I am a rocketship. Not a whole rocketship, technically, but a critical component of one. I am one of those enormous solid rocket boosters that provide the main liftoff thrust needed for the space shuttle to escape the earth’s gravitational pull.
After propelling the space shuttle off the launch pad and assisting in guiding the vehicle during the initial ascent up to an altitude of around 24 nautical miles, SRBs (using acronyms is a dandy way to sound as if you know what you’re talking about) burn out and separate from the orbiter. Their job is over in about two minutes. They then descend back to earth on parachutes, falling into the ocean while the space shuttle continues on to greater heights and wider exploration.
I am that SRB.
A month or so ago, I wouldn’t have thought of myself in such space aeronautical terms, but there came a moment recently when I re-thought what it means to be a father. Fatherhood, I realized, should be renamed “fathership.”
The realization came on a Saturday afternoon when in my earpiece I was surprised to hear ground control initiate the countdown to separation.
My 12-year-old son asked if he could invite a pair of friends out to see a movie and if I would take them. I readily agreed. It was actually a flick I thought I wouldn’t mind seeing myself. On a few previous occasions I had taken my son and a friend to the theater and had allowed them to sit together down front while I sat in back. I was cool with that. After all, I’m a cool dad and understand guys needing their space.
As it turned out, my son’s friends couldn’t make it, but I suggested he and I go anyway. It’d still be fun, I said. Perhaps he was a bit forlorn when he agreed, but I paid it little mind.
Around the midpoint of a short drive that strangely involved minimal conversation, my son suddenly broke out with what had obviously been bothering him since we left the house.
“We don’t have to sit together, do we?” he asked.
I was stunned speechless for a moment.
“Um,” I said, “it is just the two of us. I kinda thought we would.”
There must have been a look of utter bewilderment on my face because my son moved quickly to soothe any perceived insult he may have delivered.
“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” he said.
“No, of course not,” I said.
“I just . . .” he struggled to explain. “Well, remember when you were 12? Did you want to sit with your father?”
It was an easy question. The answer was a resounding “no.” Absolutely not. Not at anytime, anywhere. Not in public anyway. It would have been completely mortifying. I still recall recoiling with horror as I sat at a showing of “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan” and saw my father begin to sob aloud as Spock died from radiation exposure. And I was 17. I couldn’t slump deep enough into my seat.
“Well, no,” I told my son as we pulled into the theater parking lot, “I wouldn’t have wanted to sit with my father. But here’s the difference. I had cause. You don’t. My dad was a nut. Come on, I’m cool.”
“Dad,” he groaned.
Clearly, the mere act of proclaiming yourself cool denotes how uncool you actually are.
Nonetheless, I wanted to press my case. I wanted to remind him that I had taken him to his first movie, “A Bug’s Life,” when he was just two and without qualms agreed to leave halfway through when he became too terrified to remove his face from my armpit (I still don’t know how that movie ends). I wanted to remind him that I had endured animated after animated movie with him sitting on my lap as my legs gradually went numb. I’ve sat through every Disney movie released in the past decade and can sing many of the songs. And now, now, when he was finally of an age to want to see a movie with live, adult actors that I, too, might enjoy watching he wanted me to sit apart?
Where, I wanted to ask, is the righteousness in that?
But I didn’t. Instead, I heard ground control in my earpiece, “Prepare for separation in T minus 10 seconds.”
This is how it is supposed to be, I thought. A child’s burgeoning independence requires eventually disengaging from the rocket boosters. There comes a time when the orbiter no longer needs the extra thrust and the booster becomes dead weight. Separation is necessary.
I take heart, however. After all, SRBs are not abandoned after doing their jobs. They are recovered from the cold waters of the Atlantic and when the space shuttle returns to earth it is reunited with its booster.
It ended up the movie was sold out, and my son and I agreed to just go to a bookstore. Once inside, he went to one section and I went to another.
7, 6, 5 . . .
