Dreams of space travel and simple days

I'm enjoying a very nice cup of coffee in Hotel ZaZa, a hip, upscale place right in the middle of Herman Park and the Museum District in Houston, where my balcony overlook the Museum of Fine Art and many of the park's lush trees.

I'm playing hooky from the Association of Food Journalists conference, a four day affair with dozens of other newspaper and freelance food writers, restaurant critics and food editors (all very different positions, I assure you), to A) catch up on a wee bit of sleep and B) reminisce about the last time I was in Houston for a conference.

It was a whopping 15 years ago (which is whopping when it's more than half your lifetime), in 1993, for a Young Astronauts conference, a gathering of members of Young Astronaut chapters from across the U.S. We had a pretty strong YA chapter in Aurora, where science-minded students from all elementary school grades would meet after school with teachers and talk about the bernoulli principle and jet propulsion and conduct experiments that involved messy ingredients and homemade hovercrafts that used vacuums to move around the smelly cafeteria where we met.

All very fun for eager 10-year-olds, but not near as much fun as going to NASA and hoping you pushed a wrong button that launched you and your buddies into space.

My mom, who as a teacher was one of the Young Astronaut leaders, had planned to go to that year's YA conference, but although my brain, like most young brains, understood she was going, I didn't comprehend what that meant until the day or two before she left. Once it clicked that she was about to go on a majorly cool adventure, I threw a fit and probably threatened to never talk to her again unless she let me go.

As my wee luck would have it, a small rural school my mom had once worked at was sending a busload of kids overnight to Houston (it was too late to get a plane ticket to go with Mom) and they had an extra seat. So I packed my little kid bags and headed to Bois D'Arc, which is where my parents were living when I was born, the night before the conference started. A TV crew was there, and KY3 anchor Tony Beason picked my little smiling face out of the crowd to interview for the nightly newscast (I ended up interning with him before starting Mizzou. Small world, huh?).

That long, dark bus ride was a milestone for me. Hunched in the rigid seats, I made fast friends with the older students, listening to the Beach Boys and Beatles on their Walkmans and checking out their teen magazines and for the first time getting what it meant to be cool.

By the time the sun rose, we were in a foreign land I now call home. Texas felt like the Deep South and going to NASA and touching the side of a rocket that had been in outer space made me even more sure that one day I, too, would go in space.

Hearing John Lennon sing "Help" might have given me a glimpse of the grown-up world, but I still embraced my childhood dreams.

In fact, as illogical as it might seem, this group of food journalists is going to NASA today, hypothetically to learn about the challenges of feeding astronauts in space, but for at least for one of them, it will be more about revisiting those eager, precocious days where anything was possible, the realities of adulthood be damned.

(If you want to see if I "accidentally" launch us into space on the field trip to NASA today, check out my live-tweeting of the conference, over on Twitter.)