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Current Weather. Powered by Dark Sky. Low Temp. November 11th , Thursday. FRI SAT SUN I glanced at a small cylindrical object I was using as a paperweight.
I picked it up. It was a sophisticated but tiny rocket nozzle. Its story was only a hazy memory. As I talked to the editor, pieces of it started to come back. We won a medal — a science fair… no, the National Science Fair medal. I sent in the fax and forgot about it. The next day the editor called. She loved it. Would I send pictures?
The medal? Anything I had? The magazine was going with the story as a major feature. I was surprised at her reaction but I was to be absolutely astonished when the article came out. Letters and phone calls from parents all over the country, even in England, came in a rush. They were inspired, touched in a manner most unexpected. They called me just to hear my voice and tell me how proud my little story made them and, in a couple of instances, begged me to speak to their children.
There was more to come. One day a letter came in the mail from a small motion picture producer, wondering if I had sold the rights to my story.
The agent said that I should write a book about those days, too, and, of course, I said I would. A book on our adventures as rocket-builders would, I thought, actually write itself.
After all, it had all been so simple. We were stuck in a coal camp and we were enthralled by the space race. Of course we built rockets. Of course, we kept building them even when they blew up. Of course, we kept working and learning until we had designed sophisticated rocket engines, capable of flying for miles into the sky.
Something had happened once in my life, something so very special that 35 years after it had been done, and I had nearly forgotten it, it had been brought back to me to relive. I sat down and began to write. I wrote of the boys. I wrote of our rockets.
I remembered the first one, and the next, and the next. And as I wrote, it was as if there were others there whispering to me, just shushes of conversation coming as if behind a thick curtain. And there was one. Every time I tried to turn away from him in the book, he moved like a phantom to stay in my view. My dad. And then I knew where I was going, what I had to write the entire book for.
I had to write it all down so that I could get to where waited the answer to my odd contentment when Dad died. The moment lay there, far in the distance, and all I had to do was to relive it all to get there. I wrote, and as I wrote, the little town of Coalwood came alive again. The miners trudged up the old path to the mine, their lunch pails clunking against their legs, their helmets perched on their heads.
Dad was there amongst them, wearing his old snap-brim hat, his cow-hide coat, encouraging them in the day, gathering his foremen to him for their instruction. The people of the town bustled in and out of the Company store and gathered on the church steps after Sunday services to gossip. My mother was in her kitchen, in her refuge in front of the big painted picture of the beach and the ocean.
My dog waited in my basement laboratory, his stubby tail wagging at the sight of me as I picked up and inspected the implements of my chosen trade, the high school rocket builder — the potassium nitrate and sugar, the zinc dust and sulphur, the moonshine we used as a propellant binder. In my room, there was my old desk and the book our Miss Riley had given us, the one with all the answers written in a mathematical script no one believed we could learn but we had, against all odds.
I looked and my wonderful little cat still slept on my pillow on the bed beneath the window from which I could see the mine and the tiny machine shop where the kindly machinist had built our first rocket.
The church bell was ringing as once more we boys stood on the roof of the old Club House and peered through the telescope a junior engineer had loaned us, to see once more the bands of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the craters of the Moon.
The old high school was there, the halls ringing with the excitement of youth, the classrooms echoing with our lessons, the awareness slowly dawning on us that we were the designated refugees of our town and our school — that we were being prepared to leave and never return. Everything and everyone was still there, all in their places, defining the path, urging me along it, to where my dad waited.
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