It was only a short block walk. Just five little houses on a little street in a little town between me and the end of my trail. I was ten years old – it was 1969 – and I was trudging up the sidewalk to my great-grandma’s house. This was one of the few times I was excited to make this journey, as this was a chore, another never-ending task set upon me. My great-grandma was eighty-two and was clinging on to her independence as fiercely as she could, but she knew the battle was lost. She had to accept dinner every night, made by my mother, and she had to allow someone to spend the night with her every night, which on this evening was my responsibility.
As I write this I still have decades to survive to reach her age, and the fifty years that have passed since the night I am recalling have not dimmed the memory. I better type this up now, however, because if my great-grandma is any indicator, I may not remember when the sixty-year mark arrives. This woman is infused in everything I write, all the decisions I make, and the life I have lived. She is the greatest testament to the tenacity of life I have every known. Born in 1887, or 89, I don’t think anyone could know for sure, she lost her slave-born mother and raised her siblings as best she could from age thirteen and lived through two world wars with an even more devastating influenza pandemic in-between. She grew up so poor the Great Depression was just slightly harder times to her and everyone she knew.
And here I was, at her doorstep, in time to turn on the television and share the first moon landing with her.
“You gonna watch it? I mean the moon landing!!” burst out of me as soon as the screen door closed, with all the enthusiasm a ten-year-old boy could contain. I was terrified she would prefer to watch Gunsmoke. She always preferred to watch Gunsmoke.
“Well, I’m gonna hafta,” she moaned. “It’s on all three stations.”
In the movies it all happened so quickly, but in real time, moon landings took forever. When I woke up that morning they were climbing into the lander. Then they talked back and forth for hours, each vocal burst ending with a squeak followed by longer periods of silence. To a ten-year-old, it made no sense to get this far and then be so patient when all they had to do was flip a few switches. It was lunchtime when they finally started down, and the landing had taken place in the afternoon between lunch and dinner. Even that took hours by itself. I hustled up the street not wanting to miss man’s first steps on another world, but I could have taken my time, as hours had passed since then and it was almost dark, and they still hadn’t gotten out to start walking around yet. It gave my grandma plenty of time to reminisce though.
“I remember when I saw my first horseless carriage,” she sighed. “I must have been eight years old. It was loud and obnoxious and smelled terrible. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want such a thing. My momma didn’t think much good would come out of it, and she was right. It’s just another thing for people to be greedy about. I never learned to drive one and don’t regret it. People ain’t done nothin’ but got fatter and lazier ever since.”
Now Grandma wanted to be picked up in one of those contraptions, currently going by the name of “station wagon” every Sunday morning in time for church, but I guess that was allowed under one of her many Old Sayings, which were the rules she repeatedly instructed me to live by, ‘You should try to find something good in everything.’
Once they finally crawled into the lander and pushed off, they left a very scared looking Michael Collins in the capsule alone. That was the guy I related too, not the duo falling toward their destiny as legends. He had to wait, and never set foot on the place he had come so far to see and wonder if he’d be returning alone to outpourings of pity, or in the company of others who would obscure him.
“Now gettin’ electricity was nice. Not having to light lamps or lug those blocks of ice into the icebox was something I could get used to in a hurry. I can’t remember what year that was, but I was married to my first husband and had your grandpa by then.”
She called it the icebox to this day, and sometimes called it “The Frigidaire”. The word ‘refrigerator’ never sprang from her lips. Walter Cronkite was getting excited, but the door to the lander was not open yet. I was pondering whether to call home to get special permission to stay up past my bedtime if Neil and Buzz didn’t get a move on. I had decided to beg for forgiveness instead by the time Grandma went on to her next topic.
“And then came radio. I liked radio a lot more than television. You could get things done while you listened to it. That is, unless you were stupid enough to believe Orson Welles and go running down the street like a bunch of scared chickens because you believed we were gettin’ attacked by Martians. I sat on my porch swing and listened to it. It wasn’t as scary as some of the other shows I’d heard. I got a good night’s sleep.”
“You watch television every night, Grandma,” I countered.
“That’s because they took the best radio shows off the air and put them on television, like Gunsmoke and Arthur Godfrey. And I don’t get much done now-a-days either!”
I figured at her age television was the best thing to happen to her. She could sit there and talk to it all day and never need much other company. She kept it tuned to CBS, so she wouldn’t ever have to change it from Marshall Dillon’s home network. That’s why it was Walter Cronkite droning on in the background. I couldn’t hear what he was saying over Grandma.
“And then Lucky Lindberg flew that plane across the Atlantic. Never thought I’d live to see that day. Never wanted to see it either, to tell you the truth. The Bible don’t say nothing about Progress being a Virtue. You can tell what God thought about it when his baby got snatched. What could possess a man to kidnap a baby and kill it, I’ll never know, but the Devil is strong in so many in the world. It never leads to any good, whether its money or fame a man is greedy for. I’ll keep my feet on the ground.”
Was she saying God sent the Devil to punish Lindberg for flying a plane? I knew better by now than to try to detangle it. There had been a helicopter in the grocery store parking lot one day and I had ridden it up and down, but I’d never been on a plane. I was planning on it someday, though. I wanted to fly everywhere James Bond did.
It was past nine when the door opened and a guy who looked like he was dressed in a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man outfit hopped down the steps and onto the dusty lunar surface. When I think back on it, I wondered who had set the camera up when I first saw it too, so the folks who say it never happened and was staged to fool the public have some credence in my mind. Except Neil flubbed his line. That kinda makes it less likely it was staged, because they could have done a second take, where he said, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” instead of “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” which made no sense to me when I heard it.
Grandma wasn’t impressed, but she was definitely shocked.
“They can’t get away from God no matter where they go. There ain’t nothing we need that God didn’t provide us right here on Earth. This world will never be a better place until we learn to live together here. And if we can’t do that here, on the paradise God created for us, what right do we have to spread our sinful ways to other worlds?”
“I don’t know, Grandma,” I gushed. “I’d like to go to the Moon, even Mars!”
I’ll never forget what she told me next.
“Well, don’t go there to find yourself. It’s a lot easier to just look in the mirror.”
So now, fifty years later, my Grandma is gone, and I’ve never been to the Moon or Mars or even into lower Earth orbit. Can’t say that I didn’t expect to watch men land on Mars with my children, but I can tell them they didn’t miss much. All the problems needing to be solved are here, on this planet. All the wonder and imagination required to fill a universe are here, on this planet. Neil was right the first time. It was one small step.
