LETTERS FROM HOME: A SECRET TO MAKING MATCHBOXES FLY

Oct. 12, 2000

Dear Julie,

On some summer vacations when I was a kid, we'd visit my peripatetic grandparents in barely remembered small towns in Illinois and Indiana. Pana, Kankakee, Clinton and someplace with Green in the name. They were always moving because my grandpa managed clothing factories. That seems to have made for an itinerant life.

Chickasha, Okla., Fort Scott, Kan., Dyer, Tenn., West Virginia, St. Louis and Gainsville, Fla. were some of their other addresses. No wonder when they left Cape Girardeau for someplace else my mother, being of age and sound mind, decided to stay put.

My grandparents' two teen-age sons were still living at home when we visited. Grandma doted on both her boys, that I could tell. She even cut up David's fried eggs for him. Imagine. Larry was older, a studious trombone player. David was always in the basement hatching science experiments. All seemed to involve a homemade rocket fuel composed of a chemical I couldn't pronounce, sugar and saltpeter.

David was a member of the Sputnik generation, teen-agers fascinated by the new frontier of outer space. Like the kids in that beautiful movie "October Sky," he wanted to launch things into space, explore this new frontier himself.

His smallest projectiles were mere matchboxes filled with his propellant. When a hole was cut in one end and the fuel lit, the matchboxes sometimes could leap from the bottom of the basement stairwell up a few steps. I was in awe that my uncle could make matchboxes fly.

He says he eventually graduated to 3-foot-long rockets launched from fields and manned by ants, but I never saw these giant leaps for mankind.

Lives often seem to follow a trajectory determined by a first love. David didn't become an astronaut or a NASA scientist. But he joined the Air Force. And now he lives in Seattle, home to the aeronautical industry and the newest frontier, the microchip.

I find no coincidence in these facts.

Both Larry and David joined the Air Force. David met his wife, Marie, in the service. They had seven children. Seven children. There's a frontier.

Eventually, my grandparents stopped moving around and settled at last back in Cape Girardeau. My grandpa smoked Lucky Strikes, and eventually they took his life.

My grandma is still here hanging in there. We love to see her at family gatherings. DC, whose grandmothers both have been gone awhile, is especially fond of her, too.

For grandma's 90th birthday, we all chipped in to get her an airplane ticket to go visit David and his family in Seattle. But going on the airplane alone scared her, so David flew back here and escorted her to Seattle. When her stay was over he accompanied her back home again before returning to Seattle alone.

Larry has done as much, including moving his family here from Chicago to be near his mother.

When my two uncles were here last weekend visiting her, I realized that not all of us get to fly a rocket or a plane. But being able to show your mother how much you love her makes you the luckiest guy on earth.