Chapter 3

High school came and went way too fast. I dated a lot, got to third base quite frequently, and was considered a catch by the girls in high school. However, my thoughts of romance and love were all centered around Ruth.

I kept in touch with Ruth by phone twice a month, and either she called me, or I called her dorm room at MIT, where she was in a graduate program. Unfortunately, long-distance romances rarely succeed, so the two phone calls a month dropped to once a month and ended during the Christmas holidays of my senior year of high school when Ruth told me she was engaged. I was devastated but convinced my family I had a sinus infection to hide my moodiness.

Dianna and Joe must have gotten pregnant on their honeymoon because little Julie arrived kicking and screaming nine months after they married.

After high school graduation and after my eighteenth birthday, I hooked up with the girlfriend of one of my friends and lost my virginity. That was a bad memory I will not write about.

I was off to college at Stanford, my first and only choice. I stopped growing that summer and topped out at 6 foot 3 inches, one hundred ninety-five pounds, and I considered myself a hunk. Yeah, right, I was a hunky geek.

When I started my first year in Palo Alto, California, I carried a notebook everywhere, and I wrote down every thought I had related to space, rockets, and terraforming. I spent many hours thinking about space travel, finding ways to increase spacecraft speeds, and writing rebuttals in my head to address those who proposed going directly to Mars instead of creating an Earth base on the moon. My notebook overflowed with my thoughts.

At the end of that year at Stanford, I received an endowment from Cisco for solving a situation they were experiencing with their newest generation switches. They published a detailed description of the problem in various science magazines as a contest, hoping someone could solve it so their rollout wouldn’t be delayed. I figured it out in a week. It was a simple fix but came from a direction never considered before. I received almost enough to cover my tuition at Stanford for my last three years. They even offered me a job after graduation.

My sophomore year flew by, and I was on schedule toward receiving my degrees in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, with minors in Computer Science and Space Physics, all in four years. I carried a heavy course load my first two years and spent all my spare time studying, leaving no extra time for dating or sex.

Mid-summer between my Sophomore and Junior year, Dixie married a GQ-type guy; he looked like a male model in a magazine. Bradley Livingston was his name, and he worked part-time for his father’s company in Spartanburg that makes and sells medical instruments to hospitals. His dad handles the manufacturing end of the business, and his mother handles sales. His family was quite wealthy, so even though Dixie and Brad were only rising sophomores at Clemson, his parents rented them a house near the school.

Dianna came to the wedding and brought four-year-old Julie and her new baby Rose. I picked up Julie, and while she was looking for food in my mouth and up my nose, I made small talk with D and found out Joe was on a carrier in the Indian Ocean flying a Hornet.

“D, why are Dixie and Brad getting married after one year of college?”

“She’s pregnant.”

“Oh my.”

Dixie had plenty of boys she knew in high school and college to cover all the groomsmen in her wedding, so I went as a guest and brought a date. Her name was Leslie Cox, and besides being a total babe, she was a great dancer. She was a year behind me in high school and had just finished her first year at the University of South Carolina. So we danced a lot, drank a few flutes of champagne, and Leslie asked me to stay when I took her home. Her mother had gone with her father on a business trip to Japan, and they would be gone eight days, so we had the house to ourselves.