I fell in love with space hard and fast at a pivotal moment in my life. The person I was before this passion emerged is murky to me. I remember wanting to be an actor, because I was always a bit of a ham, and a marine biologist because I loved orcas and dolphins. I remember reading The Phantom Tollbooth over and over and over in fifth grade. I played a little soccer and a little Nintendo. I was a child. But, almost like a changeling left in a fairy wood, I don’t remember being ME. (Except for the story my parents love to tell about how, if they gave my big sister a certain look, you know, a STOP THAT look, she would burst into tears, but if you tried it on me, I would stare you down and demand, “What?” I don’t remember this at all, but that little person is still inside of me.)

Then, in the summer between sixth and seventh grade, my family moved. We didn’t go far—didn’t even change states, but the difference between Memphis and Nashville felt like we might as well have moved to the moon. There weren’t really kids my age in the neighborhood, and my new school was in another county. My family became my little island, and somehow I discovered Star Trek: the Next Generation, and as far as I can remember, that was the moment I was hooked, the moment I became me.

From there things get a bit hazy. I was obsessed with space, not so much sci fi, but NASA and life out there. I memorized the early astronauts and their missions; I got my family to install a SETI screensaver that would scan for alien life; I persuaded my dad, after a long day at work, to drive me all over the metro area looking for the right Blockbuster (remember those?) where astronaut Fred Haise was signing autographs; and my mom took me out of school for a day trip to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to see a retiring space shuttle on the back of a 747. And I began to write. First it was Star Trek stories—before fan fiction was really quite what it is today—but soon it was a meandering story about a lonely kid as obsessed with Space as me. When I think back on it now, my writing journey and my interest in Space are intricately woven together through the landscape of my adolescence and beyond.

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Yet despite my love of Space, I have no fond memories of any science class. The only science that I remember before The Move was a Girls in STEM day camp, and it was incredible. But science in school? I'm sure I had science class. After the move, my memory is limited to dissecting worms and owl pellets and designing vaguely interesting science fair projects in middle school. I remember visiting a chemistry class during an eighth grade campus visit to my future high school and being mesmerized by a demonstration from the teacher who unfortunately retired before my eleventh grade chem class. What I'm saying is that one dull science class after another, full of rote memorization and grainy diagrams, made me draw the conclusion that I was dumb at science, not capable of any avenue to NASA except through the Air Force Academy--a pilot astronaut, that's what I wanted to be.

At Space Camp I met a dear, brave friend—a friend who knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to try, who went on to become an officer and engineer in the Coast Guard. I think I have been trying to figure out how to be as brave as Heidi ever since. It was during a physical for Space Camp that my pediatrician discovered I had scoliosis, one of the most defining moments of my young life. My second year at Camp was sort of my last hurrah before devoting the next four years to high school and scoliosis treatment. For awhile I still believed I could be an astronaut, but eventually it became clear that my condition (which culminated in Harrington rods) would be a deterrent, and by the eleventh grade, my dream of a NASA career was dead. It didn’t occur to me that I was good at calculus, that I could be an engineer, one of those guys in Mission Control who exhilarated me in Apollo 13. When Heidi realized that her eyesight would keep her from flying in the Air Force, she channeled her energy into the Coast Guard, but for whatever reason, I never fathomed that there were so many ways to be. Instead, I focused on my writing. I remember saying, "I'll be like Tom Hanks. I may not go to space, but I'll write about it."

 

In college I pursued a Communications degree, with emphasis on screenwriting and creative writing. And I guess because some things never change, my science credits were in oceanography and, shockingly, astronomy. I was in that very astronomy class on 9/11--Space again, at the epicenter of another life-defining moment. Sadly, it was just one more class that made me believe I was too dumb for science. It’s kind of a tragedy, really, because I'm not dumb. With the hindsight of an adult, I know that to be true.

 

The thing is, science is insanely amazing. Any science class that doesn’t blow students' minds with how incredible the world or the universe or life itself is, should be ashamed.

So now, thanks to a writer friend who is not shy about his passion for Space, I have a little telescope. Okay, it’s actually a kind of sizable telescope, and my saintly husband lugged it all over New Mexico for me so that I could use it during one night of camping in Chaco Canyon. I didn’t even really need it. Out there, the sky is so vast and dark, you have to know what you’re looking at and I don’t yet. But I couldn’t stop looking. I saw so many shooting stars, and so many stationary ones that I still can’t quite comprehend it two years later. I wanted to stay up all night just looking. I think maybe I saw the face of god.

Obviously I’m still writing, too. And I find that Space seems to creep its way, in varying degrees, into everything I do. Now I'm particularly interested in channeling that passion into young adult literature--the books that I needed as a kid, the books that some other kid out there might need now, to help them find the courage and the confidence to pursue a future in the stars if they want to. So even though I didn’t become an astronaut, even though I tried to shelve the passion for awhile and move on to other things, in a way, Space made me who I am today. It made me a writer.

 

Jean M. Malone - July 2020

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