the rix mix

I remember. I was hanging out with a nutty girl outside her house on a warm summer evening. The Eagle had landed earlier. Her mom came to the door & said the man was about to walk on the moon. So we went inside to watch. Very exciting.

As extraordinary an achievement as it was, it was more astonishing to the girl's parents than to her & me. For them, the event was an end in itself, a man on the moon. For us, it was an expected beginning. We were hoping for a fast expansion of technology & exploration leading to a lunar base observatory, or a journey to Mars, or the cool space station from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the moon, with no natural resources to exploit, was a barren wilderness, a desert without oil beneath it. That was no surprise. Why keep sending humans there just to go for a drive in a car we used only once & abandoned?

The big news from space today was of astronauts unclogging a toilet.

Standard style guidelines say our moon should be capitalized as a proper noun only in relation to other proper noun celestial bodies: I see the Moon & Mars. I wished on the moon. The NASA style guide always capitalizes it.

The girl, who I never knew well - probably because I couldn't get in her shorts, became the only person from my Jersey hometown, Roselle Park, ever to phone me at the studio during 17 years of weekly shows at WFMU.

Labels: growing up, in the news