Before you were born

Dear Rob,

I’m listening to radio stories about the upcoming 40th anniversary of the moon landing and thinking how strange it is that for you it’s all ancient history.  I am used to thinking of you as a kindred spirit whose take on the world is not all that different from my own.  But our experiences are vastly different, and this event will not mean the same thing to you that it means to me. 

The moon walk happened before you were born.  For you it is History.  For me it is Memory.  On July 20, 1969, your father and I were graduate students at Purdue, living in West Lafayette, Indiana in a little wooden house that had been divided into three apartments.  It was hot and humid, as in memory it is always hot and humid in Indiana, though surely it snowed there . . .

We gathered in Ann Rayner’s apartment because she had a television.  We opened dewy longneck bottles of beer and watched the coverage in grainy black and white.  (We could put a man on the moon but we had not yet mastered cellphones with cameras.  We still have not mastered them in Torch Lake Township.)  Other people say they felt a sense of awe.  I remember thinking, Huh – isn’t that interesting.  And then, What did he say?  We watched it several times over.  It was an event.  It wasn’t . . . earth-shaking.  Vietnam was earth-shaking.  The civil rights movement was earth-shaking.  The moon landing was . . . interesting.  

It was also the family business.  Your grandfather was, in 1969, just about five years older than you are now.  He was one of the IBM programmers–that esoteric profession no one had heard of a decade or so before–whose work made it all possible.  That first step on the moon was the beginning of a burgeoning space program that would absorb his very considerable intelligence for the next three decades.  You could do worse than to ask him to tell you what he thought of it all.  He’d probably tell you a better story than he’d tell me.  Grandparents and grandchildren are like that.   

So the moon walk, although interesting, did not shake my world.  It did make it larger, and more beautiful.  Sputnik, now, that was pretty earthshaking.  I remember when the Soviet satellite went up, and the U.S. was astonished.  Embarassed.  Frightened.  The Space Race was on, and we were determined to win.  It was a matter of national honor.  In our sixth grade classroom at Tillson Elementary School in upstate New York we soberly discussed what would be required for space travel.  Some of us were quite skeptical about the possibility.  What, we wanted to know, would the space travelers do for water?  Powdered water! opined one of the enthusiasts.  How would that work? the skeptics wondered.  Easy, the enthusiast replied.  Just add water and, and . . . oh.

Of course as it turned out all of us were right.  Space travel is demonstrably possible–we put a man on the moon!–but the question of how to assure a supply of water on Spaceship Earth is still open.  No matter how far we soar, we are tethered to the essentials of life.  And no matter how quaint you find my memories, we will always share that particular slant on Life and What It Is All About.  Mostly, it is all about a great blue marble in space.

Love, Mom

P.S.  The NASA photos were copied from Exploring the Moon–Discovering Earth.