No Dream Is Too High

• CHAPTER TEN • TRUST YOUR GUT … AND YOUR INSTRUMENTS.

Have you ever been traveling through the darkness in a strange, unknown area, with nothing to guide you but a GPS? You cannot see the road signs—if there are any—and there is nobody around from whom you can obtain accurate directions or other pertinent information. A feeling of loneliness and, worse yet, aloneness grips you. You make a turn but you aren’t quite sure if it is correct. You nervously try to listen to the mechanical voice talking to you from the GPS, and then you hear that terse statement, “Recalculating.” That’s bad news because you realize that you have messed up, but it is good news because you know that your onboard guidance system is making adjustments that will help to get you back on the right track.

In some ways, that is similar to traveling in space. You must trust your instruments to get you safely where you plan to go. But it is not a blind trust, and there are moments, even in space, when you must “trust your gut” and override your instruments as you make a tough course decision on your own.

Prior to landing on the Moon, Neil Armstrong and I practiced on Earth for hours and hours in a simulated lunar landing training vehicle. As the lunar module pilot, I often wondered why I was practicing drills that would obviously never be needed—flying the lunar landing training vehicle. I couldn’t imagine any conditions under which Neil might turn over to me the command controls of the lunar landing module. If we experienced a problem that serious, no doubt, we would abort the landing anyhow.

But NASA wanted us to prepare for any possibility, so day after day, I worked alongside Neil. Even in the simulator, though, things could sometimes go wrong. We had several “accidents” in which something caused us to lose directional control and we had to abort during a simulated landing.

Nevertheless, we weren’t worried. We knew we could trust our instruments and the engineers who were helping us.

Besides, Neil had plenty of history with close calls. He had experienced several previous crashes, but his courage never wavered, nor did his ability to remain calm under pressure. During the Korean War, he flew from an aircraft carrier, making low-altitude bombing runs aimed at destroying bridges and other infrastructure, but as an antiaircraft measure, the North Koreans strung up wires by which they could trip low-flying planes. The wires were difficult to spot from the air. On one mission, Neil’s plane ran through one of these cables, knocking off more than six feet of his right wing. He battled to maintain control of his aircraft, keeping it at high speed to avoid dropping out of the sky. He realized that he could not land on the aircraft carrier and that he would have to bail out, which he did.

Years later, while training as an astronaut, Neil flew home to Ohio and had another accident. It didn’t faze him. He literally crashed a plane and went home and had dinner with his family, including a piece of pie for dessert.

During Gemini 8, Neil flew with Dave Scott, and an important part of their mission was to dock with the Agena, an unmanned spacecraft that had been launched earlier that day. The procedure was essential for future rendezvous and docking missions we hoped to do during the Apollo mission. Neil and Dave performed a beautiful docking maneuver but then something went wrong. The spacecraft began rolling, and the astronauts couldn’t do anything about it. They were forced to undock the Gemini capsule from the Agena, but that only made things worse. The Gemini went into a rapid roll, practically a tumble, spinning at nearly one revolution a second. There was a strong concern that the astronauts would black out, and that would most likely be deadly.

Neil switched on the reentry system in hopes of regaining control of the spacecraft. During the high-speed roll, Neil was able to reach up and activate the switches that slowly brought the Gemini under control and saved their lives. He rarely talked much about the incident, but it was another close call with death.

On May 6, 1968, more than a year before the flight of Apollo 11, Neil had another close call. Because the lunar lander itself, with its wafer-thin walls, was far too delicate to be used for practice, part of the preparation for landing on the Moon required Neil to practice in the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, a strange-looking contraption meant to approximate the real module. We derisively referred to the vehicle as the “Flying Bedstead,” but it actually flew. It was not easy to control the vehicle, and during a test in which Neil alone was maneuvering the vehicle above a landing strip in Houston, something in the vehicle’s fuel system caused the trainer to tilt for some unknown reason. Neil had little more than a second to make a decision. He hit the ejection button just as the training vehicle exploded in the sky and crashed to the runway, totally demolishing it. Neil escaped with a few relatively minor injuries, including a gash in his tongue from his teeth that made it nearly impossible to understand his words for a few days. But he survived.

Despite his numerous accidents, Neil remained unflappable. To him, that’s just what test pilots did, and accidents went with the territory. Nothing seemed to shake him. He was just the kind of guy you wanted to be standing next to you as you searched for a place to land on the Moon.

