One small step

Daily writing prompt

If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?

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Thought about this a lot…some silly, flip answers…but, c’mon, this is serious blogging. Finally settled on Neil Armstrong.

July 20th, 1969 is one of those where were you when days. For me, 55 years slips away and I’m a kid at my grandparents’ house in Clearwater, FL. It was a typical 60s Florida house: terrazzo floors, covered patio, jalousie windows, a carport. They had a 19″ B&W TV on a rolling cart with a clicker VHF knob and a dial knob for UHF.

My brother and I were glued to the TV all day. A lot of nothing: mostly guys in white shirts and ties in front of flickering screens at Mission Control. Bits of radio discussion, unintelligible beeping, views of the moon never before seen. As a budding astronomer, I was transfixed.

At 3:17 pm came the electrifying announcement that the Eagle had landed; and after an interminable eight hours, Neil Armstrong…a quiet former naval aviator, Eagle Scout, pilot at 16…emerged.

A step; a puff of moondust from his boot; then his famous words. Unbelievable.

For me, two things afterwards resonated perhaps even more strongly than the landing.

The first was the picture of the earth from the moon; this blue-green marble, somehow impossibly simply hanging in space. Everything I’d ever heard about darkness and light, lesser and greater lights, brooding over the waters, came to mind.

I also later learned that Buzz Aldrin had snuck aboard some Communion wafers and a tiny container of wine and celebrated Communion on the moon: “I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup,” he told Guideposts magazine. “It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.”

Neil slipped quietly away in 2012; Buzz is still going strong at 94. But as I take Communion this Sunday, I’ll think about two guys in a tiny ship on a different world more than half a century ago and how we are all marvelously connected through time and space in a way we can’t really comprehend. Yet.