Starry eyes: A mixtape
April 5, 2026
Digby's Hullabaloo
Earth from space, photographed by an Artemis II crew member For those of us of “a certain age”, that is to say, old enough to have actually witnessed the moon landing live on TV the fact that “we” were even able to achieve this feat “by the end of the decade” (as President Kennedy projected in 1961) still feels like a pretty big deal to me. Of course, there are still big unanswered questions out there about Life, the Universe, and Everything, but I’ll leave that to future generations.
I feel that I’ve done my partspending my formative years plunked in front of a BW TV in my PJs eating Sugar Smacks and watching Walter Cronkite reporting live from the Cape. Those particular memories resurfaced recently as I watched Richard Linklater’s charming 2022 animated memoir Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, which I stumbled across on Netflix: Of course, 10 year-old Linklater didn’t land on the moon and return safely to the Earth just ahead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin; that’s the fantasy part of his tale. It was the earthbound elements of his narrative that triggered an emotional sense memory of being a kid again, living in suburbia in 1969 (and watching the moon landing on a boxy black and white television set). This past Wednesday, those memories came flooding back to me like a hot flash from the end of a Saturn V rocket: One “teeny, tiny curb” for a humanone giant leap for humankind. Flick
Digby's Hullabaloo
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