Scooped by a Different Kind of Launch

I thought I'd had a pretty good day, all in all, between the missile museum and the mission. I could hardly wait to tell my aunt and uncle when I saw them at their house for dinner that evening. I knew they'd be pleased that I'd had a chance to visit both places.

When I phoned them from my motel room that afternoon, they immediately told me some important big news. Their daughter, my cousin, had gone into labor, a week ahead of schedule. My aunt, who was already planning on flying to Wisconsin for the birth, had pushed her flight up to the next morning.

On the way over to their house I bought not only a bottle of red wine, which I had brought on the previous two dinners at their house on my visit, but a bottle of champagne.

By the time I got their, they had received updated news: the baby girl had already arrived.  So the dinner was a bit of a celebration.

Visiting them this time in their new house had been very fun. We had talked for hours each time about politics, physics, history, art, and cinema. We had even watched a University of Arizona basketball game on television together.

I had told them about my weird lifestyle, and even about the television show Route 66, and my ideas of how America had changed, and hadn't, since the early 1960s. I told them that my all-time favorite episode, "How Much a Pound for Albatross?" (Season 2, Episode 18), had been set and filmed in Tucson, and featured interesting period cinematography of the city from that era. So my visit was a bit of pilgrimage in a way.*



It was particularly fun to talk to my uncle, who is my dad's younger brother. He's in the age rane between my father and me, and has been an electronics engineer most of his life. He proudly showed off his skills in their backyard at night with a green laser pointer, which could reach the slopes of nearby mountains (green stays coherent over a longer range than red). He even rigged up a contraption to point the laser pointer on a telescope to extend its range, the of makeshift device that my grandfather (his father) was famous for cooking up.

When I left at the end of the third evening, I insisted on taking their picture. They weren't enthusiastic about it, but I told them it was "so your granddaughter can see what her grandparents looked like on the day she was born." They went for that one.

* I just found the opening few minutes of this episode on Youtube. The first shot is of Julie Newmar's character riding a motorcycle past the San Xavier mission---I knew there was a reason I had to go there.