Recently in Blast from the Past Category

NASA is transitioning to all-electronic personnel files for employees. As a result, I got a sealed envelope in my office mail today that contains all of the paperwork they had on file for me that they determined did not need to be transferred to my electronic record -- things like transcripts, training records and offer letters. It's pretty cool to look at because it contains a lot of paperwork from my days as a co-op. It's got random things like a copy of my letter of admission to the graduate program at Stanford, summaries that I had to write each semester to cover what I worked on as a co-op, and a copy of my transcript at the end of freshman year. (Straight A's, thank you very much. I did not maintain straight A's after my freshman year, but oh well.)

The best item by far is the very first letter I got from JSC, offering me a job as a co-op student. It was June 1997 and I had just finished my freshman year at Georgia Tech.

Dear Sarah:

Congratulations! We want you to join us as a Cooperative Education Student at the Johnson Space Center. You will be hired as a GS-3 with an annual salary of $17,332 on August 18, 1997...

I distinctly remember getting that letter, and $17,332 seemed like a LOT of money. How times change...

My sister wrote a great blog entry today about some of her childhood memories from growing up in Charlotte, and growing up in our neighborhood in particular. I don't remember all of the same things that she does, probably because a few are specific to her life and I'm five years older. But I do remember a lot.

Our elementary school mascot was the trolley (yes, the inanimate object), and apparently that's now been changed! Bummer. She mentions Wad's, which was an old-school lunch counter and drugstore place up the street that we'd walk to for gum and candy. She mentions our old neighbors, the Utseys. I remember Mr. Utsey watching the Tour de France in the late 80s when Greg LeMond was the American upstart, not Lance Armstrong. And he'd play catch with us in the front yard, throwing the baseball so high in the air and letting us run around trying to get under it and catch it with his huge catcher's mitt. And I remember the winter Katie mentions where it iced hard enough that we could sled from the top of a huge hill all the way down to the base of our street. The only trick was that it involved a 90 degree turn. I didn't make the turn, and hit the curb. The sled stayed behind while I went skidding off into the park.

The park itself is a constant presence in all of my childhood memories. We lived next to a large city park (in fact, we could walk through our backyard to reach the tennis courts), which meant that we always had somewhere to go play. I remember rollerblading on the tennis courts, and riding my bike through the park. There used to be a large dam on the creek that you could reach by skirting along a thin strip of concrete and holding onto a chain link fence -- there was a 20-30 drop below. When you came back from the dam, you were dumped into a little ditch filled with rocks and concrete. One time as I jumped back into the ditch, I fell and hit my head on the rocks. I got to ride my bike all the way home with one hand while holding the other to my head to stop the bleeding.

The park was also home to a yearly arts festival where we'd paint rocks and eat elephant ears and watch the cloggers all week. The park had a bandshell on a little island in the middle of the lake that occasionally we could get to when someone left the gate unlocked. Way back when, the park had a rocket slide and an airplane and a train. Not a play airplane or play train -- no, an actual airplane and actual train engine. And you could climb all over them! Climb on the wings of the airplane, and into the inner workings of the train engine. The airplane is long gone, and the train is now behind a tall fence. "Too dangerous" in this day and age.

My parents still live in the same house I grew up in; they've been there next to the park for 30 years. The fact that I can still go home -- truly home, to the house where I grew up -- is one of the things I love most. I know that someday my parents will sell the house, and since only one of the four children in my family still lives in Charlotte, the house will almost certainly pass on to someone else. Possibly someone who will simply tear it down and build another monster house too big for the lot and too close to the street and just too something. When that day comes, it's nice to know that we all have such great memories of growing up there.

11:33 pm, April 6, 1997

I suppose I do look like a tomboy in many ways. I wear tennis shoes instead of clogs, jeans instead of dark brown dress pants, and avoid dressing up at most costs. I can see how an outsider looking at me could come to the conclusion that I am athletic. But I don’t feel like an athlete. When Marti asked what sports I played, I could only reply that I used to play soccer, and that I watch a lot of sports on TV. I cannot think of any answer that would be more pathetic. I want to be able to put together a better answer to the question “are you athletic?” I don’t like being pathetic.

(I think a couple commenters were confused. Note the date at the top -- I wrote this in 1997 while a sophomore at Georgia Tech, and found it while digging through my hard drive last night. I was definitely not athletic then. Ten years later, I know that I am athletic, and I like that. I don't feel pathetic anymore.)