On Partnership

It is a sunny morning in April. The former Patricia McCann and I survey the Rillito River Walk together, reflecting on 45 years of marriage. We visit the farmer’s markets at Rillito Downs and St. Philip’s Plaza. Pat limps a little, always has. She’s a childhood polio survivor. Some people would call us old. Not Pat. The sun still plays in her bright blue eyes the way it did when she was twenty, though now her hair is silver, not red.

Life together has given us many gifts besides each other. Everything we can do together is a gift. For example, we have produced two brilliantly creative and intellectually daring daughters, both largely home-educated. Their accomplishments include specialized education and training in comparative religion in one case and law enforcement in the other. Both run small businesses. And they have given us grandchildren.

They inherit Pat’s powers of observation, patience, and intuition, heroic qualities that go nicely with their capacity for speedy but incisive judgment. Those talents are tempered, perhaps too much, by an inclination to trust. That last they may get from me.

Pat has supported me and steadied me in every important endeavor. She saved me from my foolish appetite for risk-taking in pursuit of trivial knowledge, like the intimate operational details of the Navy’s F-8 Crusaders. After the military, she got me through college, sometimes literally supporting both of us and our first-born. Later, she refused to let me quit graduate school. While our kids were still elementary students (before experience handed us evidence that public schools are to education as public bathrooms are to sanitation), she took over the Parent Teacher Association at our school, found ways to get computers into every classroom, and taught the teachers how to program them.

She organized Space Week in an otherwise sleepy town of rocket scientists and engineers by using kid power, with enthusiastic help that she generated from the local chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The kid power was a gang we called Camp Fire Astronautics (a merger of Camp Fire Boys and Girls and Young Astronauts), and they were powerful. If they had to be somewhere to run a movie theater showing Star Trek reruns or the film Silent Running, they would shove planets out of the way to get there. If they had to get good at math to make change in the ticket booth, they did that. Pat became so much a part of the AIAA (although she’s a microbiologist, not an engineer) people started calling me Pat (I’m the engineer).

As president of the East Texas Writers Association (we were both members), Pat published that group’s first official anthology, Voices from the Pines (ISBN 0965796906). I contributed, as did many others, but Pat executed.

We started SpaceFarers Corporation together. She’s CEO/CFO. I work an engineering day job. I also organize events, although not as well as she did. We’re editing a book together, and rescuing our first-born from a really bad marriage (it’s the trust thing - she shouldn’t have).

We work with an outfit called Valley of the Moon in Tucson, Arizona. It’s an all-volunteer fun-and-imagination factory on the banks of the Rillito. It teaches kids (and adults) kindness and cultivates imagination. The ‘Moon’s walking tour  theatrical productions, including Halloween’s “Haunted Ruins,” are a local sensation.

In general, we have fun. I have fun. If Pat doesn’t, benign deception is another of her powers.