The Promise

This is the moment it happened.

That is a night shuttle launch – STS-130, to be exact – taking off towards the international space station with its cupola cargo.

Why is it so important?

Because I bleeping do my best to keep my promises.

Please understand, I’m a human being. I make promises, fully intending to keep them, and… things happen. Priorities shift, people move and you lose touch. Or you’re longer friends, and you feel no compulsion to help a backstabber. And sometimes, people die before you can fulfill that promise. Those last ones are the ones that will haunt you, because they certainly haunt me.

Not getting Cindy to Maine to eat lobster. Not getting back to high school to talk to the junior high students in science class, because the teacher who got me into my college program died before I could get my act together.

Regrets. I have them.

It makes hitting the big promises all the sweeter when you fulfill one. Like the author Tamora Pierce says, sometimes you have to pile the good experiences against the bad, just to sleep at night.

Now, I make no secret of my contempt for my parents-in-law. What they did to my husband, the emotional abuse they put him through, then denied it all… I just can’t. And one of the reasons is because of what happened between the dates of August 18, 1977, and September 7, 1977.

Why were they so momentous?

Because that’s when we launched the Voyager probes.

And where were my in-laws?

In Florida. Visiting the House of Mouse. Again.

Folx, my father-in-law was a rocket scientist. But they couldn’t bestir themselves to drive one freaking measly hour to see history.

Needless to say, my hubby, about ten at the time, was pissed.

Hubby was only told, in passing, as they were leaving the state, like oh, isn’t that interesting? Well, no, we went to Disney. That was our vacation. No, we’re not coming back for the next one, those were the only two. Why yes, they did launch two this week, but that was all. No, we’re not going to go to a launch when we visit Florida again, because we go to Disney.

It says something for the level of trauma that hubby didn’t tell me any of this for a good twenty-two years. Not until NASA announced the close of the space shuttle program, did the story come tumbling out.

And now, oooooh, I was pissed. And determined.

Coincidentally, my parents were soon traveling to Florida to work on repairing hurricane homes. I know my parents very well; they’ve done work like this before. When helping re-build Katrina homes, they got lonely for family, so they invited their favorite daughter (I’m an only child) to come and visit. They’d take a week off off of working, join us, and we’d go exploring together.

So I asked for our predicted trip to coincide with a launch.

Remember the North American Blizzard of 2010?

Yeah, we saw that monster coming, and skedaddled with an extra-fast eeeee-yyyyyyaaaahhhhhh to out-drive it. Many’s the trip we’ve taken, hubs and I, where we’re literally seeing the snowflakes fluttering out of the leading edge of the storm as we drive. This was one of them. Yes, by the end of the storm, there was snow in all fifty states, but we were well below it. Nothing like being welcomed by friendly faces, hundreds of miles from home, expressions changing from worry to relief, and snacking on fresh-picked Indian River oranges while the thin rain clouds get thicker and thicker above us.

I drove us all to the coast the next night, at four ack emma, to see the launch. Being among a crowd of enthusiasts at Space Park (best viewing), talking to NASA retirees and people who worked on shuttles, including the guy who was the one to seal in the Columbia shuttle crew and hear his story. And be there when the guy who designed the payload finally got to meet the guy who downchecked said payload for weight, after fifteen years of searching for each other, and tiptoeing away when the bickering escalated… (they made up later, one of the other retirees made them. Funny to listen to, from a distance. A big distance.)

The zoo of humanity! Taking the very last illegal spot in the parking lot because everything else was full up and down the blocks. The six frat boys who hup-hup-hup’d a queen-sized mattress into the crowd, and plopped it right on the landscaped low bushes to stake their space. (No bushes were harmed; the landscapers weren’t fools, and planted super-hardy species for just this reason.) The drunk lady who brought her Great Dane to see the show, but I’m pretty sure the dog was a moose in disguise. I could have ridden that beast like it was a pony.

People from Disney, people traveling for the Superb Owl being held in Miami that night, and everyone coming in for the weekend to the shores of Atlantic Florida.

And the shelf of clouds would not lift, so the mission was scrubbed.

The wailing! The moans of despair!

As expected, you can imagine the craziness of that sea of humanity now trying to leave the scene. We waited.

And when we got back to the hotel, we slept.

Once we combobulated late the next morning, we visited Silver Springs State Park. So many manatees! It was cold (for Florida), so all the manatees crowded in to the inner river to get warm. Over three hundred! Yes, I got awesome pics, but this is about the promise I’d made.

Which I fulfilled that night.

What a difference twenty-four hours makes. February 8 was a Monday. So the Superb Owl crowds, and the Disney crowds, and the locals had to go home, or to work, or back to college. That left the odd tourists, like us, and the NASA retirees.

We had a blast chatting with them, and that’s where I got the most awesome epitaph I will ever have: She Asks Interesting Questions. It’s almost a shame I plan to be disposed of via alkaline hydrolysis, if they ever make it legal. (Stop blocking the vote and keeping your stupid monopoly, casket makers!)

And then, in the late night, my promise got fulfilled to the hoarse-throated chanting of a countdown.

Night launches are awesome.

We saw the blob of red-orange light lift, tilt, and punch through the atmosphere on its way to an imperceptible point of light with a few lonely humans on board.

Something healed in my husband that night, and again some more the next year, when we serendipitously got to see a second launch with STS-133 on February 24, 2011. He learned that some people rearrange their world to keep their promises, and that some people care enough about him specifically to keep the promises they made. Our marriage became safer, more trusting, through those two trips. He doesn’t ask for a lot of material stuff, so when he finally found the courage to voice his deep desire to see a space launch, and the story behind it, you can bet your bippy that I would see it done.

For love? Absolutely. For revenge? That too. Why not both? And the deep satisfaction of getting that delicious revenge, which my in-laws never understood. I knew my in-laws only too well; they’d completely forgotten the original incident. They were that peculiar combination of shallow and selfish, and honestly thought they were very good parents. Ohh, if they only knew! But they were completely incapable of learning to be better, so we didn’t waste our time. But we know, and that’s what matters. The best type of revenge, in our opinion.

As I type, hubby is muttering to himself, trying to figure out some kind of fiendish uber-sudoku puzzle. Hold on – I checked, and he says it’s called Knight’s Move Sudoku. Yep, I’m lost. I introduced him to sudoku puzzles, and he was instantly addicted. So was my mom, when I introduced them to her, and she got Dad addicted. Mom prefers Samurai Sudoku, and Dad prefers the Extra Hard. Me? I’ll stick to my word seeks, though I can do them up to the Super Hard level and only get stuck on two or three.

And here I sit with two slips of paper, books that hubby wants and trusts me to buy for him. Because of course I will, likely tomorrow, as the snow falls down during another winter storm. Funny how our lives circle and intertwine through certain themes, over and over. Eventually, the storm will fade, and we’ll dig out, and we’ll continue to keep our promises to each other.