Where No Woman Has Gone Before. . .

I dig Space. I always have. As a grade school student, I would take my transistor radio to the bus stop so I could listen to Mercury capsule launches. I wrote letters to Mission Control and got pictures of the original Mercury astronauts. I was nuts for astronauts.

Why did this ancient history come to mind now? In today’s I.N.K. blog, Tanya Lee Stone writes about her upcoming book, Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream. Unlike me, these women pushed for their dream of going to space even though it was never fulfilled. I abandoned mine after I realized even leaving the earth on carnival rides made me queasy.

But I never lost my admiration of astronauts. In high school, I used the assignment in Speech class to write about a career to discuss astronauts. Of course, I had a wealth of information and was no stranger to the library to gather more. My grade: C. My teacher Ms. Streusel (really, that was her name) said being an astronaut was not a career. NOT A CAREER?! I felt like Ralphie in A Christmas Story. We both had C’s, our dreams dashed, and our teachers were nuts.

While Ralphie eventually found out that the gun he wanted for Christmas could actually shoot his eye out, my admiration for astronauts has remained as men and women make a living (definition of a career, right?) as astronauts. But the real modern day message to me after seeing Ms. Stone’s book was that as children’s authors, we really have a duty to give children information to pursue their dreams. There may not be a parent, teacher, or older sibling who has the time or ability to support that child’s dream. But if a child can read a book and know her goal is possible, we’ve given someone hope and perhaps made the impossible seem possible.