Undergraduate / "David Buchine taught me" - person who has come into your life, how they affected you [3]

"A good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge." -Bertrand Russell

My quest for knowledge is traced to one person. My step-grandfather made only a cameo in my life, but he was a meteoroid landing in a hicksville: not to be forgotten, nor taken lightly. In a family of reality-television obsessed businesspeople, his affection through teaching was a welcome contrapositive.

David was one of my grandmother's many prospective husbands, so he did not leave a lasting first impression. But even with so many before him- the musician, the businessman, the stalker- Dave was different. It was not that he was an engineer (her first husband, my grandfather, was an engineer), but by nature of his outlook on learning. He wouldn't just color with me, he would make diagrams of the space shuttles he worked on. His anecdotes, rather than being quirky tales of his own childhood, explained the chemical reactions of hydrogen peroxide. When he gave me a turn with the television, it would pointedly be left on the History Channel rather than Cartoon Network. I was eight, and yet I was being held to the same standards as an adult.

No one had encouraged me so personally and fervently to do anything but act my age. He instead encouraged me to love knowledge, to embrace it like a comfort stuffed-animal. I didn't realize it at the time, but this sprouted from his own passion to learn. He knew everything, or every threatening question that Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy had to offer.

Dave was an antithesis to all I knew. He knew enough to profess in multiple subjects, head a company, or work as a politician. He, however, was content in a relatively basic, mid-income job as a launch engineer at Kennedy Space Center (he would even often joke that most of his time there was spent on crossword puzzles). After his passing, my grandmother told me he was routinely offered promotions, but he was steadfast with the position he took at the program's onset. He simply cared for his freedom and time more than prestige and responsibility. Meanwhile, my bloodline poured their own hearts into climbing the corporate ladder. From Dave alone, I discovered the meaning of content.

Rather unfortunately, from one of Dave's tales I learned the true meaning of the quote "With great power comes great responsibility." One particularly chilly launch date in 1986, Dave was working in the firing room. While running diagnostics on the shuttle, he noticed the particularly chilly temperature combined with the . He alerted his team, who notified NASA officials. NASA ignored his concerns, leaving he and his comrades nothing to do but pray. At eleven-fourty, the trembling engineers, too concerned to even look up at the gauges on their computer screens, knew the fate of the Challenger shuttle by Dave's sardonic quip: "The damn thing blew up."

While I wish I could say that he was an ideal human being, I have so much to learn from his mistakes. I learned that there must be a balance between knowledge and power, because it's as much of a shame to be an incompetent leader as it is to be a an over-endowed victim of bureaucracy.

Compared to the amount of time he spent in my life David taught me the most he could. Even if I wasn't always there to listen, he was always poised with a ladder to help me reach my potential. When he passed away in 2009 of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, quite possibly and ironically from all the rocket fuel exposure, it was beyond clear that he was someone worth remembering.