THERE ARE FIVE CHILDREN in Charlie’s preschool car pool. The school is a thirteen-mile drive from our house, and the children in the car pool all come from different directions, so getting them all together is a complicated business. Some days we drive only as far as a lunch counter/grocery called the Corner Store and then hand our passengers over to another driver. Some days we pick up a couple of children at the Corner Store and then drive four more miles, to Route 31, to meet up with another driver who takes them the rest of the way. And once a week we make all the stops and drive the full thirteen miles. Wednesday’s our day for that.
Usually it’s our babysitter who does the driving. I’m out there in my nightgown and felt-lined boots, standing in the snow, buckling my two sons into the car and hurrying Audrey off to her school bus when they set out in the morning, running back to the house for the odd mitten or pretzel. But then they’ll disappear down the driveway, driven by Vicky or (now) Joanie, and I’ll head back into my empty house to throw on my jeans and head out to work. By the time I’m turning on my typewriter, I figure they’ve reached the Corner Store. I sit there for a few minutes, sipping my coffee, trying to empty my head of sandwich making and sock hunting, and pour myself a second cup round about the time the children have probably reached Route 31. They’re probably just getting their coats and hats off, and sitting down for circle time, as I begin to type.
That’s how it is: my mind is always divided, and my concentration with it. Many mornings I wish it could be me driving in the car pool, and if Charlie has asked me particularly plaintively, sometimes I do. But then, along with the joy of that extra hour with my own children and the others (listening to their discussions of Halley’s Comet or afterschool plans, theories about how frost heaves happen and whose Mad Ball is the disgustingest), there’s always a part of me that ends up feeling anxious and rushed, knowing I’ll be falling behind with work and more distracted than ever.
But today was one of those mornings when Charlie cried for me to drive and it seemed important to say yes. We couldn’t find one of Willy’s boots, and then halfway down the driveway Charlie realized he didn’t have his bear. The car was very low on gas, and I’d left my wallet at home. Five miles down the road, I remembered that Audrey had forgotten to take her avocado seed for science. Willy pulled Charlie’s hair. Charlie bonked Willy on the head. Willy dropped his bottle. I had to pull over to the side of the road to retrieve it. By the time we got to the Corner Store, our first stop, to wait for the two children we’d pick up there, I was irritable and jumpy. The car bringing the other kids was late, and because it was five degrees above zero, I kept my motor running.
Fifteen minutes later, the other car drove up, bearing our first two passengers. I put on the parking brake and hopped out to help the children into my van, whose side door is a little tricky. But I must not have pushed the brake down far enough, because suddenly I saw my van, with my two sons still buckled inside, begin to roll away, headed straight for the highway.
No way to catch it, hop in, and push the brake in time. Nothing to do but scream, and of course I did. And then I realized that the car wasn’t going to roll out into the highway after all. It was going to slam into another vehicle that was parked in its path. A second later, that’s what happened.
I suppose the whole thing probably happened in the space of ten seconds, but that time seemed endless as I stood watching. I saw my two sons’ heads, in their winter beanies, bobbing in the driverless van. Saw the other car, a blue Ford, and the left front end where mine was about to hit. The other two children I’d been about to pick up, and the mother of one of them. All of them standing there helpless, like me.
An instant later my car hit the Ford and came to a stop, and I was able, then, to fling open the door and put my arms around my children. Who were fine—laughing, even.
The damage to our van was negligible: a ripped bumper, a couple of scratches. The other car had fared a little worse, and so, still shaking, I had to walk into the Corner Store to announce the license number of the now-dented Ford and wait for the owner to come forward. He turned out to be the husband of Audrey’s piano teacher, just finishing his scrambled eggs and home fries. A policeman was sitting next to him at the counter, and on his other side the owner of our local body shop. The three of them escorted me back to the two vehicles to assess the damage and write up a report.
We exchanged names of our insurance companies. I apologized again. Then I piled my two passengers in and headed (very late now) to Route 31 to pick up my final passenger and ferry the group the rest of the way to school.
