Boys and Girls and Spaceships

There is something wonderful happening with our children. Of course, that is what is to be expected of any parent at almost any time, but this one truly took me by surprise.

It started for me the summer before last, when my son and I were looking at the moon, and talking, and he grasped that it was a place that he could go. He made the connections, it is magic when I can see it happening right before me, told me quite matter of factly that he was going to go to the moon. I was joking when I asked him how and he showed me a spaceship he had built of legos.

I was proud of him, of course. But the adult fact of the matter is that the people who are responsible for making sure that he can go to the moon are more concerned with their pensions, I thought to myself. And the longer until he learns the unpleasant reality, the better. And put it all in the back of my mind.

Until a visit to some friends the other evening, who have a couple boys around the same age as my own son. And one of them, the younger, showed me a spaceship he had made. It was a very nice one, with a little spaceman riding it, much the way my son builds them. There were stylistic differences, of course. And when I asked, he pointed up, out the window, and told me that he was going to the moon. The I remembered a conversation with a single mother who has a girl about the same age who told her the same thing.

And it hit me: We have gone over a watershed. This generation of children knows without any doubt whatsoever that they are going to go into space. We watched the first moon landings and shuttle launches in awe. They have as ready an acceptance of space travel as we did of taking a plane to see grandma. And as the child said to her mother, with an eerie appreciation of the future, "I hope you're alive when I go to the moon." So does she.

That is the wonderful thing, that they have a hope and expectation of unimaginable possibilities and worlds without end. And I have a hope, that I was wrong in my cynical opinions, thankfully never expressed, and that the men and women who are responsible are also capable of such unfolding dreams.

by David E. Freeman

dfremail@yahoo.com

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