Tears before breakfast

[mamagotcha]

Linc has been wanting to watch online videos of airplanes, blimps and rockets. I usually indulge this desire while combing his hair... it keeps him still for ten minutes and he's happy.

This morning's selection has included a bunch of space shuttle launches. Even though I haven't let him see either the Challenger or Columbia disasters (gotta read those headers carefully), even just seeing a shuttle on the launch pad reignites all those feelings of horror, loss and sadness.

I was reading the live AP news feed of the Challenger launch out loud to my friends at the student newspaper at UC Davis when the feed stuttered, the reporter paused... and the horrible news started appearing before my eyes.

I was in the middle of my second miscarriage, at a juggling festival, when I heard the news of Columbia. A friend had me braid seven memorial braids in his hair (one for each lost astronaut). My personal sorrow was diminished by this second national tragedy.

Am I the only one who cries when watching rockets launch?

Comments

[cheesepuppet.livejournal.com]

Nope, you are not the only one; I bawl my head off. I also cry while watching marathons.

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

Marathons? Why? Just the dedication and determination, or do you have a personal tragedy associated with them?

[cheesepuppet.livejournal.com]

Oh no, not a personal tragedy. Just totally in awe of them, watching their triumphant faces when they cross the finish line. It's not as fun with the first 50 or so, those guys just look tired and matter of fact about it - you have to wait for the middle-to-last wave of people, the ones crossing almost or fully in tears, amazed that they did it.

I just want to hug them all. :) Makes me get all weepy.

[via-lens.livejournal.com]

I was in 9th grade science class - with Miss Ringold, who had been a finalist in the competition that ultimately chose Christa McAuliffe.

She reserved an A/V cart and wheeled it into the classroom. Our activity that day was to watch the launch.

That was the day I learned of the fallibility of engineering, the hair's breadth between good and bad luck, and saw my teacher weep.

It was the day before we were to leave on a family vacation to Florida to visit my great-aunt and great-uncle. My great-uncle was a Captain in the US Coast Guard. It was his privilege to helm the boats that collected spent rocket launches. He had gleefully described the insider's tour of the NASA facility that he'd arranged for me just the week before, on the telephone.

Instead, the vacation passed in a surreal blur. Dan was gone, out to sea, picking up pieces of a different sort. I have vague memories of anoles on the screen around the swimming pool and pieces of tinfoil under the furniture legs that would scritch at night under the feet of cockroaches. We went to Disneyworld, but it was strangely joyless.

The news of Columbia left me numb. Not in the sense of not caring: in the sense that I had been there once before, and I wasn't so sure I could go back.

I don't just cry at rocket launches. I cry at the national anthem played over a slow motion film strip of the flag waving, because that is the scene that used to play on television in the wee hours of the morning before the shuttle's first launches, in the days when my father would wake me before dawn so we could watch the broadcast together.

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing that, S. Thank you very much.