Out Of This World
Gray, raw late January morning: the baby napping. Soon Tracy must wake and bundle him for the stroller-ride to Rachel's nursery school. The precious morning has evaporated into chores, the perpetual leaf-raking of family life.
The phone rings.
"Do you have the television on?" asks her mother.
"She's at school, no Sesame Street today, thank goodness."
"You're missing the lift-off. The shuttle."
Still holding the cordless phone, Tracy turns on the television and joins her mother and the crowd in Florida: waiting.
More than twenty years ago, huddled with classmates on the cold tile floor of the assembly room, she'd squinted at the fuzzy black and white television set on the stage; class dismissed to cheer the lift-offs and re-entries of the first astronauts: Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, famous as rock stars.
Space travel has become commonplace, astronauts anonymous - but not today for her mother, watching the little set on the kitchen windowsill above a sudsy sink. No teacher would miss this launch: the ultimate vicarious field trip. Her mother would have loved bounding over the surface of the moon, picking up rock samples to bring back to class. And Tracy herself imagines and envies the thrill of lifting out of the every day, leaving this earth spinning below; her passport expired now, her only current travel documents a library card and driver's license.
The expectant faces of the schoolteacher's family and students regard the huge vessei, poised and pointed up into the cloudless blue Florida sky. Flashing numbers scroll across the screen in the final count-down.
Tracy murmurs the chant of the long ago schoolroom, "Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, BLAST OFF!"
The commander's voice crackles, "Roger, go with throttle, up, up."
"Oh, look!" her mother whispers, amazed as a child seeing it the first time.
Then the shuttle disappears in a billow of cloud: swallowed by the sky, obliterated. Feathers of white vapor bleed into the vacant blue.
Tracy's the last mother to arrive at nursery school. She kneels, inhaling the heavy earthly scents of white paste and apple juice, embracing her sturdy, solemn child: anchor, ballast, sweet millstone.
Published
in Glossolalia: Summer 2009; Volume 1:4
