Sent: Sunday, October 24, 1999 8:53 AM
Subject: T+3, October Sky - later early morning

This Robinson Crusoe thing here, you know, making out with what I can in this 
environment.  I had an interesting experience about 8pm last night (T+2) 
which you might also find interesting, especially my brethren and sistren 
tech nerds in the audience.

The room I am in would be a great room at the Holiday Inn, being big, clean, 
excellent service, all the perks (I think I would drop dead though when I had 
to pay the bill).  The one thing that is almost totally lacking here is any 
connection with nature.  Sure, I have 4 big, big windows facing east, and I 
can see the tops of trees, but they are fairly distant.  Those of you who 
know me know what a big deal the natural world has always been to me, it is 
something that, given my overall good luck here so far, I have had the 
opprotunity to think about and miss.  Even I can actually watch only so much 
PBS, and I've seen all those cute but nasty lion stories more than I need to. 
 Here's my story.

In an effort to try to get some of the natural world back into my life, I 
asked JoAnne to bring me my trusty old Nikon binoculars, probably the best 
purchase/investment I ever made.  These things have been everywhere with me, 
seen it all.  JoAnne brought them on her visit yesterday.  I put them on the 
shelf along the windows, thinking about using them at some time.  There is 
one cable tv channel here that has reasonably decent movies.  On my first or 
second night here they showed the movie October Sky, a fairly 'small' film 
that I wanted to see when it came out but never got around to.  It is about 4 
high school kids from West Virginia, and it is during the time of the first 
Sputnik launch.  They set out to do a science project, to build a working 
rocket.  These kids, with no real background, no teachers with enough 
education to really help them out, jeering classmates, discouraging parents,  
have every conceivable adversity.  The fathers and everyone else tells them 
they are nuts, that the only thing they really have to look forward to is the 
life in the coal mines.  You get the picture.  They end up using their 
wits,any available resources and whatever to finally succeed.  They end up 
getting scholarships from some national science fair, go to college, work on 
the Apollo project, maybe at Martin/Lockheed.  The parallels between this 
story and my present situation are obvious, but it gets deeper and more 
ironic than that.  I actually lead some of that life.  Yeah, I was in the 
suburbs of Chicago, and it was actually my older brother Mike who had a bunch 
a friends who set off the rockets, (some of which we shot up and didn't know 
where they came down), but I went through the science fairs, the dreams of 
Nobel prizes, and all that.  To put it in context, even an old guy like me 
was only 6 years old when Sputnik went up, so rockets and their fuel were a 
little beyond my scope.  You get the picture, I really related to that movie, 
inspirational as Rocky, Breaking Away, or the hundreds of others that tell 
pretty much the same story.  Frankly, with my current situation, it is much 
easier to relate the end of October Sky than to the final scenes of Rocky 
(1,2,3,4,5 or 6) right now.  Anyhow, the October Sky movie came on for the 
second time last night, and I had missed the first part when I had previously 
seen it.  I decided to have dinner and a show, so I got up, and robbie and I 
walked across the room, swiveled the tv set, and sat down with my dinner.  As 
my head and eyes twisted from the food to the tv, I necesarily gazed through 
the window at, amazingly, a full moon.  The coincidence of this moment was 
not to be believed.  I picked up the recently gotten binoculars, adjusted the 
inter-pane venetian blinds to parallel to my direction of view, and stared at 
he moon for a full five minutes.  The canned pears tasted partiularly good 
that night.

Bye for now.

Dave