In the car, driving the final stretch of highway, I played the scene over and over in my mind. I asked Charlie if he’d been scared. “No,” he said. “I knew if we kept going you’d run home and get our other car and catch up with me.” I tried to remember the precise moment when I’d stepped on the parking brake. Whether, in the back of my mind, there had been that uneasiness a person gets when she knows something’s wrong, knows there’s something she’s forgotten, but thinks that—just this one time—she’ll get away with it. Like the times I have laced up my son’s shoe, vaguely aware of a wrinkle in the sock, or sand in the toe, but too impatient to start over. Or when I simply pour an extra couple of ounces of milk into Willy’s bottle without checking to see if what’s in there is still good. All those little moments when corners can—and should not—be cut.
Well, I got the children to school. I drove home. Left Willy with our babysitter. Headed out here to work, but ended up spending most of the morning on the phone to one friend and another, telling and retelling my story. Hoping, I guess, that if I told it enough, I’d finally be free of it. By the fourth or fifth telling, I had the words pretty much set. My voice no longer shook as I described the sight of my sons rolling away from me, headed for that Ford.
I felt reassured when friends told me their own parking brake and car pool horror stories. It could’ve happened to anyone, they told me.
But the truth is, I was a prime candidate for trouble this morning. It was the sort of morning when, if I were an airplane pilot or a trapeze artist, I would simply know to stay on the ground for a while. The sort of day when, not for any obvious reasons, just a general distractedness, something was almost destined to go wrong. Only, motherhood—though it’s a high-risk occupation too—doesn’t allow for off days or for days off. There is no vacation.
It was winter, the day before Audrey’s fifth birthday. Charlie was not quite one. We’d been snowed in for a couple of days, and now that we were finally plowed out, I had a long list of errands to run, with less than an hour until it would be time to pick Audrey up at school. Twelve children coming for her party the next day. The cake unmade. Golden Dream Barbie heads—those disembodied oversize Barbie heads that are cut off at the neck and mounted on a base, with makeup and curlers included—half-price at Zayre and just what my daughter wanted. My son had fallen asleep in the car instead of waiting until we got home, and if I roused him, I knew, he’d be cranky for the rest of the trip, the rest of the day.
So I left him in the car while I ran into the store. This was Keene, New Hampshire, not New York City, but still the thought of child theft flashed long enough that I didn’t leave the motor running (in case someone might want my car, and take Charlie along for the ride). And I made the conscious decision not to lock the doors, vaguely picturing some farfetched catastrophe—fire, flood—that might require a person to open the car door and rescue my son. You might ask why, able as I was to envision possible disaster, I would leave him there at all. All I can say is that the distant possibility of full-scale catastrophe was unreal to me that day, compared to the difficulties—small-scale, but certain—of life with an eleven-month-old jolted from sleep and wheeled through a crowded, fluorescence-lit discount store, and then returned to his car seat for another forty-five minutes on the road.
So I left him. I parked in front of the store. I ran all the way to the toy department. I got the Barbie head and stood in the express line, with my money all counted out and a restless, uneasy feeling: the sort you get three days into a vacation when you begin to wonder whether maybe the iron’s plugged in back home. All those little actions—the cashier’s small talk to the woman ahead of me, her hesitation at the price of the toy, the way she paused to open a new roll of quarters—seemed to take much longer than usual, but finally my purchase was paid for and I was out the automatic doors. My car was easy to find, with a crowd gathered round and a police car beside it, siren on, blue light flashing. When I got close enough—to hear the policeman’s voice: “Is this your car, young lady?” to see the women shaking their heads—I could see my son awake in his car seat (from the siren, probably) and screaming.
The first thing I did was to get Charlie out of his seat. Then there were lots of questions. What was I doing and did I have a job? Who was the child’s father? I can’t remember most of what the policeman asked me except “Why doesn’t he even have mittens on his little hands?” And I remember—with surprise, as someone who is always polite, even obsequious, with police officers, and is reduced to tears by a speeding ticket—asking the policeman loudly whether he had any children, and if he’d ever tried keeping mittens on a toddler? “Well, as a matter of fact, my wife had our first ten days ago,” he said. “And I can tell you she’d never leave that baby alone in a car.”
Eventually he let me go, and of course my son cried all the way home, and I was pretty shaky myself—the odds of us all getting killed in a car accident on our way home probably tripled. But we made it back, my daughter loved the Barbie head, I baked a cake in the shape of a little girl with brown eyes and brown hair, the party went well. A few weeks later an unfamiliar voice called on the phone, asking to speak with my husband. It was a child-welfare officer, wanting to know if Steve was aware that his wife … et cetera, et cetera … and would he inform her that someone from the department would be paying us a home visit?
