This is the memory palace. I'm Nate DeMail.

Charles Duke was 25 that spring when man first went to space.

He was 26 when he met Dottie.

He was on leave from the Air Force, at MIT.

He went there to get his degree in aeronautics, and found out they also had something called astronautics.

And it sounded cool. So he did that too.

Dottie was a secretary at Harvard Business School.

They were both from the South, and they fell in love, and complained together about the winter, and were married in the spring.

He got his masters, got into test pilot school, the Edward's Air Force Base in California.

Dottie liked the sound of California.

Didn't think of the desert when she thought of California though.

Soon her husband was never around, and her day is well-heat, and dust, and dashed dreams.

Charlie was 29 when their first son was born.

And when he saw this thing in the Sunday LA Times, front page, said NASA was looking for more astronauts, for the Apollo program, for the moon.

And that sounded cool.

Sounded cooler to Dottie, who thought lugging a baby around Houston would be an upgrade over the Mojave Desert.

Charlie was 31 when their second son was born.

And Charlie was never around.

He was training to be an astronaut.

He loved all of it, loved learning, loved the long hours, the weeks away, studying geology and Oregon and Hawaii and Iceland in Alaska, jungle survival and Panama.

Learning how to troubleshoot the far ultraviolet spectrograph, how to perform a trans lunar injection.

While his sons were learning to walk, how to make sure their lower case jays dipped beneath the line, like a fish hook, while his wife was learning to do everything, everything at the house.

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