Riding Rockets

On December 5, 1987, the astronaut office held a going-away party for Abbey at Pete’s Cajun BBQ. It was billed “George Abbey Appreciation Night.” About a third of the office were no-shows. Two astronauts told me they were boycotting the event. I suspected some of the other absentees were of a mind that they would rather fly a night TAL into Timbuktu than show any appreciation for George. I attended merely to celebrate the fact he was gone from our lives. There would be no weepy singing of “Auld Lang Syne”at this party. Mark Lee, class of 1984, was the MC and did a terrific job, donning a buzz-cut wig to mimic Abbey. It was obvious Mark was of the opinion that George was forever powerless over astronauts, because his humor was “I’ll-neversee-this-man-again” acidic. He made reference to Abbey’s preferential treatment of the navy astronauts, of Dick Truly’s suspected role in removing him from the FCOD position (Dick Truly and the new JSC director, Aaron Cohen, were both noticeably absent from the event), and of George’s tendency to suffer episodes of narcolepsy when he didn’t want to hear an opinion contrary to his. Then, to everybody’s astonishment, Mark took off his wig and grew sentimental. “You can’t have a boss for so many years and not be choked up about his departure.” I couldn’t believe it. Others around me held similarly incredulous looks.Choked up about George’s departure? Only if one of Pete’s Cajun rib bones got caught in my throat. But Mark continued his endearing comments, glibly flowing to a conclusion, “And for those of you who might be feeling a lump in the throat and getting all misty-eyed thinking about George leaving…just remember what an asshole he can be!” Mark had flown well beyond the edge of the envelope. Everybody cheered and applauded. Abbey smirked. What was behind that smirk? I wondered. It could have been anything fromI’m proud of these guys toI’ll get even with these traitorous dickheads if it’s the last thing I ever do.

Abbey was dead to me. The other significant man in my life, my father, would die unexpectedly in his sleep a few months later—February 10, 1988. He was sixty-six. He had lived exactly half his life with legs and half without. Only in the dim recesses of my mind, far back to my eighth and ninth years of life, could I see him standing next to me on rock-solid legs showing me how to turn into a fastball and lay down a bunt. Those memories were all but obliterated by the thirty-three years of images from his post-polio life. In those, I always see him in his wheelchair, as if the device were an organ of his living body. And in those scenes I see a man who stood taller than most of us will ever do on two good legs. My dad was my hero.

I chose to drive the eight hundred miles to Albuquerque for his funeral so I would have some quiet time for reflection before being plunged into the administrative details of his death. Two of my brothers lived in Albuquerque so my mom had plenty of help to deal with the situation, though I knew she wouldn’t need it. Grief didn’t stand a chance with my mom. Two days later, when I entered the house, she pulled me aside and said, “Mike, I loved your dad very much, but you won’t see me cry. It’s not in a Pettigrew to cry.” And she didn’t.

Like many children who experience the sudden loss of a father, I regretted all the things I hadn’t said while he had been alive to hear them. I wished I had told him how much it had meant to me that he had stayed in our kid-games even after polio. My brothers and I would carry him to the mound and he would be our permanent pitcher in games of baseball. He would referee our driveway basketball games. He would play water polo with us, his shrunken legs trailing in his wake like two ribbons of flesh.

He had endowed me with an easy and spontaneous sense of humor and I wanted him back to hear me say, “Thanks, Dad.” I could recall him sitting in his wheelchair, fully clothed, smoking his pipe and deciding it would be fun to go swimming. He bellowed, “Banzai,” and raced his wheelchair straight into the pool. It sank to the bottom, where he sat for several seconds with his pipe still clamped in his teeth. My brothers and I laughed at his underwater pose. We begged him to do it again and, after hauling him and the wheelchair from the water, he did.

I wished for a chance to tell of the thrill I felt watching my rubber band–powered gliders soaring across the desert. Dad had shown me how to build them and I could still see his hands, made huge and calloused from the use of his crutches and wheelchair, guiding mine in the sanding of the balsa-wood propeller spinner.