Archives March 2022

Prior to arriving at my dad’s place near Tampa, I spent a day and a half in Savannah Georgia, a short but very intriguing visit that offered up some interesting historical, cultural, and political observations. I’m not going to tackle those here, though, as there is something else burning in my mind that I just can’t ignore—something my dad and I saw together that literally blew me away. I must share.

Prior to my visit, I’d been to Florida seven or eight times: several times as a kid and the rest starting just after my girls’ seventh birthday (they’re twins). As one might expect, there’s a big difference between visiting Florida as a kid and visiting it as an adult with kids. When you’re the kid, the focus is on hanging out at the pool and going to the theme parks—you’re oblivious to the parental effort and cost. As a parent, it’s hard to think about anything other than money, especially when it’s tight and your kids want you to pay for two separate parks, seeing as Universal has spread “Harry Potter World” across both of its establishments in order to fleece the public as much as possible. Five years ago, the cost to visit each park was something like sixty-five bucks per person. Of course, Universal “magnanimously” discounted five bucks from each of my kids’ tickets to both of its parks. It was insulting, really, and I recall imagining a very specific thing Universal’s board of directors could do with that overly generous ten–dollar savings.

But I digress. The point is that when you travel with kids, it’s not actually your vacation—it’s everyone else’s. When I started to think about this solo visit, I was determined to make the most of it. And after the last two years that we’ve all somehow managed to stagger through, this trip felt like my own personal quest for the Holy Grail as much as a vacation and family visit, only in this case, my quest entailed reconnecting with a part of me that I’d lost. It’s hard to know exactly what part of me, though, given that the chaotic events of the past six or seven years had significantly disrupted my life as well as the lives of millions of others. But as Tom Baker from the 50th anniversary Doctor Who special says, “Things do get lost, you know.” The presumption is that not all that’s lost is lost for good.

One of the things I’ve really focused on in therapy over the years is the idea of thinking about what I want rather than what everyone else wants. We shouldn’t be our own afterthought. The more I held this idea in my mind, the more determined I became to do something uniquely “me”—and something free of politics so I could share it with my dad. He and I don’t see eye to eye in that arena . . . at all.

I was born in 1969, three months after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, leaving that big footprint behind for posterity and forever establishing his place in history. Like so many boys of that era, the first thing I remember ever wanting to be “when I grew up” was an astronaut. That was followed, of course, by Captain Kirk, but the goal of becoming a “real” astronaut came first. In the 1970s, the Apollo space program was in full swing, and between that and growing up with Star Trek (TOS) re-runs and the occasional Space 1999 , I was all about it. And it wasn’t just kids that were energized by space exploration; the Apollo program was part of our national identity, binding people together of all ages, from all walks of life, all ethnicities, and all races. People were glued to their television sets with every launch while Cape Kennedy’s launch site attracted thousands of viewers outside its fences.

Cape Kennedy Space Center! That was the answer! When I mentioned it to my father, he was all in. Not only did the space center have the two renowned Apollo and Saturn V exhibits, but it also had the Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit. I’d seen other cool space stuff in the past: the Apollo 11 command module, a Russian Satellite, and a bunch of other stuff. But Atlantis was something special. I couldn’t wait!

I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a small part of my brain making the additional calculation that, as a federal site, Cape Kennedy would have mask mandates in full effect. And after spending several days in Georgia and Florida over the course of my trip, it had become clear that a large swath of the public in those states questioned whether Covid was even real. I’d go further to say that many of those “questioners” even debated whether the vaccines were a trick created by communist, pagan gods bent on the destruction of Christianity and American democracy as we know it . . . or at least as they know it. Anyhow, the last thing I needed was to come down with Covid.

So, on the morning after Thanksgiving, we eagerly jumped into my dad’s car and hit the road. Route 4 cuts across the state heading northeast from Tampa toward Orlando. Now, I know what some of you must be thinking, that this must have been a long and boring drive across the pancake that is Florida. And as much as I sometimes like to have a bit of fun at Florida’s expense, I do find some things about it quite interesting, in both good and bad ways.

Seeing grapefruit and orange trees in random places is cool, especially having grown up in the Boston area where the nearest citrus trees were probably a thousand miles away . . . probably in Florida. On one of my previous trips to the Sunshine State, I saw an old grapefruit tree on a McDonald’s property next to the drive-thru. Awesome! And although Florida’s forests are often reminiscent of the woods around the little town of Wrentham, Massachusetts, where I grew up (lots of maples, oaks, etc.), the Spanish Moss hanging off those trees like tattered blankets is a reminder that this is not New England.

Florida has some of the most interesting—and batshit crazy—wildlife of any place on the planet. On the one hand, there are animals that are truly amazing to behold: dolphins, manatees, and a variety of vibrant bird species. But on the other hand, there are animals . . . scratch that, creatures, that frankly scare the bloody hell out of me: alligators the size of canoes and ginormous swamp-dwelling pythons that eat alligators the size of canoes. And as if that’s not enough, there are myriad poisonous spiders, other deadly snakes, and let’s not forget that horrifying brain-eating amoeba thing. A lot of Florida’s nature seems bent on our destruction, and yet the folks here seem almost oblivious to it.

Here’s a perfect example: On the last day of my visit, I decided to take a walk around my dad’s retirement community on some of the paths that wound their way past a small golf course, a shuffleboard space, and other recreational spaces. I used the opportunity to call my brother at the same time to let him know how the visit had gone. As I strolled along on my merry way, I came across a pond. The trail encircled it, so I decided to follow it around, but I paused when I noticed a very strange-looking log with weird ridges along the top. A point of family history: my brother attended the University of Miami for three years, so he’s quite familiar with the peculiarities of Florida’s unique biosphere. A few paces closer, and I realized it wasn’t actually a log . . . it was a seven-foot-long alligator! My brother was all over it!

