I wasn’t coughing, fortunately, but I felt feverish and achy, so I decided to rest for a day—which, frankly, I was planning on doing anyway so I could tour the nearby Kennedy Space Center. I ate breakfast at the restaurant next door, then walked a block to a drugstore, where I purchased some cold-relief capsules. Then I took a cab to the space center on Merritt Island. My father was fascinated by space travel. I’ll always remember the look on his face as he told me about watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969, repeating Neil Armstrong’s words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” My father told me that Armstrong had not only prepared the speech himself after landing on the moon but had unintentionally dropped the word a before man, which technically changed the quote’s meaning. When I was twelve my father took me to see an actual moon rock at the California Science Center, and for the next week I drank nothing but orange-flavored Tang, the drink of astronauts.
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