,
The man was too old to deal with gratuitously stressful situations. Thankfully, he could identify from a mile away a situation with the potential of getting him into deep waters fast. Throughout most of his life he had had to deal with the nuances of being a reluctant celebrity and had become familiar with most of the back doors fans tended to use to access him. Above all he treasured his privacy and just wanted to live the few remaining years of his life peacefully away from the limelight. Nevertheless, it was 2008, he was approaching his 78th birthday and a feeling of remorse was creeping in, not for what he had done but for what he hadn’t.
Some days he found himself entertaining the idea of telling the whole world everything and the hell with it. He thought that, maybe for such a venture he would be willing to leave the peace and quite of his self-imposed exile. Before long, his musings were interrupted by his wife’s voice…
“Hey honey, cutting down a cherry tree?”
“Just some fantasy baseball stuff… and building up an appetite. What’s for dinner?”
“One of your favorites, roasted squab with potatoes and gravy.”
“It smells delicious.”
Carol was his second wife. He looked at her with loving eyes as he remembered the day they met at a golf tournament sixteen years ago. She was a widow at the time, and he was trying to rebuild his life after a heart-wrenching divorce. The seating arrangements placed them side by side at the breakfast table but, she said very little to him. The woman felt overwhelmed by the celebrity status of the man next to her. Nevertheless, two weeks later he called and asked her what she was doing. She replied she was cutting down a cherry tree with her son, and half and hour later he was knocking on her door, chainsaw in hand, to help out. They married two years later.
“The weather is really nice today,” he said, “what do you say we open a bottle of Cabernet and eat at the veranda while the Moon rises over the tree tops.”
“Sounds lovely, I’ll set the table outside,” she said while giving him a peck on the cheek.
They lived in the countryside and their house had a spectacular view that always looked even better during the lengthening days of spring. They sat on the table and clinked their wine glasses.
“Cheers,” he said. “Carol, I was thinking… what if I told someone the truth?”
“What do you mean the truth?”
He just looked at the rising Moon in the darkening blue sky.
“Are you serious? You can’t just go out there and tell the world what you know. Besides, there would be serious consequences. Your reputation will be reduced to ashes, plus who knows what the government will put you through. Listen, you weren’t even supposed to tell me. Why are you bringing this up now?”
“I’m tired Carol. They say that on the deathbed one regrets not what one did but what one didn’t. And what I didn’t do was stand for the truth. You’ve made me feel young again, but I don’t know how many more years I have left, and I really don’t want any regrets when the time comes. Not to mention that a man died 10 years ago without the world knowing what he had truly done, without getting the credit he truly deserved. I think the time has come.”
“What about your aversion to the media? You would have to relive all the media frenzy you endured almost 40 years ago… but on steroids.”
“This is just preliminary, but my plan doesn’t include the media. It doesn’t even involve a big splash. Let me refill the wine glasses and I’ll tell you what I have in mind…”
Apollo 1’s patch irony was not lost on her. She couldn’t help thinking about the astronauts’ family members while staring at the patch showing a command module orbiting Earth. 
“The mission commander for Apollo 7 was Walter Schirra, one of the Mercury seven original astronauts,” her father would say. “After the Apollo 1 tragedy, NASA needed all the positive vibes available in the universe. So they went with lucky number seven. Remember that all the Mercury missions used that same number and they were all successful. Of course NASA would never accept they were as superstitious as the next guy so they came up with this cockamamie story about obscure unmanned missions that only they knew about, or understood for that matter.”
Apollo 8’s had always been her favorite – a very sleek design that featured a red “8” denoting both the mission number, and the circumlunar trajectory of the mission. The design was first conceived by mission astronaut Jim Lovell who then prepared a sketch and gave it to the NASA artist in charge of the project.
Apollo 9’s mission patch was probably the least appealing of them all. Her father used to compare it to an elementary school textbook diagram. She moved over quickly to the Apollo 10 patch – another one of her favorites. 
A pretty busy design, unlike Apollo 8’s sleek one, but somehow it worked in a very pleasant manner. Mission astronauts Young and Cernan designed it and its shield-like outer shape gave it a space ranger flair.
The first time he said that my eyes opened up like Frisbees, thought Vega.