When Neil and I slipped through the tunnel from the Columbia to the Eagle, it was the first time for either of us to ever fly the thing. Although we had practiced repeatedly on simulators, nobody had ever before tried to land an actual lunar module.

That’s why it was a bit disconcerting when the Eagle’s computer alarms went off with about six minutes to go during our descent to the Moon. At about 35,000 feet above the surface, a little lower than what the average commercial passenger plane flies, the data screen in front of us went totally blank.

“Program alarm!” Neil reported to Houston.

Something was affecting our guidance computer, overloading its ability to handle the massive amount of data coming into it. Alarms continued going off every few seconds, but even though it took one and a half seconds each way for us to communicate with Mission Control, we had to trust the guys on Earth when they told us it was safe to proceed for a landing.

Trust your instruments. At about 2,000 feet above the surface, another alarm lit up. Another quick check with Houston told us to keep going. Neil was looking out the window, searching for a good spot to land, while my eyes were glued to the altimeter readings. With our communications dropouts and computer glitches, if we were going to come down in one piece, he needed accurate readings.

“Seven-fifty,” I called out to Neil, letting him know that we were 750 feet above the surface while he continued to scan the surface intently.

“Pretty rocky,” Neil said.

“Six hundred,” I said.

But also trust your gut.

At only 600 feet above the surface, Neil switched over to manual controls, taking our lives into his own hands, as we tried to find a safe place to land before we ran out of fuel. It was a classic instance of “Trust your instruments, but also trust your gut.”

“Forty feet,” I said. “Picking up some dust.”

“Thirty seconds,” Charlie Duke, our Mission Control liaison, said from Earth, letting us know that we had only 30 seconds of fuel left before we crashed.

Neil slowed the Eagle even more, just as he had the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle from which he had to eject 14 months earlier, but there was no ejection possible for us on the Eagle.

That’s when I saw it—the shadow of one of our three footpads, which had touched the Moon’s surface. “Contact light,” I said.

The Eagle settled onto the surface of the Moon. We had less than 20 seconds of fuel left, but we had made it.

Whether you are trying to land on the Moon or land a new job, it is important to have a game plan you trust and stick with it. But it is equally important, at times, to trust your own inner direction, and to control your own destiny by the choices you make.

OF COURSE, IT IS ALSO HELPFUL TO remember that some things aren’t always as they seem. I once did a television interview for a show with a new hip interviewer who the producers said was trying to relate to young people, an interviewer with whom I was not familiar, for the Da Ali G Show. I had no idea that the interviewer, Ali G, was actually a character created by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. The interviewer showed up at my home wearing a bright yellow floor-length robe, which should have tipped me off, but I’ve done interviews with people all around the world, so I simply assumed he was from some part of Africa or India, because he had a British accent. During the interview, I was repeatedly perplexed by the unusual and ridiculous questions he asked, such as “What was it like not being the first man on the Moon? Were you ever jealous of Louis Armstrong?” I patiently explained to him that my fellow Moonwalker was Neil Armstrong. Later, I clarified to the interviewer that it was actually the Moon on which I had walked, not the Sun. Cohen never broke from his character, and I did the entire interview thinking it was absolutely real.

Things aren’t always as they seem. Today, when I see clips of that interview, I crack up laughing.

WHEN NEIL, MIKE, AND I SPLASHED down in the Pacific Ocean, the recovery team wiped us down thoroughly with an iodine solution to decontaminate us, because NASA was concerned about us bringing back strange bacteria or germs from the Moon dust we had encountered. Before boarding the U.S.S. Hornet, the ship that would carry us to Hawaii, we quickly suited up with biological isolation garments (BIG) suits—similar to modern-day hazmat (hazardous materials) outfits—including gas mask–type respirators over our faces, until we could be transferred to a specially made quarantine unit aboard the ship. It has always struck me as odd that the recovery guys took the rags they used to wipe us off and dropped them into the ocean! I guess they figured the poor underwater creatures could fend for themselves. Who knows? Maybe our Moon germs spawned a whole new breed of Godzilla movies!

Again, because nobody knew what effects the Moon dust might have on human beings, NASA was taking no chances. Once inside the quarantine unit, a specially adapted Airstream trailer, we were able to remove the BIG suits and move around in normal uniforms or other clothing. Still, we were kept in an airtight isolation unit. The three of us peeked out a window with a speaker, similar to a window at a movie theater, when President Nixon came to visit us and stood outside the quarantine unit, talking to us from behind the glass.

