Fool's cap

Abstract

To the man on the moon, our world is a bauble, and when he holds up his hand, the earth disappears. My father once told me that astronauts go a little crazy when they return from space: when you've played peek-a-boo with the planet, it's hard to get worked up about Richard Nixon and Tabasco sauce. Nowadays, of course, we know to lock our homecoming heroes in cells padded with flickering banks of CNN - it helps to realign their priorities. But in the 70s, my father said, astronauts were left to cope on their own. One retired spaceman was pulled from his brand-new Chrysler Chimera with carbon monoxide in his lungs and a note in his pocket: This car was too fanciful for me.