The most important professionals in our midst

I remember the exact day when my teachers underwent a magical transformation. Christmas 1968, most of my family was dozing in the wee hours as we sped along a lonely Texas highway to a distant holiday rendezvous. My tiny body was easily stretched out on the rear console of a Ford sedan, gazing through an old-fashioned slanted rear windshield at a crystal clear night scape poured thick with winter stars. In a moment of pure synchronicity my father tuned into a recently arrived static filled season's greetings sent a quarter million miles on the gossamer wings of invisible light. At the tender age of six years old it would forever alter the trajectory of my entire life:

NASA Archive -- "We are now approaching lunar sunrise ... For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you". ... In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth ..."

The skeptic in me today might wince at the religious reference. But at age six I could have cared less. I was utterly captivated by mankind's first message from another world and quickly asked my father about the nature of those points of light burning cold in the night, "What are stars, how far away are they?" As an engineer, he was well equipped by temperament and education to explain to me quietly, patiently, using analogies of distance a child could understand. And as he spoke the spell was cast: It hit me.

Through some combination of childhood imagination and a neurotransmitter cocktail, I was whisked effortlessly right through the windshield, thrown clear off the planet, reeling, head over heels into the heavens. For long timeless minutes the universe consumed me whole, like Jonah swallowed by a cosmic whale, and terror soon turned into ineffable glory. When I suddenly found myself back in that long gone Ford, I was changed forever. One sip of cosmic infinity was all it took, I was hooked, a newly minted wonder junkie. And like any other junkie all I could think about when that transcendental trip ended was ... I want some more.

I didn't know it on that obscure night in that lonely place, but teachers would never seem the same to me.

Follow me below the fold to find out why.