The day was cold, and it seemed to want to give way to drizzle. I had a decision to make. If it started to rain later, I would get wet walking to school in the rain. I walked every day in any case but it was a question of timing. To heck with it. I decided to gamble and sneaked back home. I had waited until the last of my sisters had left for school. My mom and dad had long left for work. I hid on a side street behind a small brush to make sure everyone was gone. I had never skipped a day of school. I was not that kind of kid. Waiting a few more moments, I scurried back up the little hill to our house. I was almost 12. No one would know.
Going back into the home still warm and smelling faintly of the oatmeal we had for breakfast, I wondered if Antolina Paredes the wonderful lady who lived across the street from us or her husband, Benito, had seen me skulk back to the house. I did not care. Nothing was going to stop me from watching John Glenn shoot into the heavens on live television. The first American to orbit into space. The Russians were way ahead and this was the country’s shot at getting back in the game. I was young but old enough to think this was important. We really did not know how important.
I went back into the house and sat on the floor and tuned in to CBS and Walter Cronkite who more and more used a word – computer – to describe the machinery that we could not see that would manage Glenn’s reach for the stars.
The black-and-white television was a bit hazy but it engrossed me. I heard a noise behind me. I turned around. I had not heard my father come back into the house. Who was the more surprised I cannot remember. “Va salir el rocket,” I improvised but matter-of-factly imparting a sense of something paramount to one day of school.
An extremely intelligent and curious but reticent man, he sat on the couch behind me, wordlessly watching every second of the preparations, the countdown to liftoff, the clouds of gas bursting from the rocket’s platform, the momentary lull before the machine began to lift and then rise to gather force and blast into space. We watched the white trail trailing the thrusting rocket until another small explosion occurred. Cronkite told us everything was fine, and we watched until we could see only a tiny white dot that disappeared into infinity.
Now all that was left was to worry about the return, and that would not happen for five hours. For the moment, my father drove me to school, where I would be in P.E. when Glenn splashed back from space into the ocean. I raced home after school and was already in front of the TV set when my father’s truck came up the driveway. He came in and Cronkite replayed it all on the 5:30 news.
Watching Glenn’s flight recounted during the last few days to commemorate its 50th anniversary and looking back to that day, I thought about my father, now gone 12 years. And I also thought that neither he nor I – not even the space engineers working on Glenn’s historic flight – could have imagined what would happen to the country during the next half-century. The commemoration this week should have been a fixed point to think about the next 50 years.
Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.