To the Moon, Alice. To the Moon!

"Boys.... Boys: Wake up."

I remember this call very, very faintly. It was my mother.

And it was around midnight, Eastern Standard Time.

And it was July 21, 1969.

Blinking and shielding our eyes from the light, we padded down the hall to my parents bedroom, where the TV was.

And on the screen was a fuzzy, blurry, black-and-white image of ... I wasn't really sure. I was, after all, only six years old.

But what really struck me -- and what remains memorable these 50 years later -- is what my mother said to me and my brothers: "I want you to see this. I want you to be able to tell your grandchildren you saw man land on the moon."

I'm not sure what drove my mom to be such a fan of the space program. I can only guess that it was her fandom of President Kennedy, who kicked this effort up big time before his assassination.

My dad was equally as interested, working in Naval Aeronautics his entire career. He was wowed by the engineering of it all.

He was also pretty conversant on the nighttime sky. He liked pointing out the constellations to us, whose shapes he learned at sea. Topside on a ship at night, he claimed, enabled even the most faint of faraway stars to stand out like a diamond on a black cloth.

He also told me to look for the man in the moon by imagining it was like the logo for the Jackie Gleason Show. I took him literally, and was trying to see Ralph Kramden in a surface of vague pits and crevasses.

Can't tell you how old I was before I finally discerned the man in the moon.

As the following years unspooled, man in space, man on moon became more common. I remember the advertising associated with it, specifically Tang (even though the stuff had been around since the late 1950s). And I remember things like the lunar rover.

CBS on Saturday Mornings ran a show called In the News, which was a two-minute recap of national stories that the producers thought would be interesting to kids. Christopher Glenn was the host, and the show would be nestled into the lineup of cartoons. Many of these reports centered on the space program into the 1970s (lots of coverage on Skylab), and I well remember waiting for them to be over to get back to "Archie" and "The Groovy Ghoulies."

When we went as a family to Walt Disney World in 1973, Dad worked in a side-trip to Cape Kennedy. And in all honesty -- after a handful of days of audio animatronic attractions, stellar fireworks, elaborate parades, amazing restaurants, and character interactions -- I was bored to death looking at rocket towers and gigantic warehouses.

(Always thought we should have flipped those trips, done the space stuff first, then gone to Disney. Eh. Hindsight.)

The space program faded somewhat from my consciousness after that, until the Challenger disaster in 1986.

Since then, I've hoped we could recapture the technological oomph (and the budgetary resources) to get back into space. It's currently resurfacing as an idea in Washington (Space Force. Yes!! Even if it sounds like a cheesy Sci-Fi TV series), but I doubt it has the public support to find funding, especially under the current administration.

Still, I'm grateful for that midnight call to come and stand in front of the TV set. I may not remember every detail to tell my grandkids.

But I remember some.

And I look upward a the full moon often.

And somehow see Jackie Gleason.

Plots but No Plotzing

Gad, it's hot.

High temp is expected to soar to a feel-like 100 degrees plus over the next few days.

When we were kids, 100 years ago, days like these usually meant an afternoon at our nearby swim club. Or hunkering down in front of a fan in the living room for a marathon Scrabble game.

But I also remember escaping the heat by riding my bike to the local library.

Not only was the library a place of access to a seemingly unlimited number of books, which was appealing on its own because of my love of reading. But it was also air conditioned! 

Which meant blissful browsing. Novels in Nirvana. Plots but no plotzing!

The bike ride was about two miles from home. Traffic made it generally safe, but there was a point where one of the road squeezed its lanes together as an underpass beneath an old trolly line. I remember that section requiring extra attention, given the close proximity between handlebars and passenger doors.

Once inside the library, I was in another world. A cool, quiet place with nothing but reading material as far as the eye could see.

I remember often pulling books from the shelves and, in a burst of enthusiasm to start, sitting down in the aisle and starting to read. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I finished a book before I even had the chance to take it home.

