MountainMornings

Where were you when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon? The nostalgia this week is killing me.

The summer of 1969 I was a few weeks away from my starter marriage, living in a basement apartment in Cambridge, MA. My roomie, Alicia and I, had a small TV perched on a chair in the corner; I can picture it now like an old Polaroid developing slowly. We stood there watching the grainy image, marveling sure, but also discussing our plans for the weekend like most young girls.

Alicia’s father had invented some kind of outdoor/basement/door, Bilco? Yup, and it’s still in business! https://www.bilco.com/

There I was in a basement, with an heiress to basement doors, looking at the moon’s surface. I was too young to really understand the significance of what we were seeing. We were both Catholic, and our handsome Catholic President had been shot, then MLK and Robert Kennedy; I’d dropped out of school to work at Harvard, and for no good reason I can think of now, I was planning a wedding. 19 years old and full of my own insecurities and vanities – 1969 was a very strange year.

I agreed with President Kennedy that anything worth doing was going to be hard, and that would make its success so much sweeter. After all, how could we revel in our happiness, if we didn’t know despair? How much despair could a teenager know?

Well, I’d had 2 fathers die, a biological and a step-father, and Bob was going to Woodstock! The love of my life was gone, so I thought, and I was making the best out of a bad situation. Better to marry a law student than to continue seeing the phantom of love lost on the streets of Boston. I dug in my heels and had bridal photos done; whatever they put in Catholic churches about up-coming weddings was publicized in his Ohio newspaper.

Did I tell you that Henry Winkler, aka the Fonz, was an upperclassman at Emerson College on Newbury Street in Boston? I was a lowly Freshman/person when we met and he was bound for Yale Drama School. Did I mention that I broke my leg skiing with a Brown student? There had been a few suitors, including one from Colorado I almost married, but I chose this law student because I thought Nelly Bly and the Flapper would approve, and because he was so unlike my high school ghost.

He was rigid, and rule-bound, an Eagle Scout from Cleveland.

We went to the moon, not because it was easy. And I went to Westchester County, NY precisely because it was hard. Because that’s what girls were expected to do in the 1960s. And we had 2 pretty good years and 2 pretty bad years when I sought the first divorce in Connecticut history due to “irreconcilable differences.” It was the 2nd wave of feminism, and I jumped on board.

Where were you when we landed on the moon? This was us when Great Grandma Ada turned 95 in June!