At an H.M.S. Pinafore performance I played in sometime in the mid-1990s a dear friend of mine, visiting from out of state, brought along a guy who barely made an impression on me. We all went to Denny’s afterwards and my friend and I were so engrossed in catching up that I don’t recall speaking much to her friend (I am now picturing myself rudely never asking him anything about himself). Months later when she confided that he was courting her most gallantly in old-fashioned Southern style, I couldn’t remember his face. And what a shame that was, because I found out he was a most unique and memorable person: an M.D., a varsity gymnast, and a Navy pilot who was accepted into the NASA astronaut program in 1996. Grasping onto my extremely tenuous connection to the fascinating world of actual space travel, I checked in on David Brown’s NASA bio occasionally to see when he was finally going to get to go “up.” I kept checking even after he was no longer under consideration for Mr. “dear friend of mine.” His mission kept getting rescheduled, pushed back, again and again. But it did eventually happen. It ended in great sadness on Saturday morning.