The Blue Marble

She is beautiful you know, the "Blue Marble."

Even more beautiful from my current physical and emotional vantage point. My situation adds a sharp, pleasantly acidic flavor to it, like a sip of good cider. I'm being silly and that bothers me.

I've wondered what those astronauts thought when they snapped that picture. Were they afraid? Was fear eating at them looking back as they sped away from the only known place in the universe where they could survive? There's fear thinking that so I try to avoid it. I keep thinking, "Am I going crazy?"

When I was five years old my father took me to Cape Canaveral to watch Apollo 17 take off and a road opened before me that defined my life and led to me being here.

Now it's 2027 and I'm sixty years old, the oldest astronaut to leave the earth. It took a great deal of hard work to be selected at my age, but I've been working at it for 55 years.

Have I told you she's beautiful from here? Mother Earth? She is you know.

From five on my mind lived in space. Everything I did had a space theme to it. The only toys I wanted were rockets and space ships and moon landers and moon rovers. In 1976 Viking 1 soft landed on Mars and a whole new world of possibilities opened. I was off to the races again with new toys; Mars rockets, landers, rovers. Anything MARS!

It was a silent walk down that road, I had to fly! I did everything in my power to make sure I got what I desired, being here.

Now, sitting on this rock with a limited air supply and the space craft wrecked behind me I'm wondering if I'll die with dignity.