Kathryn Harrison

Author of The Kiss, The Seal Wife, Envy, and While They Slept

July 21, 1969. I am 8. My grandfather is 79. Together we watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the surface of the moon. The picture is black and white, the sound raked by static, and the astronauts mysteriously translucent, the way ghosts are said to be.

For days we’ve been following the progress of the rocket’s white flame through a black sky—a simulation, of course, because who is hanging in space to film it?—and I’ve been unable to share my grandfather’s excitement, bored by this story in which nothing seems to happen.

Tears run down my grandfather’s cheeks as he watches the figures move in their clumsy spacesuits. He seizes the top of my arm, and this, along with the tears, frightens me, the vehemence of his grip unfamiliar. “If anyone had said such a thing would happen in my lifetime, I would have said he was mad. Do you understand?” He shakes my arm, demanding a reply.

I nod yes. All my life I’ve begged my grandfather for more stories of a boyhood spent in London, in the 1890s, a city without cars or radios or television, a city whose nights were illuminated by gas, lamps that had to be lit one at a time, by a man carrying a flame.

Suddenly, the way the astronaut walks, the lack of gravity, of the force that grants him his weight, offends me. I want a solemnity that isn’t possible for a man who leaps and hops to test his new lightness.