I can’t find a link to this one, so I’m throwing in a bonus pic. This ran on June 19th, if I’m remembering correctly.
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Many years ago, I sat in a corner booth at Red Lobster and watched my husband and young sons re-enact the French Invasion of Russia using salt and pepper shakers, cutlery, and the crab legs. They spent a solid hour trying to demonstrate how the Russians outwitted Napoleon.
The crab legs took a pasting that night, as did the pepper shaker and the Grande Armée.
The first date for Dad, Interrupted and me was a Star Trek convention. Our oldest son’s first bib was a Captain Picard knock-off, so we could laugh uproariously when Sam did, in fact, make it so (messy).
Even the Daughters, Interrupted, who only speak phonetic Syfy Channel, don’t openly mock my Star Wars sun shade that makes my Honda look like Luke, Han, Chewie and Obi-Wan have piloted the Millennium Falcon into my driveway.
I think we’ve established the nerd cred at our house, which is why I’m astounded that not one member of my family is impressed with my one huge celebrity connection:
On February 18th, 1980, I met Clyde W. Tombaugh.
I expect that, amid your collected gasps of surprise and awe, there’s at least one person in the Ahwatukee Foothills village who has dropped their newspaper right into their pancake syrup and yelled, “NO WAY! The witty yet obviously sheltered humor columnist from the intellectually stimulating and provocative Ahwatukee Foothills News met the guy who discovered Pluto?”
And I’m guessing that there’s at least another member of the Mountain Park intelligentsia who is fishing the ‘Tukee Talk out of their Frosted Flakes and yelled, “NO WAY! The insightful and incisive columnist for the leading news outlet in the southeast Valley met the guy who found Pluto on the fiftieth anniversary of the planet’s discovery?”
Thank you for asking, I most certainly did.
How, you ask? How did I manage to meet only the third recorded human being to discover a planet within our solar system?
“NO WAY!” you’re yelling. “It’s a DWARF planet! Neil DeGrasse Tyson said so!”
Sugar, when I was your age, Pluto was a planet. A real planet. (And while we’re at it: maybe cut down on the caffeine. And maybe the sugar, too.)
It was nothing, really. I was a first-year journalism student assigned with the rest of my class to cover the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of Pluto. It afforded me the opportunity to shake hands with the man who delivered one of Percival Lowell’s dreams to science by sitting for hours in the freezing northern Arizona winter taking pictures of the night sky and then tracking tiny dots on huge photographic plates.
Fittingly, there’s only place on the planet where anyone really cares that I met Clyde Tombaugh, and I visited it last weekend. At Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory they’re celebrating the Year of Pluto and gearing up for a hoedown when the New Horizons probe flies by it next month.
So if you’re the reader who knows whether the Muscovites were clever or lucky; if you know who William Herschel and John Couch Adams are; if you’re the person who Googled where to find a neat Star Wars sun shade; and especially if you yelled “DWARF PLANET” just now…
…come on over. We’re firing up Pluto Palooza. We’ll save you a seat.
© E. Stocking Evans 2015
Mom, Interrupted 