Each summer, the library would embark on a campaign to encourage reading throughout the school recess. These efforts were usually embodied by some method of tracking the books kids had read; I know one year, we were given an empty U.S. map, and each read book was logged by getting a sticker (a cluster of a few states, as the Library didn't expect us to read 50 books between early June and late August). 

Participants who filled their entire map were awarded a small prize and the honor of having their maps -- or whatever the monitoring artwork was -- hung on a library wall.

I can't recall a single tchotchke I received; I only know that I'd have my paper done well before July 4, and often before the library had received its supply of prizes.

Didn't matter. 

I never participated for the prizes. I participated because I loved reading.
... and, well, okay, I was a little competitive.

As I got older, my visits to that library became less and less frequent. The bike was replaced by a car. Enrollment in elementary school eventually became high school and then college, where I spent an awful lot of time in the library and never earned a sticker for it.

I'm still an avid reader. The trips to the library to browse thousands of books is now a logon to the Kindle store to browse millions of books.

But the joy of escaping the heat by diving into a gripping story still has appeal.

Rockets Red Glare

I've written before about my rather obsessive love of fireworks.

I've seen some great shows in my day: July 04 displays that end with a barrage of shells made me think the night sky was noontime. And the deafening explosions rang in my ears until I'd finished the long walk back to the car.

One memorable show was on the Philadelphia Parkway, in front of the Art Museum. The power of the explosions was so forceful, I felt the legs of my shorts being tugged with every shot, moving on their own from the sudden changes in air pressure.

But only one fireworks show stands out as truly unforgettable.

And not surprisingly, it was courtesy of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts in Orlando.

I had heard about this show, which blazed nightly over World Showcase Lagoon in EPCOT. I'd heard about the power of the music and the use of multiple visuals including fountains, lasers, fire, barges and projections to create a fireworks show unlike any other.

What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer emotional wallop this show packed. At least for me.

We first saw it when Kristin was very young; in fact, she spent most of the performance cowering in Eileen's shoulder to escape the sheer power of the audio and visuals.

I, however, was rapt.

From the impressive opening, whose narration about the power of gathering to share stories, ended with the whimsical blowing out of a ring of giant torches, ala a massive birthday cake.

The music then took over, full of chaos and fury but evolving into a four-movement symphony that helps the story unfold. It covers the dynamic range of fortississismo (that's three fs, people) to pianississimo (three ps) and back again. Its time signatures swung between syncopated measures of 5/8 and 3/8 to calmer sections of 6/8 to bouncy measures of a more traditional sounding 4/4.

The accompanying visuals were showers of sparks, explosions of color, bursts of fire, beams of light and video images on the large globe that had been floated to the middle of the lagoon.

After the dazzling finale, it segued into two vocal selections ("We Go On" and "Promise") before the final exit music.

Eileen was rather distracted as Kristin was freaking out, and Amanda was somewhat nonplussed by it all. But I remember Claire looking up at me as it ended, with tears streaming down her cheeks (matching my own waterworks, fyi). When I asked her what was wrong, she said, "The magic's all over."

To this day, I'm not sure if she meant the magic of the fireworks display or the magic of the entire trip, which was indeed ending, as we were departing the following morning.

We got back to Disney a handful of years later and Illuminations was must-see. Kristin was much calmer this time and enjoyed herself.

Somewhere along the line, I acquired an EPCOT soundtrack, and the Illuminations music remains to this day a favorite. I play it in the car loud enough to strain my speaker system. But it still moves me.

Illuminations is on its way out, according to the Disney folks. The lagoon at EPCOT is due for a refresh, and with it will come a new show. And I suppose that's as it should be. "We Go On" is more than just a theme song to an evening entertainment extravaganza; it's a viewpoint for all of Walt Disney World.

And life in general, I suppose.

So tomorrow night, July 04, I will stand with neighbors and family at our local golf course, stare at the sky and oooh and aaah.

But somewhere deep, I'll wish I was in Florida once again being literally blown away by a fireworks show.