Our entire quarantine unit was flown from Hawaii, where the Hornet dropped us off, all the way back to Houston, with us still in it! We spent the next three weeks inside the quarantine unit being observed like mice in a cage. The unit was comfortable, but there was little to do and nowhere to go, so we got bored in a hurry.

One day, I was sitting at the table staring at the floor, and I noticed a small crack in the middle of the floor, with tiny ants coming up through it! Hmm, I guess this thing isn’t really tightly sealed, I thought. Imagine, if we had brought some sort of alien substance back with us, those ants could have contracted it and taken it back out to the world!

Things aren’t always as they seem.

On the way to the Moon, about three days and 200,000 miles into the journey, I noticed something odd-looking outside our window. It appeared to be a light or an object following alongside us in space! Neil and Mike saw it as well.

It was something outside our window that was close enough to be observed, so of course, we wondered what it could be. Certainly, we could see all sorts of stars outside, but traveling along close to us was this mysterious object. We could see it, but we couldn’t identify what it was, so in that sense, whatever it was, I suppose it could technically be described as an “unidentified flying object.”

Mike thought he could see the object with a telescope. When it was in one position, it looked like a series of ellipses, but when he looked at it from another, sharper view, it looked more L-shaped, so that didn’t tell us very much.

We were wary but nonetheless reluctant to blurt, “Hey, Houston, we have something moving along beside us, and we don’t know what it is. Can you tell us what that might be?”

We knew our transmissions were being heard not only by Mission Control, but by millions of other people as well. We were four-fifths of the way to our goal; we certainly didn’t want to endanger our mission or have to turn back now because somebody might be afraid that we would encounter aliens.

Neil calmly spoke to Mission Control, “Houston, do you have any idea where the S-IV-B is with respect to us?” The S-IV-B was the final stage of the rocket that had been jettisoned two days earlier, several hours after we had launched from Cape Canaveral, when we had made a midcourse correction that sent us off in the direction of the Moon. On later missions, that stage of the rocket would be sent crashing into the Moon so scientists could study the seismic effects, but on our mission, the discarded rocket made an evasive move to miss the Moon and continued on its way toward the Sun.

Houston reported back to us, “The S-IV-B is about 6,000 nautical miles from you. Over.”

Hmm, 6,000 miles away? If that was so, then what we were seeing couldn’t be the discarded fourth stage of our rocket. We didn’t think that the object following us was that far away, but we decided that because we could do nothing, we might as well go to sleep and not worry about it.

Of course, people who are convinced that aliens and extraterrestrials exist contend that we were being tracked by a UFO. It certainly seemed that way.

NASA encouraged Neil, Mike, and me not to talk about the strange object we saw in space for fear of public ridicule. We tacitly agreed, and despite the hopes of people wanting us to confirm the existence of a UFO, we kept our comments to ourselves. But we all knew that we saw something!

So if three fairly intelligent human beings, all of whom had flown in space previously, agreed that we saw something outside our window, something that appeared to be a UFO, that should be evidence enough for the existence of UFOs, right?

Not necessarily. Remember, things aren’t always as they seem.

All sorts of suggestions have been posed to explain the unidentified flying object that we three Apollo 11 astronauts saw with our own eyes. Some have even suggested that it was another spacecraft, sent up by Russia to keep an eye on us around the same time as our mission. That was ridiculous. How Russia could launch a rocket to the Moon without our noticing is totally incomprehensible to me.

Ruling out the outrageous possibility that we were being followed by a spacecraft from another country, we were left to believe that the object we saw was either the jettisoned S-IV-B section of our own spacecraft, or possibly one or more of the four panels that peeled away when we extracted the lunar module (LM)—the vehicle in which Neil and I would land on the Moon—from our command and service vehicle. In moving the LM, the command vehicle in which Mike, Neil, and I were traveling was nose to nose with the LM for a while, and the four panels that had protected the LM fell away in four separate directions. With the Sun reflecting off one of the panels, still moving along with our spacecraft, it seemed as though a brightly lit object was following us. Which of the four panels? I don’t know, so technically, there was an “unidentified flying object” in our rearview mirror.

After Neil, Mike, and I returned to Earth, we were debriefed by NASA scientists, and we mentioned the odd encounter with the unidentified flying object. NASA made little to-do about it, and we were thrilled with so many other aspects of the Apollo 11 mission that we had a lot of other things to talk about. We let the matter of the unidentified object drop.

