Moon Landing

From the time I was 12 years old, I loved science fiction. I was a voracious reader, and my very favorite genre fiction was science fiction (notice that I don't call it sci fi, any more than I call San Francisco Frisco). It started when I knocked an Andre Norton book off the bookmobile shelf, and became intrigued when I was putting it back. The librarian directed me from there to Heinlein and Asimov and Simak and Silverberg and Lieber and Eric Frank Russell. I gobbled them down. I wanted to live them. Going to other planets seemed like the most wonderful thing a person could do. I wanted to be an astronaut, although in 1954 they didn't have that name for it. (I wrote to the Air Force and asked what I should study in college to be able to go to the moon. They, of course, told me that girls don't do things like that and there was nothing I could study that would make it possible, but that is another post.)

And for some reason, my step-father hated that I read so much science fiction. Now, that makes no sense to me. He was born in 1903, the year the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, and at the time I am writing about he had lived to see the atomic bomb. How could he doubt that people would fly to the moon? But, he did. We got into fights about it regularly. He referred to my reading as "Wizard of Oz" (thereby relegating it to childish and stupid). At least once a week, if not once a day, we would get into these fights about whether man would ever go to the moon.

So, in 1969, I happened to take Julie and Richard to visit my mother and step-father the week of the moon landing. We watched it together, and afterwards he came out with a bottle of champagne, saying, "Would you share this with me, or do you want me to eat crow?"

Damn. The man had grace, you have to give him that.