Skip to main content

Speaking of Astronauts

As I drove at a little after seven this morning I thought... 'if my husband were alive. What would he be doing right now?' There was a mental quietness of wondering for a moment as I drove. 

My thoughts then floated to seeing a man walking two dogs, As his not yet school-aged children walked ahead of him. I see this routine of theirs nearly every school morning at this time. This simple set of acts of theirs is amazing to me.

The rest of my day is filled with studies, writing, taking classes, a run, and some cleaning. If I'm lucky, I get to settle in and watch part of a news program by seven or so. 

Tonight I caught the last fifteen minutes of a news program near eight. Some of the final few minutes focused on a space flight for six civilians. That brings me back to this morning. My husband, if he were alive he would be reading up on this. He would want to do this. He always wanted to be an astronaut. However, one of perhaps the many things that stood in his way in his early life was his eyesight. Depth perception, he adjusted well to it in life in general. Yet, to fly even a jet in the Air Force back then you had to have better eyesight than he'd had. He knew this.  

He didn't fool himself about it. He twice went to a recruiting office. And it was his eyesight as the main issue. Not even his age, the second time at age twenty-nine.

If we were millionaires, he would be on board with going into space soon. Academically, he had what it took. Especially, as he got older and went back to college fulltime in his late thirties for four years. And granted as well, I think he would pass all the physicals. For he always stayed in fairly good shape. Now, books on aeronautics, missiles, space and such, still line a few of our bookshelves. He read them all.---Jody-Lynn Reicher 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

It Follows Me...

One may wonder what would inspire someone to work hard labor voluntarily. For me it’s the love of many things. It’s the passion that won’t be broken. Because there are so many aspects to such service for me, that it may seem beyond comprehension. I’d compare it to my youthful desire to enter the military as a young child. Then for a multitude of reasons only to follow through thirteen years later at age eighteen entering the Marines. There were things that followed me throughout my life. Sometimes they were questions of how I ever gave up my over decade’s life dream to become a New Jersey State Trooper. My childhood desire to never wed—to never have any serious relationships with another human being. I desired only service in military and law enforcement nearly my whole childhood. Too the extent that even one of my Marine Corps superiors expressed to me last July, “I never thought you’d ever get married. It just wasn’t who you were. You were always a loner.” I replied, “Yeah. I know.

Sledging the Hammer

  "You could have a steam trainIf you'd just lay down your tracks..."---Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' lyrics. This is not the tune that lay in my mind this morning as I reminisced about yesterday's volunteers to help on trail crew.    However, as I looked up the proper definition of sledging that song popped up. I say sledging, which is my own take on swinging a hammer that we call a "Double Jack". The Single Jack is six pounds. I know that because our regular crew of five including me and one staff supervisor are handling Harriman State Park Trails, and have to carry about four of those, two shaping hammers, along with a hoist, belay bag with heavy equipment, first aid kit, double Jack, three 18lb rock bars, a lopper, three buckets, three eye to eyes, two burlap straps, two green wrapping straps, two pick Mattox, a roe hoe or two, a bar for either the two ton or one ton hoist, the feathers with pegs for splitting rocks that we drill... s

Death in the Distant Future...

  Death in the Distant Future… Or at least that is what its supposed to be. We don’t suppose people should die at a certain age. We will witness suffering; but we know it gets better. So, we’ve been told. Or so, we have hope that it will. There are instances of mass tragedy. Sometimes we call that war—maybe insanity—perhaps terrorism… We have names for it, that type of death. Then there are the terminals. Things we think we can control—once we know the enemy within.   Or things we follow, pray for, aim for. We hold hands for it. Or we choose to suffer with the suffering because it matters. And it doesn’t matter how it matters. Then there is some form of Universal Order. A tainted weird line of fate. Perhaps mathematically calculated in everyone’s existence. No matter how great, how menial a life on earth may appear there’s a geometric wave—a pattern. We can involve other mathematical ideologies—Fibonacci, perhaps. And each of our lives are formulas. Formulas appearing misundersto