March 6, 2011

• Rambling Conversation, Big Laughs

  It started with a radio news story about Shuttle Discovery going into a museum after this mission.  Doug wondered aloud whether it would just be on display, and expressed a wish to get inside and poke around.

  After a pause, he said, “I have a memory from the Big Field Trip,” (a 28,000 mile drive around the Western U.S. we took 17 years ago, weaning him off Ritalin between 6th and 7th grades) “…of a space museum, and it’s connected in my mind with discount tortillas.”

  “Yes,” I confirmed, “New Mexico… Alamogordo… they were factory seconds… irregular tortillas, 3 dozen for a buck — actually 88 cents, I think.  The supermarket was only a few blocks from the Museum.”

  Talk veered off tortillas and onto the museum.  “They had a mock-up of Sputnik,” I said, “and the grave of one of the primates that went into orbit… I think it was a chimp.  Kind of a weird place for a grave, right outside the museum’s door.  They wouldn’t do that with a human astronaut.”

  Doug nodded, thinking, then he laughed and I queried.  “I was just thinking,” he said, “of, say, Neal Armstrong’s last will and testament…”

  “Wanting to be buried in the forecourt of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum,” I supplied.

  “No,” he corrected, “taxidermied and on display.”

  “In his spacesuit,” I finished.

  Then we broke up a bit, and went on to other things.
  

  • 12:39 pm
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