Armchair Astronaut

I coulda been piloting this space capsule!

In Second Grade, I decided I wanted to be an astronaut, and immediately set to learning everything I could learn about what astronauts do, and what NASA is and how it works.  I drew space capsules and space shuttles as obsessively as some girls draw horses.  I learned the names of the Mercury Seven, the Challenger Seven, and every woman who went into space to date. 

I developed the habit or affectation of looking up into the night sky and getting lost in the stars.

I learned all the words of "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee, Junior, and I felt them in my soul every time I'd recite the poem to myself:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; 

Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds,- and done a hundred thousand things

You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, 

I've chased the shouting wind along and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air...

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue,

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or ever eagle flew-

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod

The high untresspassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Wanting to be an astronaut was part of my Identity for the whole rest of the time I was in elementary school.  If a friend didn't know what to talk about with me, space was always an excellent option.  Over the summers, every so often I'd get a letter from a friend with a tear-out from a magazine with something about space, or a movie about astronauts.  I still remember getting a clipping from one of my friends of the poster for the movie SpaceCamp, the one where a bunch of Space Camp-attending teenagers accidentally get launched into space on Atlantis, and they have to use their skills, ingenuity, and luck to get home safely.  

Looking back on that movie, what a gas it was. All of the actors except Joaquin Phoenix (who went by "Leaf" at the time) were well into their twenties, which made them tower even more cool and authoritative and capable to a little eight-year-old looking up at them.  The movie sincerely took its sincerity very seriously.  It was utterly implausible.  And yet, I bought into it, hook, line, and sinker.  We taped it from the TV and I watched it every day when I got home from school for a while.  

And then as Atari was winding down (thank you, awful ET game!), we spied an Atari Space Shuttle game cartridge in the bargain bin at Hills and snapped it up.  The idea was an 8-bit adventure, launching the spacecraft, getting it into orbit, docking with a space station, and re-entering and landing the space shuttle safely.  I never got out of "easy" mode, but I loved the way that game was a launchpad for my imagination!  

I was kind of hokey about it.  I'd get my snow-suit on, and my grandma's old snowmobile helmet, and then tip the Lazy-Boy recliner onto its back on the living room floor so I could go through the launch sequence.  And I'd spend hours in "space" in that armchair.  Sometimes I'd enlist my sister to come along on a space mission.  Sometimes my dolls.  Sometimes it was the family cat who'd go to space with me, but he'd always try to take the controls while we were landing, and nobody's got time for that kind of power-struggle when one false twitch could make you burn up in the atmosphere!

For those years of my life, I was so sure I was going to be an astronaut.  It would be perfect!  I was shaping up to be fairly compact, which was great because there's not a lot of room in spacecraft.  Finally something a short person could excel at!  Floating around in the tight spaces of the space station!  I was quite afraid of heights, notorious for my meltdowns on Darien Lake's Giant Wheel (the amusement park's located between Buffalo and Rochester, NY, but you can see Toronto, Ontario, freakin' CANADA from that Giant Wheel on a clear day), but I reasoned that astronaut training would train me not to be afraid of heights, and even if not, once I was in space, I wouldn't know how high up I was anyway, so I wouldn't have to be afraid.

The magical thinking of an elementary schooler, am I right?!

But reality set in in seventh grade.  I think that's the case for a lot of us.  Seventh grade is the grade where childhood dreams go to die.  I learned right quick that I was super-not-good at the maths required for astronauting or engineering.  I was also awful at science.  And I wasn't great in tense, clutch situations.  The dream of April the Astronaut faded and got put in the scrapbook of memory in short order, a story I'd tell by eighth grade. 

I'll tell you what.  I never stopped looking up at the night sky and getting lost in the stars.  I got to college, and my junior year wound up in a Physics and Astronomy course.  I was in with a bunch of hard-science types.  I got the top grade in the class.  The professor had been part of the astronaut program at NASA, but never went to space.  The class was far from my major of Creative Writing (or was it?), but it still stands tall as in my top 5 favorite classes from my entire higher educational experience.  I always kind of wondered what if...

Anyway.  I might not be an armchair astronaut anymore.  But I will never, ever stop looking up at the night sky and getting lost in those stars.