Fly me to the moon...

Yesterday the world remembered "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

The date is also an important one in my personal history.

I was home following my sophomore year at Rice. My sister and I attended a summer session at Texas Tech: she, to jump start her college career since she was targeting graduation in three years rather than four; I, to take a history course for my teaching certification and to make up the math class I'd failed to pass. {Matrix algebra. At Rice it was the standard 1st semester 200-level course. At Tech it was a 400-level course taken by math majors and graduate students. A red-headed guy from my section at Rice also repeated the course at Tech. He and I got lots of negative attention for blowing the curve and we each took a 4.0 back for our transcripts. At least in summer school, the Tech course covered the part of the course I had understood; I had a good solid "B" after the first exam at Rice before it all fell apart. The Tech course never got past that point; everything I hadn't gotten the first time around was in Appendix Two which we never looked at in that summer course. The best thing I learned from my semester at Tech was that I really hadn't suddenly turned dumb. It helped me relax and start learning not for grade points but for the sheer joy of learning. But, I digress...}

Shift work at David's summer job in Houston gave him a four day weekend about once a month. So on the momentous day in history he drove clear across Texas to see me. It was his first visit to my family's farm. He was driving up the caprock between Ralls and Floydada and listening to the car radio just as the men first stepped on the moon. I had one eye on the T.V. and one eye on the road, looking for a cloud of dust that might indicate David's arrival. That night, he and I sat up late watching reruns of the moonwalk, holding hands, and talking. {There might have been a kiss or two... "fly me to the moon... in other words... hold my hand..." But, I digress...}

Which is how it came to be David, rather than my brother, asleep on the sofa bed in the living room when my mother walked in about 6:30 a.m., picked up the pair of jeans at the foot of the bed, and threw them on the sleeper,

"Get up, you lazy bones! It's past daylight; time you were in the field."

She jumped about six feet when a bass voice replied,

"Good morning, Mrs. Cummings."

On his second visit, the line from our one bathroom to the septic tank collapsed and David ended up digging about the front yard with my daddy and my brother.

And he married me anyway. Must have been true love.