The Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum was a spur-of-the-moment decision, a way to fill the hour between Georgetown and Dulles Airport. I hadn’t been there for years — since long before the …

and the …

arrived there. And I was totally unprepared to have my eyes well up. I’m getting emotional about airplanes? Come on!

But the Discovery was so battered and patched, and the Concorde was so sleek and lean.

And they and all the planes and space capsules and satellites there were so much the stuff that dreams are made of that I just couldn’t help myself.

They were made for the sky, but they are earthbound now. No longer where they belong.