Listening to the Apollo Murders audiobook by Col. Chris Hadfield

I’m listening to The Apollo Murders…Love it, they’ve landed on the moon and I’m learning lots. And remembering. Sometimes the Russian pronunciation isn’t as clear as it could be but that’s probably the muddled interpretation of the audiobook reader. I find myself repeating phrases. But the Russian-English accents are great. As is Nixon’s accent. Reader does a bang up job, but needs to go to a Russian language school, his Russian is mushy—horasho!

Col. Chris Hadfield is a good, solid writer. No waste, no fluff. Good reportage. Solid science. For example, I never thought of moondust as sharp. No erosion. Of course! why didn’t I think of that? And he knows some cool obscure words, like “rills” and knows how to handle a metaphor, so, as a writer, I am over the moon! 

Since I’ve met Chris, I can also hear his voice behind the words. And it’s a kick to see glimpses of his autobiography in the storyline, bits of which Ive read, or heard him read. Mitchell cranked up Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. LOL.

Audiobooks is a fairly new thing for me, during the early days of the pandemic, I had the attention span of a newt. I couldn’t concentrate long enough read a sentence little in a paragraph. I couldn’t retain anything as my mind was a sieve, more like blotter paper. But I found I could listen to audiobooks, which I formerly hated being read to. Go figure.

I’m bummed that I didn’t have the dough to buy Chris’s biography when he read at Book Passage in Corte Madera. But I had some astronaut freeze-dried ice cream which he kindly autographed. Someone took photos, but you know how it goes, I’m always the one behind the camera…so whenever anyone attempts to take a photo of me, it’s always out of focus. Like with Amy Tan, and Mary Robinson, the President of Ireland, FFS! Oh, and Chris speaks Irish too! Le do thoil.

I’ve seen one of the Apollo 11 test capsules on the USS Hornet in Alameda, CA. And once when I was teaching an Elderhostel class, one of my students was a NASA engineer. He brought me a moonrock collected from the moon’s surface, to hold. It was a piece of basalt—with sharp edges.

Per aspera ad astra

Per aspera ad astra (or ad astra per aspera) is a Latin phrase meaning "through hardships to the stars". I prefer to translate it as:  through aspiration—to the stars. A gold pin we found in the back of a lovely old bureau abandoned by the roadside. Or rather, a hidden dime-sized enamel pin that stuck me and drew blood...I guess it wanted my attention. 

I have no idea what the rest of the pin means. A red star, a beehive on a piece of wood? Busy bees? Work? A mercator sky to map the stars? A red star, a Communist symbol, if ever there was one, a reference to socialism? Or what LOTM means. At first I thought it was LOTR! Hobbitses! One ring (or pin) to rule them all. And we do have that double planet conjunction coming up on the 21st. 

Katherine Hastings suggested, Ladies of the Maccabees is a possibility. Which proved to be harder to trace, than not. References were clear as mud. Something to do with a rebellion. But I got a lead, some Knights, and a whiff of masonry. A secret society. 

Are handshakes or fez hats involved? Oddfellows? Let’s try the Knights. See where that leads. KOTM doesn’t have that same ring to it. Oh great, a graveyard reference, but their motto is catchy: Astra Castra Numen Lumen. Just don’t say it while drunk. Any low-flying vultures involved? Do I need to duck? Kyle Alden Thayer says Life of the mind. I can work with that.

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862)

My favorite astronaut, Colonel Chris Hadfield said the phrase was the motto of the Royal Canadian Air Force.  Per aspera ad astra .Through adversity to the stars. But their logo is a maple leaf, so I’m suspecting it really is much older than the Air Force. 

Then it dawned on me that Lowell Hendrickson, who once lived on our road, was a pilot. Weekends he would take his biplane out for a spin and do barrel rolls and loop-de-loops overhead with all of us kids out in the field screaming our heads off cheering him on. Either way, it’s a cool pin, and a cool motto.

Note bene: stuffing that little bureau into the back of my Guppy car (a Scion) was almost a comedy of errors, an engineering feat requiring precision to clear the wheel well, but we did it. My cousin, who fancied it, said it couldn’t be done. Passers-by shook their heads in disbelief. But I am allergic to the concept of No, I prefer to work with Yes! I knew it would fit if only we got the right configuration.

