'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky

(with apologies to Jimi)

Okay.  So I didn't kiss the sky.  It was just a convenient song lyric.

I did, however, touch a piece of the moon.

That's right.  I said I TOUCHED A PIECE OF THE MOON.

The Air and Space Museum is just amazing.  There are rockets in the entry way along with the nosecone capsules of Gemini and Apollo rockets.  Just standing there under those pitted, curving surfaces was almost religious.  Those tiny little vessels sheltered men who rode fire into space and came back to tell the tale.  The scored and battered heat shielding was like a warrior's shield, each impact and burn mark telling a tale of what might be the grandest of all the battles, man against gravity.  Man against his earthbound existence.

There was a personal touch for me, too.  I have family who worked on those big rockets at Redstone Arsenal.  Somewhere among them, there is a bit of my genes, a bit of my shared DNA there.  Somewhere, my family helped those birds fly free.

I walked from exhibition hall to exhibition hall, looking at a history of man's obsession with flight.  There were a couple of Wright Brothers planes (not the first one), and there was the mighty Spirit of St. Louis.  There was even the Key Brothers' plane, hometown heroes that they are for us.  There were graceful, sleek shapes, more fish of the air than feathered counterparts.  There were deadly machines, beautiful in their stilled aggression and survival of impossible combat.

There was an exhibition in progress dedicated to the Space Shuttles.  I stood with people from many nations and watched that last great flight of Discovery as it hurled itself upwards one last glorious time. As ignition occurred and the blue-clear flames began to push the ungainly white craft up, I had tears in my eyes.  It was beautiful, and so was the collective silence and respect of every person in that room even though it was just a recording.

The theme that ran throughout for me was the undying need we as a race seem to have to escape limits, to go beyond whatever it is that holds us down.  The museum, even though it had machines built specifically for war in it, was an incredibly hopeful and inspiring place.  If we put our mind to it, even the edges of the Earth cannot hold us.

I stood for a long time running my fingertip of the tiny sliver of moon rock embedded in the hard white plastic.  I took the time to focus on it, to try to be sure I would remember that oddly slick marble-like texture.  When I walked away, I had an unconquerable smile on my face.  I had touched the moon.  With both feet standing on the ground, surrounded by flowing tides of speakers of other languages and school field trips, I had traced the surface of another world.

What could ever be impossible now?