My Private Moon Landing, 1969
I have never understood the interest of mankind in space, especially the current interest, given all the issues we have to solve here at home. Unless space tourism creates jobs immune to automation and AI.
I know we spent a fortune in the 1960s to compete with Russia to put a man on the moon, but when we finally got it done, I couldn’t have cared less. I was at a peculiar inflection point in my own life that year, and I had no bandwidth for the large, visionary accomplishments of others. I was way too busy trying to figure out where I myself had landed. I believe we’re in that position again today.
After several mishaps, our guys finally landed on the moon in 1969. I was already living in Phoenix, having arrived there at the end of previous summer. I was living with my second husband Jesse, a female student of mine named Sandy who needed a place to hide out during a divorce, and our German shepherd. We were in our third rental in a year, after a new marriage and a cross-country move.
The dog had broken down the bathroom door of our first apartment when Jess and I were at work, and we thought it might be best to make a midnight move out. The next place lasted about six months, and then we had to move again. I think we did it to be closer to Phoenix College, where I was a professor of English. I was all of 29, and had moved across the country to a foreign land that may as well have been the moon, and moved houses three times in under a year. If I had not already been an adult, I would have characterized all that as adverse childhood experiences.
You could say I was unsettled, about like the times. Jesse, Sandy and I spent a great deal of time drinking and smoking pot that summer, and wishing we were at Woodstock. During the day it was too hot to go out, but all we had at home was evaporative cooling. At night we often went to a bar aptly named The Monastery.
A lot more was happening in 1969 to distract me from the space program. For openers, Richard Nixon was president. Everybody I liked or admired in politics had been assassinated the previous year. First Jack Kennedy in 1963, and both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. The war in Viet Nam was a literal hot mess.
Also, 1969 was my first full summer in Phoenix. You cannot conceptualize how difficult it was to be a “cosmopolitan” young woman from New York and wake up one morning surrounded by grimy Mexican restaurants, decomposed granite, and cactus. Not even a foreign film to see. As far as I was concerned, I might have landed on the moon myself, as uprooted and discombobulated as I felt in this new landscape.
It did not help that my beloved father had recently died and my mother kept telling me I would be sorry I left because there were no Jewish neighborhoods in Phoenix and they didn’t let Jews into the Camelback Inn.
None of that bothered me, as I didn’t plan to be a Jew in Phoenix anymore than I was one in New York. College had transformed me into an atheist, another useful quality to carry with me to Goldwater territory.
That first year had been very eventful as I had gotten into trouble at my new job almost immediately by volunteering to be the faculty advisor for Students for a Democratic Society. This, coupled with the fact that I actually wore “winter clothes,” made all the locals suspicious of me immediately. I’m not sure which of these characteristics made me more of an outcast. At the time I moved to Arizona, most of the other migrants were from the midwest, Canada and Mexico. New Yorkers were few and far between.
During that entire first year I was so homesick and lonely for New York that I spent all my free time on the lawns of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. The Biltmore was the only place that had grass, and I would lay in the grass and cry, wishing I had never moved to Arizona and trying to pretend the grass at the Biltmore was like the familiar landscapes of Cornell and Syracuse.
What had seemed like the promise of a glamorous adventure when I first agreed to it, a year later seemed like a ghastly mistake. It was the days of Barry Goldwater and the John Birch society on one hand, and student revolutions on the other and I had fierce FOMO not to be in New York or California during those exciting years.
The moon landing therefore went by in a blur. It had absolutely nothing to do with my life and although I realized it was probably a great coup for America to put a man on the moon before Russia, I was not at the age where I cared about the Russians. I really couldn’t see past my own eyeballs, and I cared only for my own unhappiness.
In retrospect I realize the end of one’s 20s are always a difficult time, made more difficult by the tumultuous division in America at the same time. Adulting in a hostile world. I also realize that’s not very different from today.
Maybe we should quit asking young people to save us. Looking back on it, I understand why I didn’t vote when I was young and why no one could have depended on me to save anything. And maybe today’s young people feel similar. Their lives are in such turmoil, just like mine at the end of my 20s, that the last thing they can think about is the future of the country.
First they have to figure out who they are, what they care about, and where they belong in the universe. By the way, it’s probably not on the moon.
