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The crowd of wild-eyed, mesmerized little boys chanted in unison, "Six!  Five!  Four!"  I felt my heart pounding as though it would leap from my chest.  "Three!  Two!  One!  Ignition!"  My finger pressed the button, and an electrical current traveled through two small wires.  "Liftoff!" Swish!  The slender tube streaked skyward with a cloud of smoke.

I remembered my brother, Louis, who had introduced me to these flying marvels that continue to hold my interest even 51 years after graduating from high school.  I said a silent prayer.

Fifty-one years ago, had it been that long?  It seemed only yesterday that I dove into the intricacies of designing, building and flying rockets.  I even tracked them and used my newly learned trigonometry to determine how high they went.  Mr. London, my high school physics teacher talked me into entering the district's first-ever interscholastic rocketry meet my senior year.  I entered five events, four for which I was to receive first-place ribbons: spot landing, egg loft, high altitude, and glider.  I had a lot of memories in those rockets when I went off to college.

I wanted to be an astronaut.  Living close to the nation’s NASA Manned Space Center will do that to you.  Bitten by the bug to see the earth from space and to float weightless in the black vacuum I had only read about, I dreamed I could feel myself pressed back in the capsule seat as he swished off into imaginary orbit with every flight.  What a rush!

Once I had moved out of the house and into the dormitory at college, my mother boxed up and stored my rockets in the garage.  One weekend visit home, my mother roused me from my near vegetative state in front of the television.

"George, George, George!" she exclaimed.

"What!" I answered back.

She pointed to the yard and continued to exclaim, "Your, your, rockets!  The, the, the boys!"

I caught a glimpse of her concern, as I followed her finger out the window.  I saw little balsa wood fins popping off the rockets which two little boys twirled.  A little boy I didn't recognize had joined the eight-year-old neighbor boy, Jason, in a jig of destruction.  I felt this overwhelming sense of indignation swell up inside of me as I saw the empty storage box lying nearby.

I darted outside not really mad, just kind of mindless.  The little neighbor boy, Jason, bolted away like a scared rabbit as he saw me approach.  But, the other little boy just continued twirling Big Bertha, a rocket I had so painstakingly birthed and proudly flew.  (Several years before Big Bertha, a multi-blue-ribbon-winner by the way, carried an egg aloft and brought it safely back without cracks three times in a row for one blue ribbon and it also succeeded in landing within six feet of a flag posted some 300 feet downrange to win another blue ribbon.)

I could hardly contain myself.  I sprinted through the den, out the door, and over the patio fence, like an untamed stallion, racing toward this little boy.  All the while I could hear my mother in the background saying, "Don't hurt them please don't hurt them!"

Another fin popped off as I arrived out of breath.   Then, I stopped abruptly, bridled short as a master bridles his horse.  Suddenly and unexplainably, I saw myself as that little boy.  Three feet from him I dropped to one knee, and with a shaky voice, I asked, "Hey, buddy, what're you doing?"

The wild-eyed, smiling face of a mesmerized little boy looked at me.  Still spinning my prized Bertha rocket at speeds that would destroy even the space shuttle, he said, "I'm, I'm flyyyinggg!"

I mustered up control from somewhere, slowed the little boy down to warp speed, gently took the rocket from his careless fingers, and asked him, "Don't you know that this thing can really fly?"

I didn't think eyes could get any wider than when I asked if he wanted me to help him fly it.

"OH, WOW!" he exclaimed, "SURE!"

Off we went to fly the rocket.

About ten years passed.  My dream of becoming an astronaut faded away when a naval flight surgeon discovered a heart murmur fluttering in my chest.  The last step prior to enlisting in the Naval Aviation Reserve Officer Candidate (NAVROC) program, the flight surgeon pulled down his stethoscope and said, "The Navy won't take you.  You might as well just accept that and move on."  So, instead, I completed college and entered the ranks of oil tycoons.

Living a thousand miles away in Florida then, I once again came home to visit the folks.  I happened to go outside just to daydream a little.  As I stood by the side of the house, a young man obviously of high school age, but nobody I recognized, walked up to me.

Tentatively, he said, "Hi.  I don't know if you remember me or not.  But, when I was eight years old, I was in your yard playing with rockets.  You took me to fly one of them."  I had only a vague recollection of the incident.  "Anyway," the little boy said, "I have been interested in rockets ever since.  In fact, I studied everything I could learn about them.  I'm about to graduate from high school, and, making pretty good grades, I got an appointment to the Naval Academy at Annapolis.  You see, I am going to be an astronaut.  Well, I just wanted to come by to thank you for getting me started."

The young man turned and walked away, never having told me his name.  But, that didn't seem to matter to me.  Because I realized that I had just received a blessing I would remember for the rest of my life, a firsthand confirmation of the influence I had on a person.  I just walked away in a daze whispering a thank-you prayer that I hadn't backhanded the little kid for destroying his rockets.

Today, as I think back and re-tell this story, I add to it the knowledge that I would not have had the pleasure of this experience if my own brother had not introduced me to rockets.  My dream of flying into space lives on in that little boy’s memory and in his life.

The little boys scampered, almost uncontrollably; chasing after the rocket that had just streaked into the sky.  "I see it," one said.  "I'm going to try to catch it," said another.

I looked heavenward.  Tears streaked down my cheek as I said a silent prayer, "Louis, I love you and miss you and I know you're on your knee before Jesus' cross.  Thank you for sharing your rockets with me.  I have always been interested in them since then.  I thought you might like to keep your eye out for an astronaut circling the Earth now and then, and ask the Lord to watch over him.  He enjoyed the rockets you showed me so much that he decided to ride one personally."

I am the sole author of this work which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.