So a welfare officer came to our house and looked Charlie over while Audrey, to whom I’d explained the situation, hovered over him, saying things like, “Remember, Mom, when we took Charlie to the Children’s Museum?” and “Sing us that song Mom always sings when she puts you to bed, Char.” And eventually this child-welfare officer pronounced me a fit mother and said he’d take my name out of the files provided we had six months with no further problems. Before he left he told me about a man, referred to him, who had been left in charge of his four-year-old and newborn daughters one afternoon and how the man left them for a minute to go to the bathroom, and how, when he came back, the newborn was dead. What do we learn from that story, I asked him. Only that terrible things sometimes happen.
Last month a woman I knew slightly was making scalloped potatoes while her three children played beside her in the kitchen. This was in the mountains of Nepal, where, in my imagination, the dangers come from lions and tigers. But in fact what happened to this woman’s three-year-old son—while she turned her back to reach for another potato—was that he put his right hand into the Cuisinart and in about one second all four fingers on that hand were gone. The parents were on a plane to the U.S. with him the next day. Within twenty-four hours they were talking with surgeons and physical therapists and psychologists, and the scale of their dreams for that particular beloved child had shifted from any possible images of him as a concert pianist or major league pitcher to the slim hope that maybe, a few years down the line, one of his toes might be successfully grafted onto what was left of his hand.
When I heard about this mother the first thing I said—the first thing everybody says, probably—was that I’d never again let my children pour ingredients into the Cuisinart for me, that you can’t be too careful. And it’s true, a parent must always be watching for fingers in car doors and cars backing out of parking spaces, dry-cleaning bags and thin ice and electric outlets. And it’s also true that I shouldn’t have left my son in the car.
But you can be Mother of the Year and still there’s always a moment when you blink your eyes or turn your back. Audrey, at age three, was attacked by seagulls and nearly lost an eye while I sat on my towel, twenty feet away, making sure she went in the water no farther than her knees. And as a matter of fact, you can be too careful, I believe, and if I’m sometimes, to some eyes, too casual a parent (giving birth to my children at home, for starters; letting my five-year-old carry her newborn baby brother; letting him climb stairs alone) it’s partly because I was raised, myself, so protected from dangers that I never broke a bone or chipped a tooth or sustained a single injury requiring stitches. As a result, I grew up with a different kind of invisible damage, with too much fearfulness. What I believe is, there’s no removing all danger from the world; there’s only keeping the odds down.
People we know in the city, seeing the main street of this small town where we live or making the five-mile drive beyond it, through woods and farmland, to our house, say what a wonderful place this must be to raise children. And of course, in many ways it is. Summers we swim daily in a waterfall down the road. This winter we built a snow fort covered with pine boughs, and we ski out our back door. More than one fundamentalist-survivalist religious group has settled in this particular valley of New Hampshire out of a conviction that we’re situated in such a way as to escape the worst of a nuclear blast. There are—I reassure Audrey, after watching a scary movie on TV—no bad guys around here.
So yesterday I let her, for the first time, walk off alone down our dirt road for a quarter-mile journey through what are mostly woods, to visit neighbors, just moved in, who have a daughter her age. I bundled her up warmly for the trip (hat, mittens, snow pants) and gave her a plastic bag filled with popcorn to eat along the way. I stood at the window, watching the pom-pom on her hat bob off down the driveway. Then she dropped the popcorn and kernels scattered in all directions; she bent to pick them up with her mittens still on, which made the job difficult. Then a strong gust of wind came. She gathered up what she could that the wind hadn’t blown away, set out again, dropped the bag again. She bent down a second time, picking up kernels one by one. I thought of how impatient I’d been with her, just before she left. How (with Charlie asleep, and wanting to savor the time alone) I’d complained that she was taking too long putting on her boots. The way I’d brushed her hair (not absolutely unintentionally) just rough enough that she cried out once.
I wanted, then, to run out and put my arms around her, take her hand and walk with her the rest of the way. It seemed suddenly as if the sky had darkened and there was a wolf behind every tree. Of course, what I actually did was just stand there.
Word came this morning that my friend Janet’s seventeen-year-old son was killed late Friday night—one of two passengers in a car going too fast down the wrong side of the highway. The three boys hit an old pickup truck whose occupants remain in intensive care. All three boys are dead.
