Moon and memory
I've been a little melancholy all day. It's my Dad's birthday and he would be 87 today if he were still with us. Of course, ever since '69 the lunar landing and Daddy's birthday have been inextricably linked in my mind, no danger of me ever getting the date wrong! It's also been just over a week since I took The Boy off to camp and while I am enjoying my free time and turning off that whole portion of my brain I've reached that point where I really miss him. So, a little nostalgic, a little introspective, a little blue.
Sib 2 and Sib 3 and I were chatting on Saturday and it's sort of strange and wonderful how different sense memories can be: I was 6, Sib 3 was 16 and Sib 2 18 but we were all there in the same dark living room with the big old console TV with those amazing images glowing on it. Birthday cake and candles and singing, and two other families over for the evening. Laying on the old braided rug with our beagle Freddy and listening, listening. All the long silences. Adults holding their breath; knowing that Mom had her rosary in the pocket of her dress "just in case". Daddy opening champagne after the landing and yes, even 6 year olds had a glass (half a glass).
I remembered having guests but the Sibs remembered who they were and that the men were all engineers, and former pilots, like Daddy. Sib 3 remembers using an illustration from The Houston Post to help Mom make an "appropriate" rocket on Dad's cake.
And then it comes back around to the realization, unexpectedly startling, that it was Dad's 47th birthday, he was just a year older than I am now. Which is... odd. He was born into crushing poverty, was the first in his family to go to college and graduate school but also the first to finish High School, to grow up speaking English as well as French. When he piloted The Slick Chick, a B-24, for 33 missions out of Ipswich during WWII he was "the old guy" on the crew... at 22. Of course he was married then, with Sib 1 on the way. So yeah, at 47 he had a child in graduate school, two in High School, one in Jr, High, and one about to start second grade (me). He'd been working for the same company, the one he would retire from decades later, for nineteen years and had either 4 or 5 patents in his name (we're all a little fuzzy over what was '69 and what was '70). Over the next three years he would lose both his parents to cancer, his best friend of three decades in a small airplane crash, and Sib 4 to a drunk driver. But on that night we watched, breathless, and we dreamed and Dad coaxed us all outside to gaze up at the moon and try to wrap our heads around the idea that Americans were on that surface. And we lifted our glasses.
Daddy, I miss you still! Thanks for teaching me to dream. Tonight, I'll go out and look up at the moon, and lift my glass to you!
Sib 2 and Sib 3 and I were chatting on Saturday and it's sort of strange and wonderful how different sense memories can be: I was 6, Sib 3 was 16 and Sib 2 18 but we were all there in the same dark living room with the big old console TV with those amazing images glowing on it. Birthday cake and candles and singing, and two other families over for the evening. Laying on the old braided rug with our beagle Freddy and listening, listening. All the long silences. Adults holding their breath; knowing that Mom had her rosary in the pocket of her dress "just in case". Daddy opening champagne after the landing and yes, even 6 year olds had a glass (half a glass).
I remembered having guests but the Sibs remembered who they were and that the men were all engineers, and former pilots, like Daddy. Sib 3 remembers using an illustration from The Houston Post to help Mom make an "appropriate" rocket on Dad's cake.
And then it comes back around to the realization, unexpectedly startling, that it was Dad's 47th birthday, he was just a year older than I am now. Which is... odd. He was born into crushing poverty, was the first in his family to go to college and graduate school but also the first to finish High School, to grow up speaking English as well as French. When he piloted The Slick Chick, a B-24, for 33 missions out of Ipswich during WWII he was "the old guy" on the crew... at 22. Of course he was married then, with Sib 1 on the way. So yeah, at 47 he had a child in graduate school, two in High School, one in Jr, High, and one about to start second grade (me). He'd been working for the same company, the one he would retire from decades later, for nineteen years and had either 4 or 5 patents in his name (we're all a little fuzzy over what was '69 and what was '70). Over the next three years he would lose both his parents to cancer, his best friend of three decades in a small airplane crash, and Sib 4 to a drunk driver. But on that night we watched, breathless, and we dreamed and Dad coaxed us all outside to gaze up at the moon and try to wrap our heads around the idea that Americans were on that surface. And we lifted our glasses.
Daddy, I miss you still! Thanks for teaching me to dream. Tonight, I'll go out and look up at the moon, and lift my glass to you!