A number of years later though, I was doing an interview with a foreign television network, and, assuming that NASA had made public our observations about the UFO, I told the story. When word got out that Apollo 11 astronauts had seen a UFO and not informed the world—especially those who adamantly believe in extraterrestrial presences in space—it caused a major uproar. In more places than I care to imagine, people were saying things such as, “Buzz saw an alien and NASA’s covering it up and won’t let him talk about it.”

It seemed that way. But now you know what really happened.

As Carl Sagan was fond of noting about improbable possibilities, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Personally, I strongly believe other life-forms might exist in various places throughout the universe, but the tremendous distances involved in trying to explore the immenseness of the universe make discovery unlikely in the near future.

DON’T LIVE YOUR LIFE BY what seems to be true. Other people may not “get” you. So what? It’s not what you do or where you go, but who you are becoming that really matters. Although many people sit around worrying that a decision by a roomful of strangers is about to change their lives forever, the reality is that their lives have already been shaped decisively by the sum of their own past decisions—the habits developed, the friends made, and the challenges overcome. What you do or where you work or go to school matters, because those types of criteria often present a measure of the person you’re becoming. But never allow other people to define your destiny. Who you work for and what you do are not nearly as important as who you are.

The important thing is that you believe in yourself and that you learn to maintain your composure, even under difficult circumstances. Handling pressure is a lifelong process, and the ability to remain calm or to regain self-control is key to thriving even in potentially frightening or life-threatening situations.

Why?

Because most people don’t make their best decisions when they are angry or frightened or nervous. When your emotions are surging and running rampant, it is far too easy to make an irrational mistake, to do something really stupid that you may regret for a long time. Many of those emotion-driven, irrational responses could be avoided simply by taking time to breathe.

When somebody says something that angers you, rather than lashing back with equal venom, take a few moments (or hours, or days, if necessary) to calm down and make a more calculated response. Your actions will usually be wiser, better, and more effective when you have taken the emotional elements out of them as much as possible.

As fighter pilots, Neil and I learned the principle of not allowing our emotions to get the better of us in difficult circumstances. That training came in real handy on the Moon.

After completing our experiments on the lunar surface, Neil and I reentered the Eagle, and we threw out our “garbage” bag, containing anything that was contaminated, including the boots we wore on the lunar surface. I’ve always wished that we could have kept those boots.

When we completed our housecleaning chores, we repressurized the LM, putting oxygen back into the cabin, and depressurized our space suits. We snacked on cold cocktail sausages and fruit punch. After that, our checklist told us that it was time to sleep. On Earth, we had simulated being in and out of the LM many times, but we had never really determined how and where we were going to sleep while on the Moon. We had no beds or even cots in the lunar module. I took first dibs and decided to sleep on the floor, while Neil sat on the ascent engine cover and leaned back against a console with his feet off the ground.

It was cold in the cabin and hard to sleep in the cramped conditions. As I lay down and fidgeted on the floor, I turned my head and noticed some lunar dust we’d tracked in, but also something else—a piece of plastic that looked as though it had broken off something. It seemed like a circuit breaker, so I stood up and started looking over the row of circuit breakers, trying to determine where the plastic may have come from. My heart sank when I saw it.

To my dismay, the missing breaker was labeled ENG ARM, “Engine Arm,” one of the most important switches in the Eagle. The checklist simply displayed a picture of the breakers: black = in; white = out. While we were stationary on the surface, it was perfectly safe for this breaker to be out, but the Eagle was designed so it is impossible to descend to the Moon with that circuit breaker pressed in, and it is impossible to get off the Moon with it popped out. This circuit was crucial to send the electrical current to light the ascent engine that would lift us off the Moon. Because the breaker was located on my side of the capsule, I had apparently bumped it with the heavy backpack either preparing to step outside or when we had come back inside after walking on the Moon.

As soon as I discovered the broken circuit breaker, we called Mission Control to inform them. We missed a golden opportunity to use the classic line immortalized by astronaut Jack Swigert a few years later, when he said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” as the crew encountered difficulties after an explosion on board Apollo 13, the mission commanded by Jim Lovell. Rather than landing on the Moon, the entire crew of Apollo 13 was forced to cram into the lunar landing module for the return flight home.

