Apollo 11: Looking Back, and Forward
Today I find myself remembering a particular visit home to grandma’s house. My grandmother, Mimi, we called her lived in Evergreen, Alabama and we lived in Nederland,Texas, so it had been a long drive for my small attention span. Are we there yet? My mother (in the wisdom that is ingrained in a mother’s DNA) told me to look for the big red clay hill and then I would know we were there. Magic, no more questions, but then jumping excitement when the big clay hill beside Baggett’s service station was spotted.
This was not my earliest memory, but it was the earliest memory that I can date specifically because it was the summer of Apollo 11. We had traveled all that distance in a white mustang to visit with my grandparents in their antebellum home with the high ceilings and the crystal chandeliers. These were the summers of homemade ice cream, watermelon seed fights and Papa’s dog Peanut howling at the horn when the freight train came through town.
Shortly after we arrived the lunar landing was aired on television. I remember the image of my grandfather and his reaction better than I remember the actual landing and my own reaction. It was many years before I understood the significance of the history that was taking place or to appreciate its place for him.
Papa sat on a round piano stool next to the upright piano. It was the kind of stool that had claw feet over glass casters and a wide wooden screw in the center underneath the seat allowing you to turn the seat to adjust the height. I rarely saw Papa without the business shirt he wore every day, but on this day he wore a sleeveless undershirt. When they landed, he scratched his head and said “Golee”, not nearly as exaggerated, but somewhat reminiscent of Gomer Pyle from the Andy Griffith show. I don’t remember that being a word he used often.
As I grew older I began to hear my grandfather speak about his life and the things that he had seen. One of the things Papa remembered was when the first person brought the first car to town. I was struck by how much technology had changed from the time he was a small boy until the time I was a small girl. I watched the lunar landing with a man who knew a life before automobiles came into his.
Changing technology is constant and I have seen my share. I remember large cell phones with larger batteries, life before the Internet and I also remember my daughter questioning me as though I had misspoken “What do you mean you didn’t have VCRs when you were a kid?” Still, I’ve never seen change like he saw change. Trying to put myself in my grandfather’s shoes is difficult. This person who often drove me to Sleepy’s Drive-In for a soft serve ice cream cone after dinner remembered when it was the cost of hay that fueled transportation rather than the cost of gas and I was with him while we watched men walking on the moon. He saw many more changes before he left us.
Today as we look back and marvel that many Americans carry more sophisticated technology in their pockets than the computing systems that took men to the moon, I can only wonder what changes I may see when I have seen as many years as my grandfather did. When my son was young, I subscribed to MIT Technology Review because I knew that he would read it if it was sitting around the house. Every once in a while I’d be half listening as he, who was also a Star Trek fan, would talk about something he had read and I would have to stop him to check and see if he was off in the imaginary world, or if it came out of MIT. I am reminded of Arthur C. Clark’s quotation “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” I look forward to seeing the magic that will be our future and I hope that we use it well.
