Visions
By: Kelly McDonald I have a photo on my bookshelf of a much younger me with John Glenn, the astronaut, who I met at a conference when he was the guest speaker. It was a chance encounter, and I didn’t know he would be there; I stood in line for a photograph with him, few words spoken, nothing about his fame, simply a greeting. When I was 9, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. On the day of his launch, I feigned illness so my mother would let me stay home from school. I watched his space capsule launch, Friendship 7, on our old black-and-white television. I sat in my own spacecraft, peering out at the TV screen through the porthole in the capsule I had made from a cardboard box. After launch, Glenn circled the earth three times, then came home to the spotlight. I continued to watch and listen at my young age as he and later astronauts captured the vision of the nation. As I listened to Glenn’s launch-team dialogue during his mission, I discovered there were machines ...
