. Not NBC. I was at a loss as to what to do next, so I decided to actually go ahead and READ the article.

Gomer Pyle, of course, was played by the extremely gifted Jim Nabors. I anticipated reading about his comedic acting chops, his work on The Andy Griffith Show as well as its spin off, Gomer Pyle USMC, and last but not least, his impressive vocal abilities. That’s when my illusion of a recurring magical ability came to an end. I read. And Mr. Nabors was, by all means, alive and well. It was a gentleman by the name of George Lindsey, who played Goober Pyle, who had died. Goober was Gomer’s cousin on the show, so it was easy to be confused. I felt a sense of disappointed relief: while Mr. Nabors was alright, it was proven that my freakish ability was in fact NOT deadly spot-on, and sadly, Goober Pyle was deceased.

My ego yet tried to persuade me that I might have actually been correct after all. “You were half-asleep,” it told me, “perhaps you mis-remembered which Pyle cousin you identified when you woke?” That’s a point, I thought. Did I actually think Goober and not Gomer? A moment later, I told my ego to shut up. “No,” I sighed, “it is time to end this silly, not to mention lengthy, preoccupation. I snapped myself out of it with a brisk shake of my head, as if I were a wet shaggy dog trying to get dry. My supernatural mental encounter was a fascinating one-time coincidence, I admitted, followed by a teasing, eerie coincidence a dozen years later. I named the wrong Pyle, and there was no link between George Lindsey and Star Trek.

It took another nine years – until today, when I read Star Trek’s Wikipage to find the exact date of Mr. Lindsey’s death in order to write this story – to realize that there was, in fact, a fascinating connection. As the story goes, Leonard Nimoy admitted just a few years before his death that he wasn’t Gene Roddenberry’s first choice to play the part of Mr. Spock. I’d heard that it was Martin Landau who he’d wanted in that roll, and that multiple NBC executives and directors had actually wanted DeForest Kelley to play Spock.

The actor Roddenberry wanted was George Lindsey.

Now I need to call my friend, Kathy. As Goober Spock once said, “live long and prosper, y’all.” And I apologize for my flatulence.