“Don’t get anywhere near it! Those things can run like thirty miles an hour over short distances,” he warned. “If they get near you, run around them in circles. They handle like a station wagon.”

As if I needed any additional incentive to get as far away from the damn thing as possible. Maybe it cornered like a pregnant yak, maybe it didn’t, but I wasn’t about to find out. When I got back to my dad’s place, after warning everyone I saw along the way to stay clear of that pond, his response to my panicked recap was as follows:

“You just ignore them,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Shouldn’t we call someone?” I asked incredulously. I wanted to be a good citizen, maybe save a few lives, or at least some of the retirees’ small dogs that could potentially end up serving as nature’s chicken nuggets.

“They (the authorities) only come if the alligators are over ten feet.”

It still stuns me, but apparently, such is Florida. I guess that explains why so many people there also don’t seem to care about Covid—it’s not ten feet long.

Anyhow, we cut across the state, and as we passed through Orlando a few hours later, it became clear that it was taking a lot longer to get to the space center than we had anticipated. I had done some research prior to leaving and learned that because of Covid, or maybe just because of the sheer volume of visitors, the Apollo and Saturn V exhibits were only accessible by bus, and appointments for these buses had to be made upon arrival. I hadn’t thought this would be an issue, but the later it got, the more I revisited that assumption. When we finally arrived, around one in the afternoon, it was already too late. I was disappointed, but I’d seen traveling exhibits from the Apollo era before, and at least we could still see the space shuttle. There was no way we were going to miss that.

After a delicious burger in their “pretty decent” cafeteria, we hurried as best we could through the throngs of masked visitors toward, as the website states, “a mighty full-scale space shuttle stack of two solid rocket boosters and orange external tank” that rose up over a massive sign: The Space Shuttle Atlantis.

Beyond that, the entrance to a creatively architected building seemed to loom above us, with rows of windows that swooped over the entrance like a thruster blast engulfing the structure.

Once inside, we discovered a long line of fellow NASA lovers (or people dragged there by their NASA-loving friends and family), snaking its way around several corners. Fortunately, it wasn’t as bad as it looked, and after a twenty-minute wait, the doors finally opened, and they ushered us into a large octagonal room where three massive video screens were hanging above a bank of three double-doors. The docents had us sit on the floor. Why they didn’t have seats for us, I will never know (I could have Googled it or asked someone, but then I wouldn’t’ have been able to use that “I will never know” line.)

What followed was a brilliantly produced documentary-style reenactment of the inception of the shuttle program that started in the early 1970s when one lead engineer walked into a room full of other engineers and scientists, threw a model of a simplistic shuttle design at them like a paper airplane, and boldly declared that this was the future. The presentation ended with an image of the Space Shuttle Columbia sitting on the tarmac on April 12, 1981, waiting to make her maiden voyage, one that would change spaceflight forever. As the screens faded to black, the three double doors opened below them. The docents led us into a roughly octagonal theatre with multiple screens that projected the various visual perspectives one might experience if looking outward from within the shuttle’s cockpit right before takeoff. The screen directly in front of us showed the shuttle’s complex array of control panels and instruments, a few blinking every now and then, others with more urgency.

The lights dimmed and the quintessential NASA launch-countdown voice echoed through the theatre: “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

“We have a go for main engine start,” a second voice declared.

“Seven . . . six . . . five . . .”

“We have main engine start,” the second voice again. The building shook as the simulated rockets fired with a deafening roar.

“Four . . . three . . . two . . .” Both voices synchronized.

“One . . . zero . . . We have lift-off!”

The view through the simulated windows shifted as the launch tower fell away and the shuttle hurtled skyward. The Earth spun around us as the shuttle successfully performed its first roll. It looked and felt so real that I had to reach out and take my dad’s arm to steady both of us. Minutes later we were in orbit, looking down at the great blue orb we call home. We were so fixated on the screens that we didn’t notice the wall in front of us had completely opened up, leaving behind only a dark mesh screen between us and what lay beyond.

As Earth orbit spun above and around us, the theatre lights came up, and there she was, in all her “unsimulated” glory . . .

Atlantis. She hung at an angle as if locked into orbit around the planet. Her cargo arm was extended as if reaching for a satellite. Adrenaline rushed through me at the site of her, and my eyes opened wide in amazement. My hands tingled, my breath caught in my throat, and for an instant, I had never seen anything so beautiful: Atlantis, seemingly floating in the air before us. The mesh screen slowly rose into the ceiling, and I stepped forward.

The world fell away, and for a moment, it was just me and her, all alone in our own little universe. And then it hit me. Atlantis wasn’t just a spaceship, not just a line-item expenditure in some bloated budget. Not a political tool. She was, and remains, an idea and a vision of what we as a people are capable of doing when we act as one. And that’s how the Space Shuttle Atlantis came to be—not because of some billionaire jackass magnanimously creating his own little space program by gathering up scientists and engineers as if he were their renaissance-style patron.

It struck me how far we had come since that first launch, when America really was one nation despite our political differences, when there were very few billionaires (if any at all). A strong democratic government belongs to all of us, just like that beautiful spacecraft that hung before me. And government spending to realize the dreams of what we can become and accomplish as a nation and as a people is not socialism by any means, no more so than the accumulation of extreme wealth is a capitalist concept. There is a word that describes a system where a small segment of the population controls a disproportionate amount of its nation’s wealth: monarchy. And as our form of government becomes increasingly more monarchical, there can be no more shuttles. If we want to reclaim the true spirit of America, we have to be better; we have to take back the wealth that belongs to all of us and channel it into changing the world. Together.

It’s time for a new dream, a shared dream. It’s time for a new Atlantis.