Happy May Day


A fresh new month, all clean from the rain, the earth is renewing itself, the grass looks like soft lush versions of peach fuzz and puppy fur.


High above the earth a dream is realized. Dennis Tito, the ‘first’ space tourist, is aboard the International Space Station. I have no clue if he’s a jerk, or hard to travel with. But goodness, he inspires me. If he can go to space, at his age, and well his money, I must still have a chance, somewhere in my future to go. The whole thing is like something out of Heinlein, or Resnick, or Bradbury. A former NASA employee decides he wants to go to space, has the means to do so, and books a flight to the dying Mir. Mir falls earlier in the year, and the Russians decide to honor their agreement to take him to space, mostly because they’ve already spent his twenty million. NASA doesn’t trust/want him there, turns him away from joint training, his kids and family probably resent the fact he’s spending ‘their inheritance’ to follow some crazy dream about being in space.

And now, now he’s really there, he’s weightless, he’s looking down over the whole world, catching a live glimpse of sunlight fading from one corner to the other. Seeing the real brightness of the sun and stars without an atmosphere to blur things up. He’s out there without a horizon, without an up or down.


It’s all too magnificent, even down to the ‘you break it, you buy it’ clause in his contract. It’s too deliciously like all those novels I’ve been reading since childhood.


I can’t fully explain my desire to be out there, to you. It’s close to tears over beauty as I can come. Best of all, my turn is coming ever so closer.


Ah, dreams, what are yours?