A little bit of this, a little bit of that and a few things I learned on the way to someplace else.

The Eagle has (still) landed

Watching Monday’s news reflections on the moon landing - 40 years ago! - the man of the house and I had a few vivid memories of our own. Chatting about it in comfortable chairs - our own “tranquility base” - we quickly discovered that our recollections rocket off on different trajectories.

Married less than a year, we were apart for six long weeks that summer of 1969 as he, an ROTC student at Georgia Tech, underwent basic training at Fort Bragg. He and several new-found buddies had the weekend off and pooled their money for a motel room with two luxuries their spartan barracks did not provide: air conditioning and a TV.

Weary and, I suspect, a little bleary, he recalls having a hard time staying awake. ” It must have been near midnight before that ‘one small step for man,,’” he said. “It seemed like forever. Such a historic moment, and I was worried I might sleep through it.”

Funny, I said, I remember it being in the afternoon. I’m positive because I was in tiny Bowersville, Georgia, watching the momentous event on a tiny black and white TV with my grandmother. Yes, my grandmother.

Born in 1900, she’d walked to school on dusty roads and ridden to church in a wagon as a girl.. Her husband’s body came home from Emory Hospital on a train after his death during the Great Depression. Her oldest son’s ship was missing for a time in the Pacific during World War II. Grandmother flew on jet planes, several times, as a senior citizen.

And then, on that hot, humid Sunday afternoon, I watched her watch men land on the moon. During the tense descent, we huddled near the TV screen, straining to make sense of the grainy images, clutching each other and holding our breath.

I count it among the most mind-boggling moments of my life.

“Just think what I have seen in my life,” Grandmother said, unnecessarily. I’d been thinking about it the whole time.

“Isn’t this amazing!” she said, a statement, not a question.

What I remember best, of course,, was the “Eagle has landed’ moment, while the man of the house recalls the actual moonwalk hours later.

I ‘d had to drive back to Atlanta that afternoon and watched Neil Armstrong’s famous footsteps alone in a little apartment, tears streaming down my face. The enormity of the moment - and my aloneness - finally got to me.

No less than Arthur Clarke has said that, a thousand years from now, the only thing history will remember of the 20th century will be that man walked on the moon.

I’m not too sure about that. More than half the American people alive today weren’t born in 1969.

It’s impossible for today’s texting, twittering, techno-generation to really understand how magical it was to see the moon landing, live, as it happened. They expect that of every event, every day.

Still, I pray there comes a moment, when my grandchildren are young adults, that we can share some momentous happening and my voice will quiver and trail off.

“Just think what I have seen in my life,” I’ll say.

Member of the family

It was sad, but somehow appropriate, that Walter Cronkite’s death coincided so closely with the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.

As much as anyone, “Uncle Walter” took us there. And the fact that he was awed by it helped us comprehend the majesty of the achievement.

When President Kennedy was killed, it was Walter whose solemn face conveyed the tragedy. Seeing him sigh and grip his glasses helped us comprehend the agony of that moment, too.

I do not call him Uncle Walter by accident. Though I cannot claim actual kinship, Walter Cronkite felt like a member of the famiily. He came to supper most every night,

That’s another thing today’s 24-hour news cycle has obliterated. We still have so-called “anchormen” - a term coined to describe Cronkite - but we don’t have a Rock of Gibraltor delivering us the news,

And we could sure use one.

Readers may contact Andrea Lovejoy at editor@lagrangenews.com