Moon Landing
Photo by NASA
Brother liked building models. He started with biplanes, then moved on to World War II planes like Spitfires and Wildcats. Eventually, he graduated from fighter jets with bombs to spacecraft. When he learned about the Apollo 11 mission, he went to the hobby store on Robert’s Lane, bought the Saturn V rocket, the Lunar Spacecraft, and the Lunar Module Eagle, and got to work.
Brother took model building seriously. He checked out library books so he could see pictures of real airplanes to compare. After cutting all the pieces off their plastic trees and organizing them, he studied the instructions, sanded the parts, glued them together, and painted them. I couldn’t understand why he spent so much time in his bedroom making toys instead of playing outside like me. Sometimes, I didn’t see him until dinnertime. When the glue smell gave Mom a migraine, she opened the windows in our single-wide trailer.
Placing decals was the finishing touch. After cutting them out with an X-Acto knife and soaking them in warm water, Brother used Mom’s old tweezers to slide each decal off its paper backing and place it where it belonged. When his model was finished, he’d park it on his bookshelf at the end of his bed, which doubled as an airplane hangar. Sometimes, he hung them from the ceiling with fishing line. Either way, I wasn’t allowed to touch them.
Meanwhile, Mom was excited about the upcoming Apollo 11 moon landing. She turned it into a Happy Acres Trailer Park event with a BBQ and a TV viewing party on the patio of our trailer space. She wanted to be surrounded by friends and family and celebrate when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
In the weeks before July 20, 1969, Mom became obsessed with space stuff. She bought Brother and me official Apollo 11 t-shirts with the bald eagle emblem landing on the moon. For breakfast, she gave us Tang because the astronauts drank it. When she wasn’t looking, I’d find the Tang jar and dip my wet finger into the sweet orange powder. She bought us peanut butter Space Food Sticks for snacks. And that was when Mom discovered Velcro.
When the historic day and moment arrived, everyone crowded around our TV on the patio and held their breath, even me. Neil Armstrong carefully climbed down the stairs of the Eagle and placed his foot on the moon's gray surface. I wasn’t as impressed as I thought I would be. I knew the moment was historic; Dad, Mom, Brother, and Walter Cronkite all said so, but I couldn’t see past the fuzzy image on our tiny black-and-white television. When Neil Armstrong said, "That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," I had to squint. To me, the astronaut and the moon blurred in shifting shadows. But I knew exactly when the astronaut’s foot touched the moon because everyone cheered and all the adults toasted with champagne.
"Where's your brother?" Mom asked.
He had the best view, but now he was gone. "I don't know," I said. Moments later, she found him in his bedroom, sitting quietly on his bed, overwhelmed by it all.
Later that evening, before bedtime, we went outside. Crickets sang in the summer air, and the man in the moon smiled at me on a washed-out canvas of twinkling stars.
"Just think," Dad said. "Right now, there are human beings on the moon. Today was human ingenuity at its finest, and the world as we know it will never be the same."
He was right.
We stood together in silence, gazing at the moon. In that quiet moment, I felt small in the vastness of the universe, and I finally understood why this day mattered so much to Brother.
