Tonight, at 7:38 p.m., Atlantis left Cape Canaveral for a little hook-up with the Space Station.
The weather was rainy here, so the cloud cover prohibited a viewing of this momentous event. Sad for me? Yes. Why? Well, I've been watching lift-offs since I was a child. John Glenn's circuit around the earth, that happened right after Sputnik's launch in 1959. John Glenn's orbit gave me a great deal of hope. Perhaps we might not be vicitms of Cubas's (and the evil USSR's plans to "bury us") Cuban Missle Crisis after all.
I begged my Dad to build us a "fall out shelter." Dad had to demonstrate the inefficiency of "going underground in Miami," by using a post-hole digger to show me that, in Miami, one could not dig beneath 6' without finding the water table. Believe me, I was a smart kid, but I was not so smart as to come up with another solution to this horrible problem. His solution? Faith. It simply wasn't going to happen. God would not reveal the "End Times"so this "so-called threat," was only that, a "threat." Dad doesn't know this, but he helped me live through months of "emergency exercises," wherein we had to find our bus (for me it was route 9), duck and cover exercices wherein I knew I would be fused to the underside of my desk like the gum already stuck there, and well, I love you, Dad, but, reality taught me that maybe it was better to exist at "ground zero" than to live on the perimeter.
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