Can you remember what you were doing forty years ago? I can remember what I was doing exactly forty years ago. (Full disclosure: I usually can’t remember what I did last week.)
It was a day very, very much like this day in Vancouver — hot, sunny — except it was in Winnipeg, and therefore much hotter (and sunnier (and, it must be noted, mosquitoier)). And right around now I was exiting the Polo Park Cinerama theatre, having just had my 13-year-old mind blown by 2001: A Space Odyssey, a book I’d just read but was no closer to understanding after seeing Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of formalist freakouterry.
I was rushing home from 2001 on that day-after-my-Mom’s-birthday so many years ago, so that I could watch the moon landing on television. I loved all things space, and from that point until my second year in the University of Calgary’s astrophysics program, I wanted to work for NASA, I wanted to fly to space and I wanted to be a part of the first space colony.
I still want that last part, if for no other reason than it will now be possible to live and work in an environment in which all the mythologies of the millennia have been reduced to mere history, intellectual curiosities. I wonder if it’ll even happen within my lifetime? I can’t see Halliburton getting involved in anything so beneficial-to-science or unencumbered-by-greed, so prolly not.
Anyway, my parents couldn’t have pried my eyes from our television set that night, so they kinda gave up and let me stay up until well past 1AM to watch the moon walk itself. Are there any comparable events today which brings a family together around the television, filled with hope and fear and excitement, as much as did that event? I think: no.
8 comments
you still have the ‘winnipeg free press’ and ‘time’ issues from the moon landing?! no wonder you have 947 boxes of stuff to unpack.
TIME CANADA, my friend.
And they’ve been in storage boxes for decades. They went offsite in the first week.
I love the illustration in the WFP, it reminds me of old issues of Highlights Magazine. I want it on a t-shirt.
947 boxes – for real? Dang.
I think it is sad that the only landmark moments I have in my life are bad ones… like 911, or the Sunami… (obviously not first hand, but I can always remember where I was the moment I saw my first image of or heard of these events).
No, just fear.
Forty years ago, I wasn’t even hypothetical. Still, to someone my age the fact that the moon landing was accomplished with slide rules and LOTS of coffee is what amazes me.
I guess the closest thing for me in my own lifetime was the sight of folks taking sledge hammers to the Berlin wall, but that was more a sense of relief than wonder.
I remember peeping out from my mothers vagina to watch…
Stay classy!