On a summer night in 1969

It’s been 49 years since man first landed on the Moon, and I remember that summer night with a clarity that both surprises and delights me.

I had been a science fiction fan ever since I graduated from Dick and Jane books to more substantive fare. I had traveled to many worlds, countless galaxies and across the universe and back in the company of adventurers, scientists, intergalactic space cops and extraterrestrials of every color, shape and size, aliens good and aliens very, very bad.

Going to the moon? Pish posh. Old hat.

Except, of course, that this was for real, and not some wild tale in Astounding Science Fiction or Amazing Stories, or one of Robert A. Heinlein’s brilliantly imagined novels like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel or Starship Troopers, Glory Road or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Nope. This was really happening. Apollo 11 had landed on the surface of the Moon earlier in the day, and now Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were preparing to leave their lunar module (why not just call it a spaceship, dammit) and take a walk around – an event that would change history forever.

My friend Scott Medford and I had been outside most of the evening, too excited to sit in front of my parents' black-and-white console TV and watch news coverage.

Scott lived across the street, and we had been buds since elementary school. He was one year younger than me, but that had mattered little for most of our lives. Things were about to change, however.

I had graduated from high school two months before, and Scott had a year to go. The one-year difference in age was about to widen into a gulf. College men (ahem) did not chum around with high school kids. I didn’t make the rules, I just lived by them. We both were beginning to realize that in many ways, this would be our last summer together, and this night – when man first stepped on the surface of the Moon – would be our last great adventure.

July 20, 1969, was a typical summer night in West Texas. Hot, zero humidity, not a breath of wind. As we lay on the driveway across the street from my house on Big Spring’s Morrison Drive, the wide open sky spread before us and not a single cloud blocked the wide expanse of stars. Strangely, I don’t remember whether the moon was up or not. I should remember that, given the extraordinary circumstances of the day. But I don’t.

I do remember the stars, bright and razor-sharp. If you stared at them long enough, they seemed to envelop you, sweeping you up off the hot, sun-warmed cement and propelling you out into the vastness of space, stars and more stars above you, below you and on either side.

And yet, instead of gasping for breath in the vacuum of space, you were breathing easily, slow, deep breaths, the smell of the newly cut lawn down the street strong in your nostrils.

 Breathing in and out, in and out, in … and then jerking upright at the sound of my mother calling from the front door. “Kerry, Scott, they’re about to open the hatch,” she said, her voice tight with excitement.

We hurried inside and joined her and my father in front the TV to listen to an emotional Walter Cronkite describe the scene with growing delight and satisfaction.

None of us said a word. We sat huddled around the set and watched in complete silence, overwhelmed by the immensity of the occasion and lost in our own thoughts about what it all meant.

I remember feeling a little disappointed and then feeling guilty at being disappointed.

NASA, then as now, was run by engineers who had studiously scrubbed the romance and drama out of every vestige of the space program. For instance, that silly business of calling the astronauts' spacecraft a lunar module. Module? Holy Christ, save us from engineers!

To my teenage mind, NASA needed more Star Trek and less techno mumbo-jumbo. Thank God for Cronkite, who was as gleeful as a little kid and didn’t bother to hide it in stiff-upper-lip jabber like the NASA spokesmen did.

We watched Armstrong descend the ladder and step off into the lunar dust, uttering those famous words. For hours, we gazed in wonder as Armstrong and Aldrin went about their proscribed chores. Then Scott left for home and my parents went to bed. I stayed up until the moonwalkers were safely back in their spaceship, then turned off the TV and went back outside.

I lay down in the grass of our front lawn and looked unseeingly at the starry canopy above me. In eight days, I would turn 18, and I started college in a month. My body was abuzz with anticipation. About what, I did not know.