Where Were You?

There are events that happen in our world each day that go  unnoticed because they don't change the world like others do.  There are still those here that can remember listening on the radio on a Sunday afternoon  to hear the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

My generation remembers what they were doing the day Kennedy was shot.  All of us of any age can just remember  just eleven years ago watching the World Trade Center fall.  Every one of those events and of course these are not the only ones left a pit in our stomachs as just at the moment we either heard or saw those events we had no idea which way our  life would go from there.

The summer of 1969 there was an event that captured the world attention not for the tragedy that was unfolding but the hope of a new world forth coming.  As a 16 year old I was in the middle of a three week stay with my Aunt Bessie in Crewe Virginia.  She and Uncle Joe had a dairy farm and for several weeks during the summer I went and stayed with them.

Life on a farm hasn't changed much as the years have gone by.  Up at 5am and after breakfast out to milk the cows.  Get the milk ready for the milk truck to come by to pick up and the rest of the day planting wheat and corn for the cows. Late afternoon, milk the cows  and supper before maybe an hour on the front porch before bed. 

There was a Sunday night that everyone in the world could not wait  to see it happen but on a farm it is too late for Aunt Bessie and Uncle Joe they are long in bed.  Around midnight watching CBS news and Walter Cronkite I was one of the billions of people in front of a TV set to watch the first man walk on the moon.  If I haven't forgotten the space craft landed shortly before midnight and sometime between 12.30am and 1am Neil Armstrong walked down the steps of the craft and took "one small step for man.".

There are many times in our lives that we are very disappointed in our government for some of the most idiotic things that they do, but on this night I have never been more proud to be an American.  We had landed and now walked on the moon.  Neil Armstrong was that man that represented everything that America is.

We as a country are now looking toward Mars and who knows someday we may sit in front of our computers or TV's or what ever device we may have at that time and watch Another Armstrong walk on Mars.  I hope when ever that happens I will be as proud of my country that day as I was on that July Summer day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.