Riding Rockets

I was filled with a father’s pride as I watched my children. Pat was in the final weeks of his senior year at Notre Dame. He had attended the school on an ROTC scholarship and upon graduation was to be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the air force. He had matured into a real leader. He had also developed a wonderful wit. Friends who knew Pat and me would frequently joke, “The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.” They were right. In many ways Pat was my clone—the most notable exception being his very good looks. But we did share the same crappy eyesight. As it had for me, his less than 20/20 vision was keeping him from air force pilot training. I had made calls to some general officer friends hoping they might know of a way for Pat to gain a medical waiver, but the Berlin Wall had come down, the Cold War was over, peace was going to reign forever, the air force had too many pilots, blah, blah, blah. All I heard were excuses. But I hadn’t left it there. TheChallenger disaster had shown me that dead astronauts had more cachet than live ones. Astronaut widows were consoled by presidents who told them to call if they needed anything. If I died on this mission I intended to posthumously use my celebrity status to get Pat into pilot training. Before leaving Houston, I had written a letter to fellow TFNG and USAF colonel Dick Covey on that topic. “…I’d like to thank you for taking care of Donna and the kids. I’ve always hated paperwork and I imagine dying generates more of it than anything else. At least I don’t have to worry about it…I’ve told Donna to tell the president himself of Pat’s desire to serve his country as a pilot. You might tell General Welch he’s going to be getting the order from above, so he might just want to get ahead of the game by approving Pat’s application right now…” Donna was holding the letter with my instructions to give it to Covey in the event of my death. (Visual acuity defects that are correctable have no flight safety impact—many military pilots wear glasses—and waivers have been given in the past for officers with glasses to enter pilot training.) There was also one other favor I had already asked of Covey: “If I die on this mission and there’s anything left of my body, I don’t want any of the female docs in the office doing an autopsy on me. I worry they’ll get back at my sexist bullshit by telling everybody in the office I had a little dick.” (A damnable lie!) Covey had a great laugh at that, but he promised to make my wishes known.

Amy, Pat’s twin, was now married and living in Huntsville, Alabama. I didn’t need to write any letters on her behalf. She was completely fulfilled as a wife and looking forward to the day she would be a stay-at-home mom. I had only recently come to accept her as she was. As obsessive-compulsive-West Point-engineer-astronaut fathers are apt to do, I attempted to fashion her into my own image and was frustrated by my repeated failures. I wanted her to graduate from college, but she dropped out after just one semester. I wanted her to have skills that would make her financially independent, if ever that was required, but she acquired none. Donna set me straight. “She’s a sweet, good-hearted young woman. She doesn’t want what you want. You just have to accept that.” I finally had and was happy for her.

Laura was now nineteen and a freshman at DePaul University in Chicago majoring in the single degree field most guaranteed to drive an obsessive-

compulsive-West Point-engineer-astronaut father into madness…theater. Laura wanted to be an actress. At least I had the experience of my older daughter to learn from—I accepted Laura’s dream and enthusiastically supported her. I knew most theater degrees ended up being degrees in waiting tables, but it was her dream, and—as a man who had made a similar journey toward a long-odds prize—I wasn’t about to discourage it.

As I walked the beach with my children beside me I was struck by the swiftness of life. TheFiddler on the Roof song “Sunrise, Sunset” came to mind. “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play?” It seemed like just yesterday I was running alongside bikes as the kids made their first no-training-wheels rides. Now, I walked with adults who would be doing the same thing with their children in the not-too-distant future. How swiftly fly the years.