Goldie the Space Cat

Goldie looked down at the ground, shifting her massive head slightly as if it took too much energy to protest.

July 1963

The United States of America was the greatest country in the world for most of 1963. There were no wars that we knew about; neither was their any racism or sexism that we knew about. We didn’t even know those words. Everyone seemed to really like the president. No one was angry; the United States of America was like one gigantic suburb, and all you had to do was turn on the TV to see it. No one my age knew about the Korean War, but everyone knew someone whose dad fought in World War II. The Germans were the bad guys then but we were such a great country that we ended up being cool with them, the West Germans, anyway. I had seen the award winning picture of the East German soldier hopping over barbed wire to get to West Germany. The United States and West Germany were cool, but East Germany, China and Russia, well, they weren’t so lucky. As far as we knew Bart Starr, Jerry West and Sandy Koufax lived clean lives and loved their respective sport. The high school students in senior portraits in yearbooks looked like serious, goal-oriented young adults. None of them looked satirical or like boudoir shots. Women wore white gloves when they rode the Greyhound bus. The sky was blue. No one bought drinking water. No one was afraid to swim in the ocean. No one feared the contents of a can of tuna. The music never got crazier than the Beach Boys, Skeeter Davis, The Cascades, or Bobby Vinton. Five days a week you could watch Superman stand on top of the world with the American flag waving behind him, hear the words “…the never ending battle for truth, justice and the American way,” and not once feel it was ironic. There was nothing bad in soda, meat or French fries as far as we knew.
When middle age people say it was a different world, this is what we mean. It is true that our perspective was shaded by our youthful naiveté and simple ignorance, but nevertheless, we were true believers; our government merited our faith. We even explored space because it was there and we could.
My cousin Kirk and I were fans of the NASA space program. John Glenn was as big a hero to us as Don Drysdale, if not bigger. The flight of the Friendship 7 was the first major event in our lives. Kirk had framed pictures of the capsules and the astronauts. He knew Mercury from Apollo and Grissom from Cooper. He made models of the space ships. When I made model planes I would douse them with lighter fluid and tie firecrackers to the fuselage, but I did believe that space was the new frontier. I knew that was true because the Kingston Trio said it in a song, “Then on to the heavens and the stars for to see; this is the new frontier, this is the new frontier.”
It was no surprise then that Kirk was looking to launch a cat into space one summer day. Kirk and I were good boys; sending a cat into space was the riskiest thing we had ever done, well, except for finding a girlie magazine on a bulldozer at a worksite. At that age though pushing a button on the bulldozer that caused the blade to lift was much more exciting than any magazine.
Ever the perfectionist, Kirk spent the better part of the morning finding the right box and drawing an authentic looking control panel which he taped to the inside of the box, er, capsule. His best friend, Norman, came over but he didn’t share our enthusiasm.
“What the heck are you guys doing?” he asked.
“We’re sending Goldie into space,” Kirk answered scanning his father’s work space in the garage for potential feline space helmet materials.
“And how are you doing that?” Norman asked doubtfully.
“We’re putting her in a box!” I exclaimed.
“And what will propel this box into space?”
“Well, we can drop it off a roof.” I suggested. We hadn’t worked out the details just yet.
“That’s gravity, not propulsion,” Norman said, like a smart aleck professor.
“We’re throwing the box straight up into the air,” Kirk said, giving up on the space helmet idea.
“The cat won’t get more than five feet in the air; she won’t even need a parachute,” Norman laughed.
“They’ll be two of us,” Kirk said, laughing back.
“And if you help, that’ll be three,” I added.
“No thanks. I got other stuff to do. I just rigged my train transformer to an electric chair,” Norman said, rubbing his hands together.
“Electric chair?” I said, not accustomed to Norman’s eccentricities.
“Yeah, from an erector set.”
“So, you finally figured out how to do it, huh?” Kirk said.
“Yeah, I think so. Wanna come over and find out? I even got my first test subject.” He took a lizard from his front pocket.
“Nah.” Kirk said with a mild disdain.
“You’re gonna miss it when his eyes spin around then pop out!”
“But we’ve got a cat launch in like t-minus five minutes,” I said.
“Ok, you guys are gonna miss it, I’m tellin’ ya.” He got on his bike and rode off, waving the hapless lizard in one hand.
Kirk found Goldie lounging in the patio under the picnic table. Electrocuting small animals was too far gone for Kirk and me. We didn’t fight, steal, or cuss, and we didn’t torture animals. But a cat in space, well, that was a different matter. To launch the fat, lethargic, loveable Goldie into space as a tribute to the space program, well, that was patriotic. Goldie, also known as Tomasina, was about to become the next space hero. Kirk picked her up and held her aloft.
“And now, Goldie, the great astro-cat is heading toward the launch platform. What a brave cat! What an intelligent cat!” He shook her a little to see if he could get some response; she was as active as a bag of onions.
“T-minus ten seconds and counting,” I said as we moved toward the box in the middle of the lawn. Kirk may not have been the only boy in America who talked baby talk to his cat, but he was the only one I knew. His voice switched from impressed newscaster to hysterical mother.
“Will you be all right, precious baby? Will you blow up in a million bits? Precious baby, Goldie! Don’t die, Tomasina! Please, baby, please. PLEASE!” He dropped her in the box and she sat, motionless.
“Six, five, four…” I continued, as we lifted the box shoulder high. Goldie looked down at the ground, shifting her massive head slightly as if it took too much energy to protest. At three we lowered the box to our belt buckles and at zero we flung the box in the air.
She stayed in the box for a moment, but on its descent, she jumped out, looked at us with a crazed expression before she took off running. She went missing for the rest of the day, and the next day, too. We planned no further space shots after that; it was a great country and there were other things to discover, no doubt to the infinite relief of Goldie.