And so, we managed to wedge the bureau into the back of the itty-bitty hatchback, and bring it home like lions triumphantly dragging home their prey. Getting it back out of the car again required another round of finesse. Lift and twist. The little pin was easier to carry, despite its stellar weight. Maybe someday its cryptic message will be revealed.

On This Longest Day

Inside a CT scanner is like being in a space capsule. Col. Chris Hadfield, I thought of you as I held a perfect rigor mortis formation, toes pointed skyward, as if in prayer. The capsule spins within its own orbit, humming to the universe, a song of the electro-magnetic spectrum. I chanted X-ray, gamma-ray, all the way to man-in-the-moon marigold in the color spectrum, the color of enlightenment, noting the red laser beam cross etched across my chest. I'm dissected, scanned and disassembled within minutes, then put back together into wafer-thin slices. Hosanna in the highest. The secret inside passages of my body, from hip to toe is made visible by invisible light. And tangible on the CD the imagist hands me on this first day of summer.

Rocket Man Col. Chris Hadfield

Went to meet the man who fell to earth this afternoon. Starstruck. Yes, I was. Even the Taurid meteor showers welcomed Rocket Man, Col. Chris Hadfield to California! The sky gave him a high five and a standing ovation. The meteor didn't streak, it hung there in the sky like a lantern. Was it a meteor or space debris, or a spent space capsule welcoming Chris? Does it matter?

It's not about the destination. Arriving. "it's always about the journey, and the places in between" said Col. Chris Hadfield. Happy Carl Sagan Day!

When I was teaching a class on Sonoma County history for Elderhostel (1980s) I met a retired NASA scientist who worked on the Apollo project. Because I brought bucketsfull of my favorite rocks to class to demonstrate Sonoma County's diverse geology, he brought me a piece of the moon to hold. I held a piece of the moon in my hand. Basalt. And in Guatemala, Donna Champion's cousin Raúl let me hold a Mayan smoking mirror—a meteorite. Utterly changed, I was.

Starstruck I am! And Cmdr_Hadfield was phenomenal—especially with the kids. He even sang Space Oddity, and Rocket Man for us. There were 300+ people packed into the bookstore, it was a zoo! When it was my turn to meet him, I gave Col. Chris Hadfield Neil’s CD, and he signed my package of Frozen astronaut ice cream.

A bit of synchronicity, as I typed this, on the TV Elton John is singing Rocket Man. Someone asks me what astronaut ice cream tastes like. I grouse, It's not about the taste of astronaut ice cream, it's about the signature! Chris was the first Canadian astronaut and space oddity to sing David Bowie from outer space!

PS I was given the packet freeze-dried ice cream by an unnamed NASA astronaut I had spent the afternoon chatting with at the MacWorld Expo at Moscone Center. So it seemed fitting to have Chris sign it. (Why is it that every single photo that someone takes of me with famous people is ALWAYS out of focus? See YouTube video here. 

What I learned from going blind in space | Chris Hadfield TedTalk.  "Fear not."
Canada's Hadfield Ready to Fly

Commander Chris Hadfield sings David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in space.

Commander Chris Hadfield said that after nearly five months of floating, his feet had lost all cushioning and calluses, so on these, his first days back, "I was walking around like I was walking on hot coals."

"I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue and had to change how I was talking. I didn't realize I had learned to talk with a weightless tongue."

To see his stunning photographs every day, almost every hour, was to be reminded that sunrise and sunset are part of the same grand master plan. It made my day to view earth from space along with Chris.

"It's part of our humanity to be in space," he wrote in Russian, and just before plunging back into Earth's atmosphere, he said, in French and English, "I came here on behalf of so many people — thank you."

Chris also tweeted something in as gaelige which rocked my boat, floated my spaceship. Who knew he spoke Irish? His daughter lives in Dublin.

I rarely am into hero worship, but Chris is my hero. Rocketman! You are my wings. (I'm bedridden these days with a bad knee injury so seeing Chris float effortlessly in space is awe-inspiring.) "Fear not!" said Chris.