by Patricia Albers

Created on: July 16, 2009   Last Updated: July 18, 2009

July 20, 1969, it's evening time just past the dinner hour and America is watching history being broadcast from the moon in the comfort of our living rooms. It's an exciting time being 14 years old, enjoying the last summer before high school. It is a time of the acute awareness of life, it's joys, it's sufferings and it's responsibilities. As I turn on the black and white TV set, there's a feeling of anticipation; an impatient excitement in the air.

I am not sure what will happen, but when I hear those words, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," I feel again the immensity of life. I watch, transfixed by what I see, knowing that it is real but so very far away. Watching Neil Armstrong plant the U.S. flag on the moon is an intense moment of patriotism for a 14 year old, something very special is unfolding.

It is uniquely special because they aren't showing any of the usual news stories of the fighting and killing in Vietnam; all the horrors of that have faded away into the background. We are now watching something that most people thought would never happen; a man on the moon! The talk of putting a man on the moon is now reality, not just something confined to a science fiction movie, or to the Twilight Zone. I become very serious, knowing that this is something that will be written about later in history books, and I have the opportunity to say that I saw the first man walk on the moon.

It is a happy but intimidating event at the same time. What's it like to be Neil Armstrong? What is he feeling as he plants the flag that will forever stand as a landmark in testimony to America's presence on the moon? Will more of us go there? Will there eventually be colonies on the moon? Can we live in space like the characters on Lost in Space? There are so many possibilities, so many questions left to the ingenuity of the future. The TV broadcast is over and somehow we are left to resume our mundane lives.

Forty years later, when I watch the film of Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon, I get the same goose bumps and the same stirring feeling of wonder inside. I am currently enrolled in an Astronomy class at the local college and the teacher and most of my classmates were not yet born on July 20, 1969. It makes me even more appreciative of the privilege of witnessing such a monumental event in the history of our solar system. We are not going to colonize the moon, but we will not stop reaching for the stars; there's just too much out there waiting to make history.

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