Although Neil and I didn’t say it that way, we certainly did have a problem, but it wasn’t ours alone; we figured it was Houston’s problem, too, so they told us to go to sleep while they worked on a solution. They were hoping to somehow reroute the power to that absolutely essential circuit. Neil and I tried to get some sleep while the experts back on Earth debated what to do.

We checked in again six hours later. “Unfortunately,” Mission Control informed us, “there is no way to reroute the power.” The conclusion from the experts working on the problem in Houston was that we would have to push something in to activate the circuit.

We moved the time of pushing the breaker to two hours earlier on our flight schedule; we wanted to make sure the circuit would function while we still had some time to adapt. Houston said, “We’ll just have to try it.” If the circuit breaker didn’t work, we could wait another two hours while Mike Collins orbited the Moon again, giving Mission Control more time to find a way to get us off the lunar surface. I wasn’t really too worried about what might happen if the breaker didn’t work. I chose to spend my time doing what we could do to fix the problem, and of course, Neil and I were relying on a great team of experts back on Earth.

I didn’t want to push in the breaker with my pinky finger, or with a ballpoint pen, or anything metal—not with all that electrical power flowing into that circuit. But in our personal preference kits, I had included a plastic felt-tip pen. It wasn’t on the official list of items we took to the Moon, but I now had that pen in the shoulder pocket of my space suit.

I gingerly pressed the pen against the engine arm circuit breaker. For a long moment, I didn’t want to remove the tip from the circuit breaker, hoping against hope that it would hold. Slowly, almost reluctantly, I eased the pressure on my hand and lifted the pen’s tip.

The pen did the trick; the circuit breaker held. We could return to Earth, after all!

EVEN WITH ALL THE YEARS OF careful planning and training, something so small, like breaking the one circuit breaker that we needed to lift off the Moon to come home, could have derailed our plans. But with a little outside-the-box thinking and some simple improvisation, we were able to fix the problem, rendezvous with Mike, and return to Earth. Not panicking helps, too. That’s why, all these years later, when people ask me what it “felt” like walking on the Moon, I usually answer, “Fighter pilots don’t have feelings; we have ice water running in our veins.”

When under pressure, you must remain focused on the immediate task in front of you, regardless of the distractions around you. Unfortunately, mistakes or accidents sometimes happen, even after the best preparation. To appropriately respond to an emergency requires a clear mind and the ability to analyze a situation and do what is necessary to fix it or make it better. Fear and worry will only cloud your mind and keep you from thinking clearly. Far better to have practiced procedures that you know will help you in the midst of a stressful situation. For instance, a fighter pilot doesn’t want to dwell on the possibility of an engine failure as he is rolling down the runway. Instead, he is thinking about making a smooth takeoff. Nevertheless, in the back of his mind, he has rehearsed many times and he knows exactly what to do in case he has to hit the eject controls and leave that aircraft in a hurry!

In a similar manner, I learned as a child to look in both directions before crossing a street, and I still do so to this day. It is not fear that motivates me to check my surroundings but awareness that even the best laid plans can sometimes go awry.

In times of crisis, lead rather than follow. Establish yourself as an expert, the go-to person that others look to for insight or help. In other words, don’t wait for someone to come to your rescue in life; figure out a way to do what you need to do. And don’t merely be a strategist; at some point you need to become a doer, moving from deciding to doing. There’s action, and then there’s everything else.

To succeed in any environment, you have to believe in yourself. You must have an unshakable confidence in your own ability to achieve your goals and get the job done.

Trust yourself. Some of the worst mistakes of my life have occurred when I trusted other people to make important decisions for me. A key to success in any field is to take responsibility for your own actions. Always be open to advice from others, but what matters most is who you want to be, not merely what you want to do—and certainly not who or what others want you to be or do.

Figure out what makes you happy, content, well adjusted, no matter how crazy it may sound to other people. Determine what is important to you, what’s in your heart and mind that you really believe, and then pursue that with all your might.

Master yourself—that’s the toughest challenge you will ever have. Develop your disciplines ahead of time, so when the pressure is on, you just have to do it.

Oh, and perhaps most important: No excuses.

Unquestionably, all of the Apollo astronauts were selected for these missions because we had the right skills and emotional makeup for the job. But being able to adapt to situations was also critical to the success of our missions.

In subsequent Apollo launches, NASA placed a protective bar over the circuit breakers to prevent mishaps similar to ours. I still have that broken circuit breaker from Apollo 11 and the felt-tip pen that helped us get off the Moon. They are good reminders that when the pressure is on, you can’t allow your emotions to overwhelm you; the best way to handle the situation is to maintain your composure.

