Dateline July 20, 1969: My immediate family was ensconced in the UK, visiting our grandparents, aunts, uncles and sundry other long-lived relatives and friends before they kicked off, and happy to belong to the tribe that Mr. She would–decades later–come to refer to as the Dúnedain, because of our long-livedness and generally extraordinary compos-mentisness. (A few failures along the way. You can’t win ’em all.)
At the same time, the United States was, in an effort to fulfil JFK’s promise, about to put a man on the moon. My Dad, who was–just like the late Mr. She–a gadget freak extraordinaire, was fascinated and we rented a television for the summer for the singular purpose of watching the moon landing. (Just to clarify, Mum and Dad kept the house they bought in the Worcestershire countryside shortly after their 1950 marriage for £1,800 until their deaths. So we always had a place to land when we went “home.”)
At that time (1969) many homes in the UK didn’t have a television at all. Just as they didn’t have a telephone. My parents had the first phone in the neighborhood, and for a couple of decades we had a piggy-bank on the shelf by the phone, and neighbors who came round to use it would feed the money into the slot to cover the bills. DROitwich Three-Oh-Double-Two, if anyone wants to check.
So late at night, July 20, 1969, we–and quite a few of our neighbors who didn’t have a TV of their own–gathered in front of our rented television for a party and celebration. It’s a fond memory, one I’ll never forget.
Fast forward, about forty years.
Dad has been dead for two years. Mum has–effectively–lost her marbles. And the only close family member who remembers that night is me. (Or “I” as the grammar Nazis might posit.)
My sister, God bless her, has taken Dad’s slide collection and had the thousands of them digitized into JPG format. I wish we’d done it several years before and could have gone through it with him before he died. (Just a thought for you all.) The pictures were impressed on a CD, and–on a subsequent visit to the UK–I got my own copy and, when I got home, loaded them onto my PC photo editing app.
“Hang on,” I thought while I was going through them. WTH are these? Mistakes? (Why are we paying for mistakes???)
There were these, and several more.
Eventually, the memory.
Dad, taking photos of the television screen. Dad, running outside with his camera at the moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon (surely–if you look hard enough–you can see him, stepping onto the moon, in the first photo above? I know I can).
Dad, excited like a small child. That was the best of him.
That was then.
Decades later I came to discover that others shared such memories with me, including my eventual husband and his children who celebrated the fourth birthday of his oldest son–and their older brother–that same night.
Soon, all of us who remember that event will be dead. And it’ll be up to the intelligence of the ages, either real or artificial, to decide whether it was real or not. I’m hoping, and voting, for reality over artifice.
But–although I’m pretty clear on reality–I’m not sure it will prevail.
What say you?
Note: Photo at top of post was taken by Armstrong, of Aldrin, on the moon on July 20, 1969 and is in the public domain. See here.
