Be All That You Can Be--Believe

Aspera ad astra - "through hardship to the stars"

Be All That You Can Be - -BELIEVE!

I can still recall the rough feel of those hexagonal pieces of stone. We had lugged them from some place on the block where the city was replacing old sidewalk pavers. The “we” was Nora Jane and me. In true Southern fashion my neighbor and fastest friend had two names (as in Peggy Sue, and Betty Ann.) If you must have a buddy at age six, find one with two names—experience has taught me that they are more dependable.

This particular summer Nora Jane and I had become inseparable. We stayed together from the time we got up until dark beat us down and drove us to our beds. And when one of us was sick, we jumped that hurdle by sitting on the telephone for hours. She lived upstairs in our four-unit apartment house and I was on the other side, downstairs. We couldn’t have been farther apart than about forty feet and we telephoned! And what was so important that caused us to keep in constant contact? – Flash Gordon. Not the new Flash Gordon with CGI and super special effects, but the Flash of the Fifties, Buster Crabbe. Flash was pursued by Ming the Merciless, the malevolent menace of the universe.

We were girls—in the fifties—and we were addicted to a sci-fi cowboy. Flash was a good guy who consistently saved the world and trounced evil. And he had one very important thing that we wanted for our very own—a spaceship.

So we undertook to remedy that by building a spaceship. Perhaps “building” is a misleading word because the actual construction of this rocket consisted of merely arranging those hexagonal paver stones in a rectangle. I guess you would call us the first cosmic interior design girls. At any rate, the rectangle was our ship. Inside were two other stones, our seats, and a stick. This particular stick had to be magic because it was the entire start-up, maneuvering and landing system. NASA could have taken lessons from our simplicity. Design experts the world over probably would have been jealous of our ingenuity.

However, the single most important aspect of our two-dimensional conveyance was “BELIEF.” We actually believed to the core of our very beings that we could fly. We would simply sit on the stone, pull “the stick” and launch ourselves into the stratosphere.

I can still recall summer evenings when night had fallen, sitting and gazing at our target—that silvery orb. How long would it take to get there? What would we find on the moon? How would Flash handle this? And then we would go in and get tucked into bed.

We finally plotted a clandestine take-off. We would get up at 2:00 in the morning, hop in our spaceship and leave. The 2 AM time frame would remove the maudlin and inconvenient scenario of clingy mothers begging us not to leave. A mission “under cover of darkness” would allow us to leave unnoticed as we sought our destiny among the stars.

Did we ever launch? No, Nora Jane and I slept through the appointed night, and in the following days my idea of producing a pirate play spread to the whole neighborhood and took all our time.

I can’t even remember when or how the ship was dismantled. I only remember sitting there and believing that we would make it. That feeling of a mix of exhilaration and confidence is what I call on when I need a boost, if you’ll excuse the pun.

The pluckiness of two little girls flashes in my mind’s eye and I recall what it is to BELIEVE in yourself and all that you can be.