A Trip to the Moon and Back

I have no photographs of the event, no snapshots except in my memories, but then again, we rarely do for our most profound moments.

Today July 20 commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong's dance on the surface of the moon.

For some reason, on that hot summer day in 1969, I was not working one of my many part time jobs as a teenager.  I was not quite 16, the legal working age at the time, but I had worked for years in a variety of tasks that I could find, including babysitting for 50 cents an hour.  My dad had been out of work at this point for a couple years, and after a while, when no jobs materialized, he decided to start his own company, cobbling things together in our basement, inventing in borrowed lab space from a church friend, and selling dental materials of the trunk of his car.   My mom contributed the best she could by teaching beginning violin students in our living room at all hours of the day, for five dollars per hour, and sometimes for the music alone. 

My grandmother, who had lived with us from before I was born, held us and the household together in more ways than one.  My grandmother cleaned, laundered, and creatively stretched every dollar, "making do" with whatever was in the cupboard.  We never went hungry, but we had some rather unusual meals, and she thought that we didn't notice when she watered down the milk to make it last longer.

But on that momentous day, she dropped all her daily urgent duties and hobbled down the linoleum tiled stairs to sit in the dark coolness of the basement with my youngest brother and me --the only ones home at the time -- to see the Apollo 11 spacecraft perilously land on the moon and see the astronauts walk on its surface.  We sat together, sometimes commenting on what we saw, sometimes in silence, sometimes in awe of what was happening like a suspense movie on the small screen of our only television, relegated to the shadowy dank basement.

But with all the drama played out before us, what stood out to me was sitting together with her.  As soon as we heard Armstrong's voice, "A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind," she was reluctant to leave and instead lingered, just being with us in those sacred moments.

When I look at Your heavens,
the work of Your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
      which You have set in place,
what is man
   that You are mindful of him,
and the son of man that You care for him?

                                      Psalm 8. 3-4



"And to think," she finally said in her gravelly voice, "I went from horse-drawn wagon to seeing a man walk on the moon.  Imagine that."  This wrinkled gracious woman, who could now barely walk with her arthritic knees, was born in 1882 in rural Kentucky.  As a girl of eight, she traveled with her family by wagon to dusty Fort Worth, Texas, which I am sure seemed the other side of the moon to her at the time.

What I remember most about that day in 1969 is that she didn't rush off when there were so many other pressing and visible needs calling for her attention.  She saw a different angle on significance.   

As I can see it now -- as a grandma myself-- one of her pressing needs was just being with me.  Over the few years I had with her, she had a profound impact on my life in the way she daily lived out her faith in God in word and deed and never with the remotest shadow of fanfare.  She lingered.  And that is what impacted me.  Just being together.

Little did I know that in just three short months, her heart would run out of beats one morning, and she would slip away suddenly to the Other Side of life.  And those ordinary daily moments when she'd stop everything to listen to me, help me with some impossible dilemma that seemed insurmountable at the time, or just to be there, those moments of incalculable value are still fresh in my mind and heart, fifty years later.

Two evenings ago when I was helping out at our daughter's home here in town, my four-year-old granddaughter, trying as usual to stretch out the day, chose two books to read before bed, one about Penny the mouse and the other about Pickles the fire cat.  We lay down on her little bed with its puffy blue and pink unicorn comforter, side by side, reading page after page past her bedtime.  And I thought:  What will she remember 50 years from now?

I hope the lingering.