Touching the Moon

I was on our front porch, taking my turn at the crank on the ice cream machine. Everyone else was inside, at the TV.

“They’re starting!” someone must have yelled, and I must have run inside, and the ice cream must have sat unturned for a good while, because I remember how slowly thing went up in outer spaceeven once it had started all the astronautical fussing and deliberateness just to climb down a short latter—though I wouldn’t trade that suspense for anything.

After thousands of centuries of waiting, you want a moment like this to last.

There were a few seconds that no one but me seems to remember—a disruption in the matrix—when the TV image flipped over, and Neil Armstrong was upside down, ascending instead of descending towards the moon, which made a kind of sense, but wasn’t how I wanted to watch it happen or remember it. Happily, the picture righted itself in time for the final hop down into shadow, like dropping into shallow water, a slowed-down jolt of human contact—but definitely contact—with, we were all hoping, so we could breathe our first breath of a new age—with that other world. But that world was still hidden from us by that last foot or two of the darkness of outer space. We weren’t sure he was all the way to the moon yet. Was there still more distance to cross, more careful astronaut business to attend do? But then we heard those famous first words for the first time. We were there.