Riding Rockets

I wanted to be so normal that when somebody looked up that word in the dictionary, they would see my picture. So I lied.

But how did a psych measure mental stability? Would he be watching my body language? Would a twitch of my eye, a pulsating neck vein, or a bead of sweat mean something? Something bad? In desperation I searched my memory for what The Right Stuff had revealed about the Mercury 7 astronaut psych evaluations. All I could recall was that they had been given a completely blank piece of paper to “interpret” and that one astronaut had answered, “It’s upside down.”

I was born a week after the end of World War II, September 10, 1945, in Wichita Falls, Texas. “He looks like a monkey” was my grandfather’