55 years ago today...
My paternal grampa told me he felt so lucky with his life. He said he experienced the first airplane flight (by news, not personally of course) and lived long enough to see humans land on the moon and return safely. He was very impressed by that.
And that was from someone who experienced WWI, The Great Depression, and WWII... I was only 19, so I did not properly understand the event at the time. In my life at the time, scientific advancement was routine and success was assumed.
Medicine was much advanced. I suffered appendicitis at 18. At my grampa's age, I probably would have died. And I was vaccinated agains several serious diseases. In college, I was using a computer data center to write code (on punch cards) in Fortran and COBOL. I could drive the family car, which was relatively solid and safe (station wagons were the SUVs of the time). Food was refrigerated, safe, and abundant. We had TV and A/C.
At my age then, grampa had none of those things. And I suppose grampa was impressed by those things too when I was 19. But the moon landing seemed to impress him very greatly. In spite of the negative events of his (somewhat difficult) life, he remained a fairly cheerful and positive person. He saw the advancements more than the failings of the world.
He was an organic gardener. "Garden" doesn't quite describe it. It wasn't a residential garden like we are familiar with today, but neither was it a farm. It was about 1/2 acre, which he attended to happily when he wasn't building stuff in his large workshop. I followed in his organic gardening habits and wood-working because of him (though on a much smaller scale.
And I don't want to leave gramma out. She cooked wonderfully (Pennsylvania Deutch style). When we visited, I would sit on the porch with her de-stringing beans and de-silking corn, helping in the kitchen too. When I'm not strir-frying, I'm cooking basically like she did but with a a bit less frying. "Like", not remotely as well (I still can't make a decent dumpling)...
But I mention her because she was fascinated by "outer space". When we landed on the moon, she told me that if we could go "out there", then some other intelligent species could come "down here". And she trusted the advancement of intelligent species. She said that if a spaceship landed here, she would volunteer to go aboard.
So for both of them (and for general reasons), I wanted to honor this day...
