7/20/69
I was twelve years old when my family sat around a black and white tv and watched Neil Armstrong step onto gray alien dust. We were at a vacation home on Lake Ontario, the Speakman camp, the same place I mentioned in my vacations and food entry last week. In all the years we rented that place, that was the one moment that really connected us to the world. Lake Ontario connected us to Canada, but that tv broadcast touched the whole world.
The remarkable part was that it was live television from outer space. In the Mercury and Gemini days, it seemed that what we mostly had was garbled radio voices on tv. But by 1969, thanks to the space program, history could be watched as it happened, all around the world. The sound and picture quality were dreadful by today's standards, but it was "one giant leap" forward in quality since the early days of manned space flight, when I didn't have a clue what the guys in the capsules--or at Mission Control--were saying.
Because of the improved sound and those handy telecommunications satellites, we got to hear Neil Armstrong mess up his historic quote. Have you ever noticed that "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" doesn't actually make sense? That's because he meant to say, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." He composed and rehearsed it, but when the time came, he blew the line. For years he insisted that he'd actually said it right, only to have one word of it go missing due to poor sound quality. Recently, however, someone played it back to him, and he finally owned up that he got it wrong after all.
Anyway, that historic snafu, and the amazing accomplishment that surrounded it, happened 35 years ago tomorrow as I write this. Always mindful of Mumsy and her haiku journal, I offer this small tribute:
Grainy images
Enthralled the Earth when Neil made
Footprints on the Moon
Because the Night
NPR today (I know: I mention them a lot) had a Talk of the Nation segment on the night, a ridiculously broad topic if I ever heard one. Sure, you can rattle off zillions of song titles, quote poetry, talk about the Dark Skies initiative, remember that Neil Armstrong's little stroll was after 10 PM Eastern, and explore the mysteries of sleep, dreams, insomnia, fear of the dark, diurnal rhythms and so on. But where's the unifying theme?
For me, night time is not particularly romantic or mysterious or frightening or desperate or beautiful. It's simply the time I'm most awake and creative. Night time is for blogging, for homework, for work on the novels, for researching the careers of journeyman actors on IMDb. If I could do it and still earn a living, I would get up around 1 PM, eat, work until 6 or 7 PM, eat, spend time with John, then read and write until about 4 AM, take a bath and go to bed. That would be my ideal schedule. Unfortunately, my brain insists on approximating that schedule as much as possible. So I get up around 8:30 AM after hittting the snooze bar at least once, drag myself to work, come home at 6 PM, mess around on the computer until 2 or 3 AM, sometimes later (possibly with a side trip to do homework at B&N until closing time), take a bath, and get to bed in time to get 5 hours of sleep, which is NOT enough for me. So if I goof off at work long enough to write a journal entry, it's because I'm so tired that I feel the need to take a break and do something creative.Oddly, sleep deprivation doesn't seem to be a detriment to creativity, but it does seem to get in the way of processing invoices and checks and charge slips. It also generates typos.
The most interesting thing that surfaced on TOTN today was the notion that a large number of creative people are/were night owls. The writer of the book Acquainted with the Night didn't endorse a caller's suggestion that linked being right-brained with being a night owl, but it sounds plausible to me.
Wake me up when it's time to go home. Not really--I held out until after work to write this. But it's very true that when midnight comes around, I'll probably be much more awake than I am now.
Karen
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2 comments:
I was 16. We were in my parents bedroom, watching on the small set there. I was sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, my parents on their bed. My sister, who's younger than me and didn't seem to care, was elsewhere--her room, I guess. I had a tape recorder playing next to the radio in my room and I might still have that tape somewhere. I'll never forget that day.
this is terrific! You probably happen to know I am a closet space junkie. I remember this even like it was yesterday. The forwarded haiku will be posted in a mere second.... assuming I can do this from the web.
Thanks for the pimp, too! And thanks for the congrats on Ed's Pick-- I'm especially honored to be representing all the 'ku=gang in Most Creative category of the ongoing awards. Appreciate your continued submissions. The next month will be devoted to the One-Year anniversary haiku I've been collecting.
~~mumsy
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