I didn’t know Janet’s son, except as a skinny figure leaning out the passenger side of another friend’s truck (he never learned to drive), trying to bum a cigarette from my husband. But I knew his story from his mother. There was no way to ask Janet how she was, how things were going in her life, without getting to “How’s Sam?” And he was never fine, his life was never going well, and as long as it wasn’t, neither could hers, of course. Inescapable fact of parenthood: a person’s destiny comes to be controlled no longer simply by her own actions, but by the lives of however many satellites she has sent into orbit.
Janet’s son was known as a town bad boy. There were drugs, of course, and school suspensions. Juvenile officers were involved, and later the police. Sam’s father—divorced from Janet and living in another state—had broken off communication with his son a few years back. There had been counselors and therapists and, for Janet, a parents’ support group called Tough Love. A while back Janet had found a residential drug treatment program in another city—the kind of place a kid goes to when he has reached the end of the line. He agreed to try it, the town agreed to pay part of the enormous cost. I’d never seen Janet look so hopeful as she did in September, just after Sam had left for Odyssey House. Two days after Christmas he was home for good. Kicked out (and nobody has to get himself kicked out of a program like that—you can leave anytime) for plotting to break into the center’s office, steal the operating cash, and go on a spree.
My friend Janet is a wise, funny, loving but unsentimental woman—marvelous-looking and beautiful-spirited. She’s an artist, a lover of birds, which is how we came to meet her, a couple of Septembers back, watching for hawks on top of Pitcher Mountain. She was just nineteen when her son was born; he was five or six when she and her husband separated. I’ve heard her speak, full of regret, about not having handled carefully enough that hard time in her children’s lives. I’ve heard her voice regrets over mistakes she felt she made, things she’d do differently if she had another chance. It’s hard to find yourself living under the same roof with a person you’d have nothing to do with (I’ve heard her say) if you hadn’t happened to give birth to him.
Usually my children were around us—all over us—as we talked about this. We’d be in my living room, surrounded by the tangible chaos children the ages of mine make of their parents’ lives. Cars and blocks and Fisher-Price people flung in all directions, Audrey begging for another cookie or the chance to stay up a half hour later, and Charlie, naked, having successfully eluded my attempts to put on his pajamas, dancing his wild dervish dance to the Big Chill soundtrack, with a plastic fire chief’s hat on his head and an uncapped magic marker in his fist. They are still children of an age to be picked up and put in another place when they’re heading in the wrong direction. Children to whom one can still hold out the threat of no dessert, and for whom the lyric “You better watch out, better not pout, ’cause Santa Claus is coming to town” still carries a lot of power. My daughter (though of course she can also get very angry at me) will still sometimes say, “You’re the best mommy in the entire universe.” My son wakes in the night with my name on his lips. I try unsuccessfully to imagine my round-faced offspring being teenagers who will someday stop smiling, stop speaking to me. Go up to their rooms and close the door, blasting me out of the house with their music. And worse.
Janet was, I know, a loving mother who did everything she could to save her son, and still he didn’t make it. New Year’s Eve, the week before the crash, I saw Janet and the man who—if she were freer, and not bound up by attempts to make things okay for her children—she might happily have been living with. “Something terrible is going to happen,” she said, powerless to change anything.
If another friend’s seventeen-year-old had been killed in a crash I’d be thinking about the senseless way car accidents have of altering a seemingly cloudless horizon. With Sam’s death there is a different sort of grief—of having seen this coming as clearly as if the vehicles had been toys that were wound up and set on a track and we were all watching in slow motion. Sam’s feeling of emptiness—the inability of everyone who tried to give him excitement or hope or even interest in living—appeared bottomless. He seemed so bent on self-destruction that the shock at his death lay most strongly in the fact that he was a passenger in the car and not its driver.
Parents of older children, nodding in the direction of my small ones, shake their heads and tell me, “Wait until they’re teenagers. They’ll break your heart.” Well, I don’t feel the grip of terror. I have to believe that a person has some control over the way things turn out, and beyond that I have to trust my children. But I don’t feel even close to immune, either, to Janet’s kind of disaster, the chaos that an unhappy teenager can bring on a household. I can’t believe that I control my children’s universe and that I have the power to ensure their survival. And there is no such thing as a safe place to bring up children, no matter what the water tastes like or however much the landscape resembles a scene printed on a calendar. It’s always a perilous journey through the woods. Not only for the child, but for the mother, back at home, who stands watching through the glass.
