This was not Dancing with the Stars—this was Walking on the Moon.
It was 40 years ago this month that all over the world people gathered around
televisions and watched live pictures of two Americans walking on the moon.
I guess it was the time and place that I grew up, but I still find that
absolutely amazing. In fact, I think when it’s discussed, we’re way too casual about it. The words should slow down so that we can give
proper weight to their meaning: People. Walked. On. The. Moon. On. Live.
Television.
I remember that day, July 20, 1969, as being like any other summer Sunday.
My family gathered at my grandmother and grandfather’s house. I was there with my Mom and Dad and brother, along with assorted aunts
and uncles and cousins.
I was 11 years old, and this Sunday gathering was typical. We would meet for
Sunday dinner, and the children would go off to the side yard to play ball or
chase each other around, and the adults would sit under the shade trees in the
front yard and talk about the weather, or the children, or how the garden was
doing.
This particular July Sunday was different, though, because these topics of
conversation were overwhelmed by the fact that astronauts were getting ready to
set foot on the moon.
Being 11 years old at this moment meant that I had been almost three years old
when the first manned flight took place, and literally could not remember a
time when the current events of the day didn’t include a regular diet of space shots and near-deification of astronauts.
Those of you who are older had more context. My grandparents, at whose house we
gathered that day, for example, had been teenagers when Charles Lindbergh flew
the Atlantic, and had been born less than a decade after the Wright brothers
flew at Kitty Hawk.
Those of you who are younger have no idea of the excitement of that time. We
were sure that soon it would be commonplace for people to travel to and live on
the moon. There was a popular children’s book called You Will Go to the Moon. We believed it.
So after the evening meal, instead of everybody saying their goodbyes and
heading for home, we all worked our way into the living room and gathered
around the floor model black and white television in the corner. The couch and
chairs filled up, some extra chairs were brought in from the dining room, and
some of us sat on the floor.
Eventually—I remember it as being late, but it probably wasn’t—there was a fuzzy image that you could make out as the outline of the lunar
module against a background of the horizon of the moon and black space beyond.
Then a slow-moving, out of focus figure moved down the ladder from the
spacecraft, and then he was standing on the moon. His name was Neil Armstrong,
and soon he was joined by Edwin Aldrin.
As we drove home that night, I leaned out the back seat window of our car, and
looked at the moon, high in the dark summer sky. My Dad had the car radio tuned
to a news broadcast and the voices of the astronauts came from behind the
lighted radio dial. I didn’t understand the science, I didn’t understand the politics, but I knew that, at the age of 11, I had seen
something extraordinary in human history.
This may be a grown man embellishing the feelings of the boy of long ago, but I
remember feeling genuine awe. And I remember being thankful for being alive to
see it.
Sometime in the early 1990s, Sharon and I were at Bellevue Mall, wandering
around in search or something or another. I don’t remember.
As we walked through the mall, I could hear somebody giving a speech in the
stage area for speakers and public performances. The words grew more distinct
as we drew nearer the center of the mall, and I could also see sort of a sparse
crowd sitting around listening to the speaker. He was a tall man with white
hair and was dressed in a light blue sport coat, and looked more or less like
the proprietor of a prosperous golf accessories shop.
I heard him say something about the importance of education in achieving goals
and I was about to tune it out. Then I heard him allude to the Apollo project.
I looked closer.
The speaker was Edwin Aldrin, astronaut, American hero, the second man to walk
on the moon. His appearance was part of a promotion the mall was putting on
that day in hopes of drawing in more shoppers.
He finished his speech to polite applause, and a few people came up and gathered
around him to ask a question or shake his hand.
It seemed difficult to reconcile the decidedly non-heroic looking man at the
mall with the figure I remember from when I was 11. There was a time in the
summer and fall of 1969 when it was almost literally impossible to pick up a
magazine or newspaper without seeing something about the astronauts who had
landed on the moon. Their faces looked down from a million bedroom walls of
young dreamers who thought they were going to follow their trail to the stars.
Well, for one reason or another, it didn’t work out that way. I’m not going to the moon, and you aren’t either. When Edwin Aldrin and I found ourselves at the same place, it wasn’t in a space capsule, it was at a mall. A long way from that summer night in
1969, when anything, anything, seemed possible.
