Take Care of Your Spaceship

Driving back from Reno last fall, I startled when something flying off a truck ahead of me on the interstate smashed a tiny hole into my windshield.

Yesterday, after some gardening, I read my grandson a couple chapters from a book written in the '50s called The First Boy On The Moon. This obscure book imagines a kid and his friend being stowaways on a rocket.

The plot includes the team of astronauts setting off a small atom bomb on the moon in order to determine what materials compose its core. They do not shield themselves from the radiation with anything more than a pile of rocks.

Although the book has few illustrations, my grandson listened spellbound, no doubt absorbing and interpreting at least 25 percent of the words as new vocabulary at his age.

Regardless, he could follow the story.

Anyway, on their way back to earth, the astronauts face disaster when a meteorite the size of a speck of dust penetrates their spaceship's outer layer, causing an oxygen leak.

I won't give away the exciting conclusion, but suffice it to say, there was a happy ending.

As I recounted the plot of this book, complete with its naive depiction to my youngest son, who is 16, at one of his favorite cafes today, he couldn't believe the part about the atom bomb.

So I explained to him that when I was growing up in the '50s, Americans were bombarded with government-led propaganda about the wonders of atomic power, including a pamphlet circulated at our elementary schools called "Our Friend the Atom."

We had never been told about the dimensions of the horrors suffered at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They didn't teach us that kind of stuff.

He was appalled. I am appalled. Yet history is history.

Anyway, maybe it was that leak in the spaceship that prompted me today to finally listen to my 13-year-old daughter and stop by an auto glass shop to inquire whether they could fix that hole dating back to last fall's Reno road trip.

They can, and it will take 40 minutes and cost about 20 bucks.

P.S. She'd been reminding me for months. Tonight, I called to thank her, but I also should thank the author of that little kids' book from sixty years ago for imagining an event that helped me find the motivation to do something about my own personal spaceship.

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