My fears, since I’ve had children, center mostly on the chance of their being hurt. Sometimes, if Steve is driving in bad weather, I’ll stay up worrying over whether he’s safe. I tend to feel invulnerable myself. The greatest injury that could befall me would be injury suffered by someone I love. I have tormented myself with the picture of me losing my children. But never of my children losing me.
And then the space shuttle Challenger exploded.
I spent a day with Christa McAuliffe once. It was early last fall, just a month after she had been chosen America’s First Teacher in Space. Because we live in New Hampshire, just about twenty miles from the McAuliffes, and because, like her, I know a few things about what it is to have a family, with young children, that you love more than anything, and a job you love too (and a husband named Steve, even), I had been following her story with particular interest. Most of all, I watched her, I guess, because like her I live an ordinary life, filled with trips to the post office and frantic searches for lost shoes, and like her, I sometimes dream of adventure. Only my adventures, unlike hers, happen mostly in my own familiar home, with my two feet planted firmly on the ground.
So I called her up (that was still possible then, although the line was often busy). It was Christa herself who answered. She was taking off for Houston to begin astronaut training in a couple of weeks, and already her schedule was so busy that she had managed to spend a total of one hour at the pool with her children that summer, sitting at the edge of the water counting heads. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “This year I don’t even have a tan.”
Well, she was meeting one reporter at eight and another one at eight forty-five. Someone else at nine-thirty. That’s how it went, all day long, with breaks in between for her son Scott’s Little League practice and picking up her daughter Caroline at day camp. But there was a hour at seven A.M., and she said I could come then.
She met me at the door with her hair still wet, in stocking feet, and I followed her through the rooms of her house as she talked, and as she looked for Scott’s sleeping bag (he was going to a friend’s house), took the chicken out of the freezer to defrost, and started the wash. There were lots of phone calls too: NASA one minute. The cleaners, to say her husband’s shirts were ready the next.
There were piles of letters and newspaper clippings all over the house at that point; also helium balloons and flowers and signs saying things like “Reach for the Stars” and “Out of This World.” I guess some people might’ve said the place was a mess, but you could tell something else too: This woman was organized. In her pocket she had a two-page list of things to do, and there was another one taped to the dashboard of her car. She had NASA’s phone number attached to her refrigerator with alphabet magnets, right next to her kids’ drawings. In the middle of a sentence, she’d suddenly reach for her pencil and jot something down. “Black high-top sneakers for Scott.” “Get more checks.” She was no less concerned with the cake for Scott’s approaching birthday party than she was with her appearance on the Tonight Show. If the phone rang when she was in the middle of a sentence, she’d come back five minutes later and finish it. That’s a skill many mothers possess, but I have never met one who had it down the way she did.
I liked her. She was brisk, confident; she paid attention to things (remembered the ages of my children, asked me a question about the town where we live, knew the names of students she’d taught ten years ago). I remember thinking, too, how different we were. There didn’t seem to be a shred of ambivalence or hesitation in her, about changing in such a major way the life she and her family had been living until now (a life that everybody liked just fine), leaving the teaching job she loved and the family to which she was unmistakably devoted, for six months’ training in Houston—and then leaving the planet altogether, to blast into orbit.
She met her husband when they were both fifteen; they had been together twenty years, and though he had been, for most of that time, the kind of husband who doesn’t know where you keep the cleanser, he was also totally behind her when she said she wanted to go into space. They both seemed clear on that—surprised, almost, that there would be any question. What kind of love would it be, in which one partner would keep the person he loved from pursuing her dreams?
Well, our one hour was up swiftly, and there was a new batch of reporters knocking at the door, taking pictures of her cat, her car, her son’s bike. I left.
But I wanted to talk to her some more. It was that business of leaving the family that puzzled me. I have met women who work twelve hours a day and see their children mostly for breakfast and a bedtime story; I have known ambitious, driving women who want to be rich, want to be famous, want to have their picture on the cover of Time magazine, would just as soon see as little of their husbands as possible. She wasn’t one of those. I have even known a couple of husbands and fathers who are really the backbone of their family anyway: the ones whose name the children are most likely to call in the night. The ones who know who’s due for a booster shot and which grocer has the freshest chicken, and remember, when someone gets a loose tooth, to have a surprise ready for the tooth fairy. But this was a family that ran on Christa’s extraordinary energy and organization and attention to detail. How could she leave her husband and children? How would they ever manage without her?
