I arrive on the deck. The technician walks over to me, he pops off my helmet, and the flight surgeon walks towards me. He’s actually moving his lips, but I don’t hear anything. He gets closer, and he touches my right ear with his index finger, and I can feel blood streaming down the side of my face.
At this point I realize I am completely deaf.
They take me to the showers; my head starts spinning violently, and I throw up. They rush me to the emergency room, and they put me under so they can do emergency surgery to figure out what happened. As I wake up from the anesthesia, I see the three faces of my surgeons, and they don’t look happy.
They don’t know what happened. They couldn’t find the smoking gun as to what caused me to lose my hearing. From that point on, I can still talk, but we’re communicating with yellow legal pads as they write things to me.
They write, “We couldn’t find what happened.”
But the note I really remember is, “You will never fly in space.”
As I lie in the hospital bed thinking about these things, totally depressed, a friend writes me a note, and it says, “Remember what Janette said.”
And then I think back to four days before this accident. I was in Lynchburg, Virginia, my hometown. My parents were having their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and my cousin was there with a friend of hers, Janette. Janette called herself a prophetess, and I’d never heard that term before.
But she said to me, “Leland, I don’t know you, but something’s going to happen to you. No one’s going to know why it happened. You’ll be healed of this, you will fly in space, and you will share this with the world.”
I was like, “Oh…okay. Thank you, thanks for that information.”
I was in top physical condition. I had just come back from Russia, where I’d been working with the cosmonauts and helping the first crew get to the International Space Station.
I had gone from being at the top the world, an astronaut candidate, to not being able to hear a bomb drop.
That note reminding me to remember what Janette said was the only hope I had to hold on to.
My hearing slowly comes back. NASA’s trying to figure out what to do with me, because the doctors say I’m medically disqualified. So they put me in the robotics branch, which is a pretty benign branch, because all the training you do is on a computer screen, so you can’t damage anything. After I’d been doing that job for a little while, they asked me to go to Washington, DC, to work in education, because NASA is starting the Educator Astronaut Program. We’re going to get kids to nominate their teachers to become astronauts.
Around that same time, there was excitement because the space shuttle Columbia was launching into space.
I was driving from DC to Lynchburg, Virginia, on Highway 66 when I got the phone call from my education boss, who was new to NASA, and she said, “Leland, what does it mean when the countdown clock starts counting up?”
I did an illegal U-turn on 66 and turned the radio on, and there were eyewitness accounts of large pieces of debris falling over the West Texas sky. I knew my friends were all dead.
I rushed back to NASA headquarters.
I was dispatched out to Washington, Virginia, which is about two hours outside DC, to console the parents of David Brown, who was on that mission. As astronauts we take care of our families when there’s a tragedy.
I get to the door, I go in, I hug David’s mom, Dottie, and we’re both crying. She takes me over to her husband, Judge Brown, who’s in a wheelchair. And he looks up at me with the same sparkling blue eyes that David had, and they were full of tears.
He says to me, “Leland, my son is gone. There is nothing you can do to bring him back. But the biggest tragedy would be if we don’t continue to fly in space to honor their legacy.”
I’m thinking, How can I honor their legacy if I’m medically disqualified to fly in space?
We started flying around the country to the different memorial services to honor our fallen heroes. We took the NASA jet with the families, and on every takeoff and landing there was a gentleman sitting beside me. He was the head of all the flight surgeons.
Every descent, as I squeezed my nose to clear, I saw him writing notes in a little black book.
When we got back to DC, he called me into his office, and he said, “Leland, I’ve been watching you, and even though your hearing isn’t a hundred percent in either ear, you are still able to clear your ears and handle the air pressure of flight. I think you will be able to fly in space, and I believe in you. Here’s a waiver for you to fly in space.”
I was like, “Really?!”
I took this waiver back to Houston to the flight surgeons, and it was like one of those get-out-of-jail-free cards. I handed it to them, and I got assigned to a flight soon after that.
So I was finally sitting in the space shuttle Atlantis before launch.
The solid rocket boosters light.
Three.
Two.
One.
Liftoff!
We’re now careening off the planet into the cosmos. At two and a half minutes, the boosters jettison and the ride gets much smoother. Six minutes later I’m undoing my seat belt and I’m floating in space.
I float over to the window and look out and see the Caribbean. I know maybe seven variations of the color blue—cerulean, azure, indigo, turquoise, light navy, dark navy, medium navy—but I need twenty more hues to describe what I see below me.
We arrive at the space station, and the commander invites us over to the Russian segment to have a meal.
She says, “You guys bring the rehydrated vegetables from the shuttle, we’ll have the meat.”
