Dream: My Dad's Apollo Flight

[jeriendhal]

Very strange, intense dream this morning that woke me up about a half hour ago. I was dreaming about a memory, if that makes any sense, of my Dad being part of a Space Cowboys style Apollo mission to the moon, using refurbished Apollo era equipment to fix something there He did this just a couple of years before he died, and if you had asked me immediately after I woke up, I could have described going down to Florida to watch the launch with my mom, watching the flight on the news, and our worry as they landed and only had intermittent communications with Earth.

This plainly ridiculous for a number of reasons. Never mind the idea of NASA actually having enough restorable Apollo equipment or the institutional memory to put it back together and pull off such a mission. My Dad, at the time I thought the flight was, would be older than John Glenn and suffering from emphysema after smoking for sixty+ years. Hardly astronaut material. Nevertheless, I was on the verge of Googling "Apollo 18" to convince myself it had happened when I first woke up. Because there was so much stuff my dad had done in his life that he hadn't told me about until he was close to dying*, that flying to the Moon and then not bothering to talk much about it would have been entirely in character with him.


*I had know, vaguely, that he had been in the OSS during WWII, and done one or two semi-impressive investigations with the FCC after the war, but until close to the end he'd never mentioned he flew on a blimp up and down the California coast looking for illegal radio transmitters. Or for that matter, most of his romance with my mom, which was sweet all of itself.

Comments

[aynne-witch.livejournal.com]

I've occasionally had dreams that 'seem' to be a life memory - they can be very disorienting (ie whoa - headspin - wtf).

I'm glad your Dad decided to share some of his life memories with you, it can be a precious gift - a totally mind blowing surprise (ask Kory) or another WTF kind of moment.

Try writing down what you do remember and working a story around it - that sounds like a great beginning.

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you had time to learn from your Dad about the things he had done that were so impressive. Flying an Apollo mission would have been tops, but being in the OSS certainly rivals it!

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Well, he was a radio man, so it wasn't like he was going on commando raids or anything. Mostly he sat in a hotel room in Sicily and listened for radio transmissions coming from observers that were hiding out on Crete.

Which turned out to be a good thing in the end. If he'd stayed with the unit he'd trained with, instead of being transferred to the OSS like her was, he would have been on a troop transport that got torpedoed in the English Channel by a German U-Boat in December of 1944.