So I called a couple of weeks later (it was just three days before she left for Houston), and asked if I could see her again. She had no more time to sit and talk; I knew that. I just wondered whether I could spend the day with her, riding around town, while she did the errands on her list for the next day. She said okay.
Here’s what we did that day: Drove to the local TV station, where Christa taped a show with a couple of ministers and a priest about the religious implications of space travel. Stopped by the grocer’s to pick up peanut butter for her daughter’s babysitter. Picked up Caroline at kindergarten and took her over to the sitter’s. (I took the wheel of her car, for those three blocks, so Christa could walk over there with Caroline, alone. I recognized the impulse of a busy mother to make use of every scrap of time she can find to be with her kids.)
After leaving Caroline, Christa gave another television interview and posed for pictures for a couple of magazines. She stopped by the cable TV company to let them know that her husband Steve wanted to get the Sports Network. She picked her son up at school, listened to him tell about his day.
After that, she was supposed to pick up Caroline and take both kids over to a friend’s house for the rest of the afternoon. But it was easy to see Scott wanted to stay with her, so he came along: to the doctor’s office to get Caroline’s immunization records for kindergarten and the grocery store to order meat for a family party Christa was giving that weekend. She told me the recipe for the casserole she was making, an Armenian dish that would serve fifty. Then we stopped for an ice cream cone. She had peppermint. Scott said in a small, proud voice that maybe they’d name the flavor after her now.
After that, I went home, to my own family, my own collection of lists and phone numbers and refrigerator magnets and errands. It had been my daughter’s first day of school too, and of course I wanted to hear all about that. Also, as it turned out, this was the day my sons had their tomato fight on our porch, so all in all it was a busy day.
Christa called me once, from Houston, to fill me in on how things were going. She loved it down there. I called Steve, her husband, and he told how, when he got the children home every night, they’d say, “Let’s see what Mr. Microwave has for us tonight.” Christa had left him with lists of neighbors to call on, phone numbers of babysitters and doctors and take-out food places. Already, he said, he had a whole new understanding of what it was she’d been doing all these years. “Wait till she gets home, though,” he joked. “I plan to slip back to my old bad habits just as far as she’ll let me.”
Well, she won’t be coming home, and I have been trying to make sense of it, or at least find something comforting to tell myself and my children when the television replays for us, for the tenth time, the one hundredth time, those terrible haunting images of that rocket lifting off, blasting higher, going to full throttle, and then exploding in midair four miles above the Atlantic Ocean. Leaving no trace of the seven crew members, including, of course, this woman NASA had placed on board specifically so that the American people would finally have someone up there we could identify with, who could make us feel (as she did) “that could be me up there.”
Other images haunt me too: Steve McAuliffe, reading her Teacher in Space application and saying, “Where is this woman? I want to marry her.” Scott McAuliffe, getting off the plane in Florida with his fourth-grade class, posing before the launch, holding his mother’s official NASA portrait, with a look that strikes me now as proud and wistful at the same time. Caroline’s room, back in Concord, filled with jelly bracelets and nail-polish bottles, just like Audrey’s. Christa and the other members of the crew, taking that last, euphoric walk toward the van that would bring them to the Challenger. I move closer to the television set every time they run that film, to study their faces. As if maybe, if I look hard enough, I’ll find some clue to the tragedy that awaited them.
Shall I, tonight, tell my children the story of Icarus, flying too close to the sun? Is the final lesson Christa McAuliffe ended up teaching that mothers are better off staying home after all? I ask myself again, “How could she have left her family?” And how will they live without her?
What I choose to remind myself, as I put on our table the dinner that neither my husband nor my daughter nor I feel much like eating, and later, as Steve and I lie side by side in the dark and I hold him tight, is that the only home worth having is the kind that makes you strong enough to venture forth. That nothing is worth much that comes without risk. (Giving someone your heart. Having a child. They all leave us open to danger, and loss.) And still, it’s for all of us to press on, not shrink back. Who can forget that final command from Mission Control moments before the sky exploded? Full throttle.