So we float over with a bag of vegetables. We get to the Russian segment, the Zarya, which means “sunrise” in Russian, and it’s like I’m in my mother’s home.
The smell of meat getting heated up. Their beef and barley, our green beans with almonds, all being shared with people that we used to fight against—the Russians and the Germans. As we broke bread at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour, going around the planet every ninety minutes, seeing a sunrise and a sunset every forty-five, I thought about the people I’m now trusting with my life.
African-American, Asian-American, French, German, Russian, the first female commander of the International Space Station. Floating food to each other’s mouths.
All while listening to Sade’s “Smooth Operator.”
This was the moment. This was when my brain cognitively shifted and I felt connected with everyone on the planet.
I thought about my race—the human race—as we connected and worked together.
I thought about what Janette had said: “You will fly in space, and you will share this with the world.”
I thought about David Brown’s father, and I thought about the Columbia crew.
I thought, We did something good. We did honor their legacy.
* * *
LELAND MELVIN’s perseverance and passion led him from the NFL to NASA. Before becoming an astronaut, he played professional football with the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys. Armed with a BS in chemistry and an MS in materials-science engineering, he traveled off-planet twice on the space shuttle Atlantis to help build the International Space Station. By working on such high-stakes teams, Leland developed a deep and nuanced understanding of effective team dynamics. Upon hanging up his space boots, he led NASA Education and co-chaired the White House’s Federal Coordination in STEM Education Task Force, developing the nation’s five-year STEM education plan. After twenty-four years with NASA as a researcher, an astronaut, and a senior executive service leader, he shares his life story as an athlete, an astronaut, a scientist, an engineer, a photographer, and a musician to help inspire the next generation of explorers to pursue STEM careers.
This story was told on December 14, 2017, at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas.
The theme of the evening was Leap of Faith. Director: Meg Bowles.
I was newly married and living in Alabama when my first record came out. My husband, Ernest, and I were really excited. I’d been planning on this since I was eleven.
Unfortunately, its debut coincided with the dawn of the disco era, and I was a singer/songwriter, so it was a total flop.
I had lovely reviews, but they basically said, “Too bad she didn’t put this out five years ago.”
Shortly thereafter I lost my record deal, I got dropped from my publisher, and I found out I was pregnant, all in the same week.
I was like, Great. Let’s shelve the whole singer/songwriter dream. Tried that. The world didn’t want me. Next!
I gave birth to this beautiful baby boy and threw myself into motherhood. In the absence of songwriting, all my creativity came out sideways. I started painting and baking bread, and I even started making these cool little heads out of Play-Doh.
My husband was looking at me out of the corner of his eye thinking, Surely she’ll snap out of it and start writing again.
I was like, “No, I’m having a great time!”
One night around three in the morning, he came up behind me. I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to get this Play-Doh nose just right.
I felt his hands on my shoulders, and he leaned in and said, “Honey, it’s time to start writing songs again.”
But I was like, “No, no, no, no, no.”
I was totally in denial.
But a couple of days later, we went and saw this movie called Coal Miner’s Daughter, and it was about the life of Loretta Lynn.
And there was Loretta planting vegetables with at least four of her children climbing all over her and writing a hit song at the same time.
I came out of that movie theater, and I said, I know, I am totally being a baby about this song-writing thing. So I decided to get back to it.
I started writing songs again as I had done in the past, bouncing them off my husband, Ernest, playing him stuff as I was working on it.
I’d say, “Here’s another one, honey.”
I’d play him these songs, and he’d say, “Yeah, you just keep on doing that. Just keep on, write more.”
He didn’t say anything bad or good. He was very kind.
Then one day I played him a song called “Five Minutes.” As I finished it, I looked up, and he was just beaming.
He said, “That’s it. You’re back. That’s a hit. That’s fantastic.”
I said, “Really?”
He said, “Absolutely. And by Friday you’re going to send a tape with that song on it to these three people in Nashville, Tennessee.”
I said, “Oh, no. I’m just doing this for fun.”
He goes, “Oh, yes. You’re going to do that by Friday…or I’m going to start smoking again.”
So I had no choice.
But the good news is, I got a great response, and within six months we were packing up our then five-year-old little boy and moving to Nashville, Tennessee. It was an amazing, terrifying, wonderful, roller-coaster ride of rejection and excitement and meeting people. And finally I started getting a little traction.
During those early years, I would always play my songs for Ernest before I let them leave the house because he had great suggestions. He wasn’t a songwriter, but he was kind of a song doctor.
Late at night after the kid was asleep, we’d pour a little Grand Marnier and he’d say, “What you got?,” and I’d play him what I was working on.
So one night I played him this song. It was really just a part of the song—just a verse and a chorus. It referred to our honeymoon.
