I saw 2001, A Space Odyssey when it first came out in theaters. I saw Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon for the very first time in the Summer of 1969. I remember seeing a Gemini spacewalk on the black-and-white TV. I even remember standing in our backyard in Iowa, looking up at the blue sky, and seeing the bright pinpoint of light passing overhead that was John Glenn orbiting the Earth in his Mercury Capsule. When I was a child, I believed in space travel. I thought there was where I was one day going to go.
I believed I needed to be physically fit, smart, adaptable, and ready to accomplish anything necessary to leave my mark in life among the stars. I played sports full throttle, I got A’s in high school, and I won a full scholarship to college. It was the Space Program, not me who slowed everything down.
Of course, I went into education and became an English teacher instead. Rather than blasting off into space, I introduced classes to Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut. I read out loud and took them to Mars with me and into the interstellar far reaches of an imagined future that was further off than I was led to believe. I was teaching the day the shuttle Challenger blew up, killing the first teacher in space as horrified students watched on classroom TV sets all across the nation.
But the twelve-year-old boy that lives in my head still has not lost the dream. I may not live to see it, but perhaps the memory of me will make it there with somebody’s child that my stories, beliefs, and passion were paid forward to by someone in my class who actually listened to me. It could happen. I am not a hopeless fool.
Catch a Falling Star 