Going Supersonic In Life

In which Teófilo recounts how his newfound and reciprocated love reoriented and sped up his life and ultimately, their lives together.

When then USAF Captain Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier flying the Bell X-1, he opened up a whole new world of possibilities for aviation. After his record-setting flight, anyone could go faster than ever, engineering and relativity being the only obstacles. When my Mercie and I became a couple something similar happened to us. We saw no limits on what we could do or become together - engineering and relativity notwithstanding.

Fig 1. Bell X-1 (Source)

Nevertheless, we still have to work through our starry-eyed discovery of our love and begin forging its practicalities.

To Alabama and Back

My science teacher, Margarita Rodríguez de Torres and I, departed to Huntsville, Alabama on April 14th, 1981. It was her first trip to the US mainland and my second since New York in 1972. After landing, we boarded a chartered bus en route to our hotel, I don’t recall what it was. I may have had a roommate, but I don't remember either. It was during the bus trip to the hotel when I heard the guys sitting behind me tell this joke:

When does a monkey fall from a tree?
When it’s dead!

I went into stitches. I think the joke defined my sense of humor for years to come.

My teacher saw me laughing and asked me what was so funny. I translated the joke to her. She didn’t find it funny. I guess one had to be a Gen-Xer in 10th grade to appreciate the nuances.

At dinner that day it was the first time I had cold tea as a drink. I hated it. It tasted to me as a water infused with a plantain leaf. Decades later I would have my first - and thus far, only - mojito with such a leaf wrapping around the inside of the glass. That wasn’t half-bad.

The next day (Wednesday) was the day we presented our papers in the symposium. It was my first oral delivery of a paper in (very accented) English. I got nuanced applause. My advisor then took me to the side and explained to me why a mass spectrograph could not be taken into the Shuttle. First, the dang thing was very heavy and, second, one needed a “piece” of the Sun to put inside of it. Well, the mass spectrograph was a last-minute idea and I could dispense with it. Ironically, there’s a spacecraft today doing exactly that: getting pieces of the sun and breaking them down into components for analysis. It’s called the Parker Solar Probe. Maybe I was ahead of my time, that’s all.

We had lunch at the Center’s cafeteria. It was the first time I ever had “fried cauliflower” in my life. It tasted like chicken to me. Or maybe fish.

We also had group pictures taken on that day - see below:

Fig 2. Southeast Region, Space Shuttle Student Involvement Project semifinalists at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, April 15th, 1981.

That night after dinner they took us to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, a huge aerospace museum in Huntsville. The site later became the setting for the 1986 movie, SpaceCamp. We had the place just for ourselves. It was great!

We returned on Holy Thursday of that week and Good Friday I was back in my parish church, attending Good Friday’s services.

Meshing

Of course, I called Mercie as soon as I returned from the trip. I was worried because the sudden travel added a hiatus to our budding relationship I feared. Time alone without nurturing the little plant that had sprouted may have led to her changing her mind. I was comforted she hadn’t.

Nor did I want to establish a precedent in which distance and travel would become a fact of our lives. Did I ever…

Now came the arduous work of meshing our lives and thinking about a future together. It meant meeting her father. It meant getting along with Doña Elba. It meant getting along with Mercie’s sister, Vanny. It meant getting Mom and others used to the idea they were no longer first priorities in my life. It was to be a time of heavy lifting, lightened by the fact we were so in love.

It was a similar question to the one aerospace engineers faced after Yeager broke the sound barrier: what do we do now and how do we do it? We had no handbook for adulting so we had to write our own, ourselves. We would make mistakes, but we were determined to succeed in the end.

Fig. 3 - Earliest picture of my Mercie and I, taken either in mid to late 1981 or early 1982. Her beauty, intellect, and inner strength have overwhelmed me ever since. She’s God’s main, underserved gift to me. I’m privileged.

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