It was an unusual song for me to write at that time. It was kind of from my life, but then it wasn’t, because there were a couple of other lines that were very mysterious and sad. There was one line that went:
In the hollow of your shoulder,
There’s a tidepool of my tears,
Where the waves came crashing over,
And the shoreline disappears.
And then the chorus seemed to be talking about the immediacy of life and the preciousness of time, and it said:
We hold it all for a little while, don’t we?
Kiss the dice,
Taste the rain,
Like little knives upon our tongue.
He looked at me like, Wow.
And I just thought, Okay, good, he’s liking this one.
He goes, “No, you don’t understand. This is your defining moment as a songwriter, this is you on another level.”
Now, his favorite songwriter was Bob Dylan, and he looked at me and he said, “Bob Dylan wishes he could write this.”
And I was like, “Okay, honey. That’s great. Really? Wow.”
But then for the foreseeable future, he pestered me relentlessly about finishing this song.
I’d say, “Here’s a new song, honey.”
And he’d say, “Yeah, that’s great. What’s going on with that Bob Dylan song? What’s happening with that?”
But there was so much going on in our lives at that point, and the following spring I started having some real success. Enough success, in fact, that my husband could quit his job, start up our own publishing company, and be a full-time Mr. Mom.
I was just getting ready to put out a record with Warner Brothers and going on tour. Willie Nelson had just hit number one with a song I wrote. And that song, “Five Minutes,” had just gone to number one for Lorrie Morgan. It was crazy, and the phone was ringing, and I’d wake up every morning and couldn’t believe this was all happening.
And right in the middle of that, out of nowhere, Ernest was diagnosed with a very rare form of lymphoma. When we found out about it, unfortunately, it was pretty deeply advanced.
The doctor basically said, “You probably have about six weeks, and you need to just go have some fun and skip the chemo and get your affairs in order.”
I remember us driving home bewildered thinking, This is definitely a bad dream. Thank goodness our son was at a friend’s house, so we climbed into bed, and we took turns holding each other and sobbing for I don’t know how many hours.
Somewhere in the late afternoon, I bolted up and I said, “What day is today?”
And I realized that that evening, like an hour from then, I was meant to be singing at a huge black-tie event for Warner Brothers Records.
To make it worse, I was supposed to be singing a song I had written for my husband when we first met, the story of how we met, and it was a song called “All I Have.”
I said, “Ernest, I have to call and cancel. I can’t do it, there’s no way. I mean, look at me. I’m a mess.”
And he said, “Listen, the only reason that you’d cancel now would be for something like ‘My husband has cancer.’ And I’m not ready for us to tell the world that. Why don’t we just get dressed and go? Let’s walk into a world where I don’t have cancer and hang out for a couple hours, and we’ll come back here and we’ll deal with all this later.”
Somehow he talked me into it. I remember being in a surreal, altered state. It was an amazing evening, and I did pretty well, except halfway through the song I was looking down and he was beaming up at me in his beautiful tuxedo. He looked so healthy, and all of a sudden I thought, Whoa, and I remembered what we were going through.
I don’t know what words came out of my mouth. There was a completely new second verse written in some language from another planet, and then, thank God, I got back on board at the chorus. But in the end it was good that we went, because what else were we going to do? We were in shock.
The next morning, though, we were reading the newspaper and there was an article about the event. It mentioned that there had been somebody in attendance who had left the event and suddenly died of a coronary.
That was incredibly impactful to Ernest.
And that’s what he did. And instead of six weeks, we had eighteen months together.
It was an incredible period of time. There were friends, and love, and support, and terrible days of surgeries and chemo, and all the best, and all the worst, and an incredible constant of the present moment that we could appreciate on a level we would’ve never been able to before.
It was amazing and wondrous, but mostly—it sucked.
And the day came when the outcome was obvious—we weren’t going to be able to turn it around.
And so Ernest went from using all his energy to fight to live, and he shifted in the most beautiful, graceful way into “How do I learn to die?”
We came to the point where we were having those conversations, and he said, “Look, I want you to take my ashes to the Gulf of Mexico,” in the spot where we went fishing on our honeymoon, “and I want you to know that when you walk out to any body of water on earth, you’ll feel me there with you.”
We finished talking about some other practical stuff, and then he said, “Now, there’s just this one more thing, and this is really important.”
And I’m like, “What?”
“Well, it’s that matter of the Dylan song. What’s going on with that song? Did you finish it?”
I said, “Are you kidding me? I can’t believe you’re asking me to do that.”
(I had a bit of a fit.)
He said, “You know, I don’t have that much time, so maybe you want to work on it this afternoon?”
He was relentless about this song.
The Moth Presents Occasional Magic Page 17
