The Boy Who Reached for the Stars by Elio Morillo

Author:Elio Morillo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Liftoff

Skyrocketing to My Dreams

From the moment I stepped foot in New York until college, I never had a room to call my own. I was always working toward my future, the way Mami taught me, and I was somewhat reliant on others along the way, which at times made me feel like a burden, especially to Mami, who had to juggle so much while raising me. I felt indebted to her for the sheer sacrifice she had endured to give me a better shot.

Once I was gone, Mami began to reconsider her circumstances in New York. She was on the verge of turning sixty, and those long days taking care of elders and then cleaning offices in the evenings were catching up with her. She’d come back to the now empty apartment late at night absolutely beat, only to have to set the alarm and do it all over again the next day. Each morning became harder to endure. Simply standing up from her bed or a chair would suddenly provoke a back cramp that drained the color from her face. Her body was screaming, “Mayday!” and this time she listened. At a doctor’s appointment, after explaining her symptoms, he gave it to her straight: “Your body is telling you it’s time to stop.” That statement kept running through her mind during the long subway ride home after clocking out of yet another evening work shift. Trepidation hit when she reached her stop. Those late-night walks from the station to her building caused her anxiety to spike. After mulling it over and talking with Xavier, who insisted she move in with them, she decided the time had come for her to hang up her boots and apply for early retirement. That also meant saying goodbye to her Bay Ridge apartment and leaving New York one more time, this time for Florida.

We continued to speak daily and remained as connected as ever. It took time for me to fully understand and accept that now I was completely independent financially and living on my own; what happened next was exclusively in my hands. The classic American dream suddenly felt just within my grasp, and I wasn’t about to squander it.

* * *

When I look to the stars of engineering, my personal constellation, I see Clarence Leonard “Kelly” Johnson, who graduated from the University of Michigan with a master’s in aeronautical engineering in 1933. A legendary aeronautical and systems engineer who worked on Lockheed’s U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird, his story was already familiar to me by the time I arrived at Michigan. I had nursed a boyhood fascination with planes, enamored by their history and the scientific strides made possible by their innovation. Aerospace Engineering, the university’s internationally renowned program, encompasses both aeronautics and astronautics—in other words, it’s a discipline that includes the design of both aircraft and spacecraft. From a historical standpoint, aircraft came before spacecraft. From a technical standpoint, the former are designed to travel in the atmosphere before reaching space, while the latter need to be able to fly in low Earth orbit or beyond.

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