We live in a sufficiently small world, with sufficiently liberal prerequisites for fame, that most of us have had a brush with a famous person at least once in our lives. I have had at least three near misses myself. Only recently I discovered my name was in a book of letters to Christopher Reeve published about 10 years ago by his wife Dana. A friend of mine had written a letter of support after his accident, and had mentioned my name. And I performed ragtime music for Nadia Comaneci and the Romanian gymnastic team while in Romania many years ago, but perhaps that’s another post. My most thrilling brush with greatness occurred a couple of years ago, however, when I almost met an actual hero from my childhood.

I was booked to fly from San Antonio to Chicago, when I succumbed to the $150 upgrade option for first class. If you get the chance to fly first class every once in a while, you should take it. It’s like being taken across the country while sitting in your living room arm chair. And you encounter some seriously interesting people. In fact, on this trip I sat next to a guy who was on his way to meet with the emir of Dubai, because he was THE GUY everyone in the world consulted about oil exploration. Perhaps this post ought to be about him, as he more likely has a greater influence on the world than anyone else I’ve ever met (and he was a delight to talk with). But it’s not. Because sitting in the seat in front of me was a genuine Apollo astronaut: Captain James Lovell, along with his wife Marilyn.

Lovell, of course, was the commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. I was a child when the actual mission flew, but I recall thinking that they were never in any real danger; it was just the over-protectiveness of NASA which made them return without getting to walk on the moon. It took reading Lovell’s book, Lost Moon, and (like everyone else in the world) watching Ron Howard’s movie for me to realize what actual peril Lovell and his crew had endured.

At any rate, I wasn’t really aware that I was sitting directly behind an actual astronaut until the flight attendant gave it away while passing out hot towels. (Hot towels are another neat thing about first class, by the way.) “Hot towel? Hot towel? Hot towel?” he asked, as he moved through the cabin, flipping hot towels with a pair of tongs, until he got to the seat in front of me. “Hot towel, Mrs. Lovell? Hot towel, Mr. James Lovell Jr.? Captain James Lovell?Astronaut!?” The  suddenly obsequious behavior of the flight attendant got my attention. I was in the presence of a bona-fide American hero, quietly reading in the seat in front of me.

I had to know, after a while, what it was that American hero astronauts read while flying first class.  Technical manuals, perhaps? Maybe he was relaxing with the latest edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology.  So when the opportunity came to get up and stretch my legs, I glanced over the seat. He was reading Sky Mall.

I did not find an excuse to speak to Mr. Lovell on this trip. I have always thought that if I met an actual famous person, I would want to treat them as a normal person, which would mean not getting in their face, asking for autographs, or generally making a fool of myself. As I could think of no reason that he would want to know who I was (and believe me, I tried), I did not introduce myself. And so this would have been just another uneventful near miss, were it not for what happened when we landed in Chicago.

We were early, if you can believe it. Early enough, it turns out, that the previous occupants of our intended gate had not yet left, so there was no place for our plane to go. O’Hare ground control has prepared for this possibility; they have a couple of large empty spaces they call “penalty boxes,” and any flight impertinent enough to arrive early can be banished to one of them to wait its turn to park. Our pilots taxied over and shut down the engines, and we sat there in eerie silence.

And then I overheard Marilyn Lovell say quietly, “I need something from my purse.” Mr. Lovell did not respond. After a moment, she unbuckled her seat belt and stood up to open the overhead bin.

Suddenly James Lovell came to life. “You can’t do that!” he said.

“I just need something from my purse,” she replied.

“But you can’t do that! The light is on!” And he pointed to the fasten seat belts sign, which had indeed remained lit even though we were stopped and shut down.

Mrs. Lovell made some sort of face, continued searching through the overhead bin until she found her purse, and then sat back down.

“You can’t do that,” Mr. Lovell repeated one more time, for good measure.

And I thought, what a perfect moment. With that tiny exchange, I witnessed the essential nature of these two famous individuals: the astronaut who is alive today because of an innate trust in and adherence to the rules, and his wife, whose mere presence after more than fifty years of marriage, forty of which have been spent in a media spotlight, suggested she had learned to discount the rules when necessary, to make her own decisions, live her own life.

Suddenly I was happy that I hadn’t pushed myself onto this charming couple. As we de-planed, I watched him graciously sign the pilots’ manifest, which only reinforced my sense that these were genuinely nice people. Off they went, likely to their son’s restaurant in Lake Forest. And off I went to catch my connection, with a story better than any autograph.