One small step

The brief profile of astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the June 21 New York Times Sunday Magazine delighted me. He’s a hero of mine, and his dry sense of humor comes through in Deborah Solomon’s column.

When men first walked on the moon 40 years ago, it was big news at Camp Teela-Wooket in Roxbury, Vt. We were allowed to stay up and watch the one night of television we’d see during the month of July 1969. Most campers fell asleep before Neil Armstrong emerged for his walk; I was wide awake.

I was 10, away from home for the first time and for a month, wearing a uniform of stiffly starched light-blue cotton shorts, matching button-down camp shirt and precisely knotted red neck scarf. My mother, who suspected that even the Girl Scouts were a Fascist front, had allowed me to do this only because she was recovering from a near-death illness, and because I begged.

“But you’re sewing all those damn name-tags in your clothes,” she warned. I was probably 20 before I tossed out the last garment with that little blue-lettered KIMMIE MARLOWE tag sewn in with my ragged Frankensteinian stitches.

I fell in love with both camp and the space program that summer, and for some of the same reasons. Both transported me to a new place, the latter with nearly infinite possibilities.

If there has been any other event in my lifetime that’s appealed to such a broad swath of Americans, I don’t know what it is. Especially in the turmoil of the ’60s, it was rare for people in my world to agree on anything.

“If you were a boy, I’d shoot you in the knee myself to keep you from going to Vietnam,” my mother declared. My father wished our gutless enemies (any or all of them) would try to come ashore in New England where the flinty locals would set them straight. “They’d never get past the beach.”

Space travel, though, was fine all around. It was art, poetry, history, science, triumph (we kicked Russian butt!) and it united people in a way usually seen only during tragedies. There was a place out there without war or race riots or arguments over too-long hair and too-short skirts.

I’m surprised by the casual disregard for the space program now. Most of the time the launches and landings of our spacecraft are barely mentioned on the news. The idea of an orbiting workplace for scientists of both sexes and from many nations is no big deal.

It’s still a big deal for me. When I sit down at my computer in the morning, with its desktop background a NASA shot looking back at Earth, I get a tiny flash of what I felt in front of the TV that night the first big boot touched the powdery moon:

I am 10, my name-tags are securely in place; the heavens and the future are exactly the same thing.