Ruminations on Astronaut Lisa Nowack.

In yesterday's New York Times article, there's a section addressing the question of how someone trained to deal with stress, and presumably screened for psychological fitness, could do this thing. According to the article, "Nick Kanas, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who has studied astronaut psychology, said that the screening occurs only at the very beginning of the process and that once an astronaut has gotten through the front door, the formal psychological evaluations give way to evaluation of job performance. Psychological counseling is available but not mandatory, he said."

Which got me thinking that NASA must have really relaxed its standards since the 60's. Because as we all know, Dr. Bellows was constantly checking up on Captain Nelson, subjecting him to tests after every little mission, and always giving him the fisheye whenever Jeannie made some off-the-wall supernatural event occur in Cocoa Beach. Tony and Roger lived in fear of being tossed out of the program because of Jeannie's antics, but Nowack gets 30 days of leave for pepper spraying her romantic rival in an airport parking garage after driving 900 miles non-stop from Houston, packing a steel mallet, rubber tubing, gloves and garbage bags which she brought along in anticipation of a little girl-talk.

Hilarity ensues.

I'm an Agnostijew. I don't remember whether I ever believed that the Bible was written by (or "inspired by" although that sounds more like a TV credit) God. I'm pretty sure that I was the troublemaker in Sunday school who asked the teacher how we could be sure Moses didn't just sit up there on the mountain making up his own rules and carving them into tablets.

We moved from New York to Connecticut when I was 6, going into 2nd grade. I don't remember going to shul at all in NY, I just remember my parents coming home from services on what must have been one of the High Holy Days. I remember family Seders from those years, and that's the time of my Grandma Belle's ill-conceived trip to see Santa at Macy's.

In Connecticut, our town had no synagogue. Even in the next town over, a larger city, there was no established congregation. My parents joined a new synagogue that didn't have its own building. It rented space from a church. My earliest memory of Saturday services include staring at a large crucifix. I know Kay says she had Sunday school on Saturday because of a similar arrangement but I don't remember what we did, although I remember classes in the church basement. My more vivid memories are of the neighbor boys who walked up and down the street in front of our house singing "King of the Jews" to the tune of "King of the Road" (that's all, just one phrase, and why they found that amusing and why we found it threatening eludes me now); of telling my mother we should put the Hannukah menorah in the kitchen (back) window instead of the living room (front) window; of being pelted with pennies on the school bus; of being spat on in fourth grade by a boy I'd known since second grade who grinned and said something nasty I've forgotten but I remember that he did it because I was Jewish.

I remember memorizing The Lord's Prayer in second grade and saying it in unison every morning to start the day, two years after the US Supreme Court held that teacher led prayer in school was unconstitutional. I remember playing Parcheesi with the psychologist my mother took me to see every week or so in fourth grade, I think because the school wanted and explanation for my strange behavior, who told my parents that living in that town was the only real problem I had and his professional advice was to get the heck out of there.

We moved to New Jersey when I was 11, going into 6th grade. There were 2 synagogues to choose from, and my parents joined the newer one, larger one. My sisters and I started Hebrew school, but I was way behind, having only had Sunday school instruction before and no language and little liturgical instruction. I got some remedial Hebrew instruction, but I didn't apply myself and didn't have much aptitude. I was good in history (except for the part about being a cynic) but where I had been an outsider before for being Jewish, here I was an outsider for not being Jewish enough. Most of these kids had known each other from toddlerhood. Most of their fathers were doctors and local businessmen. My parents, new to town, didn't realize that the newer congregation had splintered off from the old synagogue when the wealthier members of the community decided they wanted a fancier building, a glitzier Hebrew school, a rabbi with a name. Their children had almost all already been to Israel (we were between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War). They went to Jewish summer camps. They all socialized together. They wore gold chai's and little mezzuzahs and Stars of David.

I did what they did, but I never did it quite right. My sense of humor was different and my jokes didn't go over. I tried too hard. And honestly, some of the stuff that they did bored me, but I kept on doing it. Watching the boys play Kadimah basketball? I still don't get it, although that David kid was cute. And the things I thought were important, they thought I was just making a stink. Like postponing my bat mitzvah for eight months so I could have it on Saturday morning instead of a Friday night, because no one was going to tell me I couldn't read from the Torah just because I was female, or that I couldn't call women to the beemah for Aliyahs, for that matter. The synagogue decided to change its policy, but not in my year, so I waited. Or how I insisted that Mrs. Felder could not put that line in the temple bulletin "Sharon intends to continue her Hebrew studies" in my bat mitzvah article,as she did in everyone else's profile, because I most certainly did not. No one else did either, but she always put it in there. So instead of saying I did not intend to continue, the article was silent on the subject. Hey, I thought it was a victory.

I think I know where I'm going with this. It's all part of how I never felt as if I fit in anywhere, and still do. Still don't? Part rebel, part misfit, part iconoclast, part earth mother.