Not that I’ve always done so perfectly—not by a long shot. One incident in which my composure was somewhat ruffled hit national news, made the rounds of the talk shows, and has been seen on YouTube more than five million times.

For years after I returned to Earth, my fellow astronauts and I were repeatedly accosted by conspiracy theory nuts claiming that the United States never really landed on the Moon, that the whole thing was done in a Hollywood-style studio, and that the landing was a hoax foisted on the public by the government. What lunacy! But there is no accounting for some people’s logic, or lack of it.

I don’t waste my time debating the obvious. Certainly, plenty of evidence is available to anyone who cares to examine it. Photographs from lunar reconnaissance orbiter satellites circling the Moon clearly show the Eagle’s landing site and all of the experiments that Neil and I set up, and it is possible to view the path where Neil stirred up the dust by walking on the Moon to see the large crater that we had avoided. For any intelligent person, such recent photos should forever put an end to the conspiracy kooks claiming that we never landed on the Moon. Google has even posted a comparison between our original photos and video and a more recent attempt to reproduce our lunar landing, and the similarities are astounding.

Most of the conspiracy nuts are harmless—irritating, but nonetheless benign. One was not. He repeatedly harassed me with false accusations, impugning my character and claiming I had never walked on the Moon. I could never figure out what he hoped to gain from his crazy assertions, other than trying to make a name for himself.

I had agreed to do an interview at a Beverly Hills hotel for what I thought was a Japanese children’s program. But I quickly figured out the interview was a farce and that I had been tricked into showing up. As I tried to exit the hotel, my accoster repeatedly demanded that I swear on a Bible, which he brandished in my face, that I had walked on the Moon. I was offended for both the Bible and for me.

I was irritated by his incessant, rude, and irrelevant demands, but when he called me a coward and a liar and a thief … well, I could no longer maintain my composure. I punched the guy right in the jaw. The harasser’s film crew recorded the entire incident, and he later tried to use the video to convince the police that I had assaulted him.

The video became a blessing in disguise because the police refused to entertain the charges, concluding that the accoster had repeatedly provoked me into decking him. Talk show hosts such as Jay Leno and David Letterman had a field day with the video clip, airing the incident on their shows. One show created a video spoof of Christopher Columbus being accosted by conspiracy nuts who claimed that he never discovered America. Of course, after putting up with the harassment for a few moments, Columbus decked the guy!

I’m glad to say that most people who have seen the video of my punch have sided with me, agreeing that my response was justified. It may not have been one of my most noble moments, but just as one picture is worth more than a thousand words …

As I said, you cannot always predict what will happen, no matter how well you have trained and prepared. Certainly, you can avoid many stressful situations simply by planning ahead as much as possible, but be prepared for the unexpected, too. Remember, even the best plans are not infallible. When things go wrong and you have to find a way to adapt, don’t be afraid to change your plans. Just do what you have to do and make the best of a bad situation.

Because I travel by air quite often, I seek out airline hospitality lounges whenever I am awaiting a flight or experiencing delays. Often, even those airlines of which I am not a member of their “club” will invite me into their lounge as a professional courtesy. One time as I was awaiting a Delta Air Lines flight in Phoenix, Arizona, I approached the desk at the Delta lounge, and without mentioning my name, asked if I could enter.

“Are you a member, sir?” the receptionist asked. She smiled at me with one of those expressions that seems as though it is sealed in plastic.

“No, but I usually stop here when I’m flying through Phoenix,” I said. “I just want to get a cup of coffee and make some calls.”

“Well, sir, if you are not a member, you can purchase a one-day pass to our club today for forty dollars.”

I knew the receptionist was simply doing her job, but I really didn’t need to join another airline club. I peered at her intently, hoping that she might recognize me and change her mind.

She didn’t. She gazed back at me with the same plastic expression.

I squinted at her even more intensely. Rarely do I say such things, but for some reason it seemed appropriate in this case. “Do you know who I am?” I asked, the folly of my question striking me the moment it left my lips.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Aldrin,” she replied. “But if you want to come into our lounge, it will be forty dollars. Otherwise, there’s a McDonald’s right next door. You can get a cup of coffee there.”

I nodded, thanked her, and went to McDonald’s.

Sometimes, when God gives you lemons …