I was born to be a star child. In the fading echo of a world war, as reluctant allies became cold warriors, artists and scientists and governments, all for their own reasons, looked to the sky.
I was too young to realize that the world tilted on the precipice of annihilation, as two superpowers continued to push all of civilization to the brink.
For the most part I was spared the horrors of racism, thinking that the things that got past my parents' protective filters were anomalies, not the stone cold bigotry of daily life.
And there was a president who looked like a prince and spoke like a poet.
I did not know that life was much more complicated that looking to the sky. I took inspiration from President Kennedy's words, and believed anything was possible.
Ohio's own John Glenn made the first orbital flight for the United States, giving my Buckeye state parents an extra measure of pride.
It really did seem like not even the sky was the limit.
In the time between Kennedy's speech and the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, though, we had more than our share of tragedies.
We lost a President, a Senator and a King to gun violence, the twisted culmination of hatred and intolerance.
The country was torn in two over the Vietnam War: as the death toll continued to mount, our great free press revealed the horrors that were happening in those far away lands.
And Apollo 1, which was to have been the foundation of our final phase of building that rocket to the stars, burned in a freak accident on the launch pad, taking the lives of astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.
So even though I was no longer a starry-eyed kid when the summer of 1969 began, for those of us who came of age in the Age of Aquarius, whose infant memories were informed by Sputnik and Mercury, and then by Gemini and Apollo, this week will always be remembered as when we first stepped among the stars.
On July 16, the crew of Apollo 11 climbed into a cramped capsule atop the launch vehicle, the glorious work of art known as the Saturn V rocket. They were Neil Armstrong, commander; Michael Collins, command module pilot, and; Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, lunar module pilot.
My words weren't eloquent, but I memorialized the occasion in my teenage journal. In the years since "We choose to go to the moon," I might have been bruised by life, but I still remember the awe, the joy, the wonder I felt.
It was a while before we knew how close the Eagle had come to running out of fuel on that landing. That's education, experience and training for you!
July 20, 1969
20:17:40 UT
4:17:40 p.m. EDT
And 1:17:40 p.m. PDT where I watched with my family here in California. We'd all been watching and listening to Walter Cronkite, America's most trusted newsman, as he and astronaut Wally Schirra described the final approach.
And then came the words that triggered a worldwide sigh of relief:
The images, on that day and later, were astonishing.
But once there was a time when we worked together - including a few women and a few minorities who were still forced to contribute around the edges, the hidden figures of our space program's success.
And what did going to the moon do for us, other than offering bragging rights about building the first steps to the sky?
For a start, I am writing this on a laptop computer that costs a few hundred bucks, but that has far, far more computing power than Apollo 11 did. I can go online and see computer models of weather worldwide. And I can turn on the GPS in my telephone, a device that fits neatly between my wrist and my fingertips, and get directions to drive from one end of this country to the next - or even from the farthest reaches of North America to the nethermost distances in South America.
From time to time, a new development in science and technology is revealed that staggers the imagination.
All these years later, there is still little wonder in this world.
Thanks, Apollo 11.
