And that was that. Guion had made it into the Space Program. Of course there was the matter of his dissertation. He and Linda were to move out to Houston in June. He had just been starting the dissertation in January, thinking to have a whole year to work on it. He now had to complete it in six months, plus he had this job he had to keep. It was a mess of a situation. He mentioned that Sally Ride and (another woman whose name I cannot remember) were in the same situation. That they had to finish their graduate work in a hurry before coming to Houston. He spoke further about their individual situations. I just sat there in awe of the fact that he and Sally Ride were contemporaries. The first black person to go up in space talking about the first woman to go up in space, their initial point of connection being that they both didn't have their dissertations ready ahead of time. It blew my already blown mind.

So, at some point Guy talked to somebody at the Air Force higher than him and told him that the job (it was, of course an Air Force job) plus dissertation was not working and the person told him to put somebody else in charge of running the (whatever it was Guion had previously been running), to work on his dissertation full time and that they could all just pretend (for the sake of pay-roll stuff and miscellaneous paper work) that he was still doing the job. He put his dissertation on his advisor's desk the Sunday before he flew off and then he and Linda were gone to Texas.

It was not a very military environment that they entered into, for which Guion was much relieved. Not all the astronauts were military, of course—maybe half, maybe less, even. He spoke of the atmosphere of awe there was around the people who had walked on the moon. He made bowing gestures and foot-kissing gestures, demonstrating the way it felt to see one of these heroes, these gods, who were, of course, just ordinary guys, he said. He went up into space four times. Four separate missions. Eventually it became routine, even tiresome. He began to feel that he was ready to move on. Also, one of the up and coming astronauts was assigned to the same office as he and was treating him with the same awe and (more bowing and foot-kissing gestures) that he and his comrades had treated the moon walkers when he was new in the program. That clinched the fact that it was time to leave.

The whole time, he said, the Air Force had been trying to get their paws on him. "So, you've just flown in space. Now, wanna come back and fly our plane?" He was like, no, sir. He kept putting them off and putting them off, signing up for another mission and telling them to call back in six months or in a year. At the end of it all, he couldn't believe that he'd been in the Air Force for twenty nine years. The NASA period was a plainclothes (no hats), so maybe that was a little like cheating, but still. Twenty nine years. And in the beginning he had imagined he would only be in the military for four years. As a way to avoid further military entanglement.

I was captivated by this accounting. Guion is a very animated story-teller. His narrative was full of hand and facial gesture. He weaved pictures for me, suspended over the dinner table and I was a little child held in thrall.

I was inspired by it all. Especially when he said that Eugene was good at languages (apparently he could pick them up like that, and he was hired by the army to learn covert languages and do all sorts of classified things with them) and that he (Guy) was good at math and that my father was probably the smartest of the three of them—Daddy was good at everything. I secretly thought to myself, "I'm like that." That was a very uplifting thought. I don't usually think so highly of myself like that.

Also, I was inspired by the fact that Guion had had such great difficulty with school. He hated to read and he was really distracted and uncentered, unfocused in college, and yet he did amazing things. When he was doing his graduate work, he said that he finally figured out how to do it. That when he was a freshman, he'd go to the classes and take notes and do homework if there was homework to do, but otherwise, he wouldn't study until right before the exams. While he was in graduate school, he'd go to the class and take notes and study after the class and do his homework and study before bed and before he went to the class in the morning and he did brilliantly. He felt like he had found the key! Listening, I felt like I had found the key. I could go to medical school if I want to. Really I could. I can do anything I want with this well-rounded brain of mine! I was so inspired!