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How very very odd that, in the middle of the disgraceful bollux that Trump has gotten us into with Iran, with debts, with our becoming not the leader but the disgrace of the world (a label most of us realize with such disbelief we cannot think about it!), how odd that in the middle of all of that human ugliness, the astronauts emerge in the news, emerge circling the earth, photographing the moon. The moon!
And Stephanie Ruhle, my favorite, on MSNOW, in the middle of her show that centered on the lowness of Trump, of his egomaniac and insane destructions, took a moment to acknowledge achievement and goodness.
I anticipated what she would say. I mean, there weren’t many choices out there where the once-leader of the once-free world broadcasts on Easter Day, “fuck the Strait of Hormuz!”, so her focus on the astronauts and their communications was not a surprise.
And yet.
And yet, she cried. Yes, I cried with her. The beauty of those four people sitting in the cockpit of whatever they were (are) riding in, the fact that we could see them from where we were on earth, at the same time they were spotting the Moon, and one man Reid ___ was naming a spot on the Moon after his wife who had died in 2020 (the same year as my John and oh, imagine naming a spot on the Moon — the Moon! after John) and the story that Reid was a single dad with two teenage daughters. . . who’d encouraged him, along with the late wife, to pursue his dream of being an astronaut. . . well, the telling of that had Stephanie’s throat choked . . .and mine along with hers.
I think in some other time I would have been dismissive of the astronauts, wondering about the practicality of all that training, the expense of the ships, the folly, as I saw it, of it all.
Yesterday I did not in any way feel any such thing.
I recently read Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, that took the reader – in some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever encountered—along for the ride in a spaceship with six astronauts, from each of their perspectives. I had a new respect for space travel, the training, the gear. I had a new respect for planet Earth, circling it as I did with those astronauts, my atlas next to me to consult, although I wished it were a globe, which I wanted desperately, a sphere of something called Earth.
I remember hearing about the Columbia) spaceship—the one with the teacher in it—crashing in space. I was teaching at the New Jersey High School where I spent 18 years, and that day I was walking past the AV Department as we called it, a storage room where large TVs on large carts were kept – carts could be wheeled into a classroom where we could show not DVDs, but those cumbersome forerunners whose name I can’t think of . Video tapes. A new and rare invention. I remember pausing at the door of the AV room, the teenagers in charge of it perched on desktops, wide-eyed at the news that a spaceship had dissolved in space.
That was years ago.
I’m no longer a teacher, no longer anything but an old woman, marveling in a way I have never marveled at those four adults in a spaceship who were talking to us. They were “talking” from a space ship, as they looked at the moon—the moon!–as though they were driving by a view of the Grand Canyon (in itself almost ungraspable) and holding up a cellphone: “Look.”