Tracy Drain

And then you saw where the comet pieces came in, these dark bruises of this like dark, rusty, almost dried blood, dare I say.

color on the surface and my understanding from the scientists is that as these big chunks of comet went in going punching into the atmosphere they got deep where the pressures were high and the temperatures were high and they kind of detonated and exploded this darker material up onto the clouds and so i learned that if you can if you imagine looking at jupiter as a three-dimensional object that the darker bands are deeper inside the lighter bands

Yeah, so my earliest memories really are me living with my mother, my brother, who's two and a half years older than I am, and my grandmother.

So I was very fortunate to have two moms for a while until my mom remarried when I was about 10, and then it was my mother, my stepfather, myself, and my brother.

You know, I was very, very fortunate that when I was in first grade, I actually got in trouble a bit for talking way too much in class.

But my stroke of luck was that my teacher, rather than saying, this is a problem, child, please get her out of my hair, sent my mother a full one-page handwritten note in 1982 that essentially says, Mrs. Williams, my mother's maiden name at the time, your daughter will not stop talking to you.

I ask her to stop talking, I put her in a corner, she talks to herself.

But near the end it says, I think she's bored.

She finishes her work early and she doesn't know what to do with herself.

So next year, why don't we put her in some more accelerated classes?

And that really did change the entire trajectory of my life.

She was so supportive in everything that I've ever done.

I...

Yeah, it's hard to even express how grateful that I am to have a mom who was like that.

She herself didn't like super duper love school.

She loved history and some elements of school, but she kind of ran screaming from school and was kind of done with that world and wanted to have her family and have her job and live, you know, air quotes, normal life.

But she always thought it was...

cool that I was interested in school.

And she always bought me books and exposed me to different things, got me piano lessons, like everything to kind of broaden my horizon.

Always.