Forty-eight years ago today, we landed on the moon.
I was not quite two. I watched with my mouth hanging open. And at the end, I announced "An-he wan go moom!" (I couldn't quite manage the g sound in my name) For years, I had to see the moon before I went to bed.
I dreamed of being an astronaut. Until I was 11 and my eyes went bad and I had to have glasses.
Then I decided to be ground crew or a space technician. So I studied and took the math and science classes and went to the engineering school
Seven years of adolescent dreams and three more years of hard labor pounding calculus into my skull came to a crashing end in 1989.
I couldn't handle the math.
I changed my major and got an English degree (GPA never lower than 3.8 after three years of academic probation) that will never feel like anything more than a consolation prize. I found it in the garage last week and set it carefully with my husband's. And tried not to sneer at myself for my failure, as I have so often over the last 28 years.
My dream was dead. Out of reach. I would never, ever have it.
I watched Hidden Figures this year. Good movie. And my heart beat a little quicker and my pulse raced with each launch. I am a child of the Space Age, who counted backward upside down in the recliner, who drank Tang, and who dreamed of going to the Moon, or Mars, of working on a space station. (And all this was BEFORE Star Wars and my love of SF)
I remember Skylab and the space shuttle. I know where I was when the Challenger exploded, and one of my teachers had been a finalist for the Teacher in Space contest.
But now I wonder, was it for nothing? Will we ever get back?
Today is a day of national pride, of personal grief, of hope and doubt for the future.
So today, I look back, and think of the great courage of those men. Of the hard work of all the men and women who got them there. And yes, An-he...and Nick...still want to go to the moon.
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