Diary

50 years ago today, men landed on the moon.  If you're old enough, you will remember exactly where you were at that moment, like the day Kennedy was assassinated.  The 60's decade was filled with momentous events; this was one of the few good ones.

I remember watching TV that evening at Uncle Mark and Aunt Ruth's ranch near Colorado Springs. At one point we went outside to look at the moon above the prairie, and marveled there was a man "up there." I can't remember any other details about that night.  Who else was there?  How did I get there? At that point, I had already been on my own for about 2 years.

Enter the old diary...

Long before blogs, I wrote an entry, every day, religiously, from about 1969-1975. Many people kept diaries back then. There seems to be a basic human need to put things down.  For better or worse, now we have social media.

I opened the dusty box of books, and found out that in July we were on the road, driving from Memphis to California in a VW bug, with all our worldly possessions inside. Poor as church mice, were just passing through Colorado. But that's a story for another post...

Aunt Ruth, always so generous, had us over for dinner to watch the landing.  Other family members were there, like Grandma, who had just returned from a trip to Germany and gave me a Hummel.  A precious gift at the time, and I still have it. I would never have remembered all this without that diary. 

The fancier name "journal" came along later. Anyway, a diary was just a place to record the day's happenings. Looking back 50 years, there's nothing especially profound about what I wrote-- in fact, most of reads like a self-centered snooze. But I was still a teenager, so I'll cut myself some slack. At least I had the self-discipline to write every single day. And I wish my handwriting was still that good!

And here is it, July 20, 1969.  The moon landing mentioned almost as an afterthought in the days other events:

Man on Moon! Don't know how I neglected to write about it first. Watched it all on TV.  Fabulous--but hard to conceive. The pictures were so clear.