Thinking Back ...

It's July 16, 2009.

48 years ago -- hard to believe it's that long -- my Grandma Sadie died. I was eight years old. I loved and adored her, and had been sad that she didn't choose to live with us after we moved into our house just months earlier. In fact, she had told my parents that she was going to live with us so that they would take the money she offered to help them buy the house, and she did move with us, and stayed a little less than a month, and then basically said "Ha ha just kidding" and moved back in with my aunt, to the town in Massachusetts she had lived in for over forty years.

I didn't go to the funeral with my parents and sister, and I was angry at them for years for leaving me behind, but when I was older, they told me that I had been afraid to go, and they reluctantly left me with family friends. It was probably a good choice, if I was scared. Not ready to deal with it, I guess. I remember that one morning (they were gone for several days), the mom in the family I stayed with let us sit on the floor and eat our breakfast off of trays, still in our pajamas, because there was a rocket launch on TV. (It was a Mercury flight, the Liberty Bell 7, commanded by Gus Grissom.) It was very exciting, as I remember now. I don't regret not going with my family, because I don't have that memory of Grandma like that (not that the casket would have been open; that's not a Jewish thing.) I remember her smile and her holding me on her lap and her voice and the magic things that came out of her kitchen.

In 1969 -- forty years ago on this day -- they launched the first rocket to carry men to the moon. We watched on TV days later as they prepared to step out of the lunar module and onto the surface. If you didn't live before then, and men on the moon has always been a given to you, you can't imagine what it was like. The TV picture was poor, although now they always show it enhanced and clear, not the way we saw it that night. It was a hot summer night, and everybody everywhere was inside in front of a TV. We had just started using the air conditioner that summer, and it was a big one, so we all sat and froze, in the dark living room with the glowing TV on its portable stand in front of us. We didn't have a color TV then, but the moon pictures were in black and white anyway. (How would I know?) We watched, and we grinned, and couldn't believe it, and took tremendous pride that night not in being Americans, I think, but in being human beings.

And ... 32 years ago today, the Hubs and I said "Live long and prosper," among other things, and poof, married. 32 years. It's a long time, man.




watching THE FAMILY GUY :: ENTRY #2088
READING: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa