Valuing moon shots, apples and a boy
The apple tree in the backyard of our bungalow in the outer, outer Excelsior bore fruit this week. This is made unusual not only by the fact that it is mid-July but also because Aunt Dorla and my son Aidan only planted it three years ago, and did so during one of the longest droughts in California history.
Apples remind me of the day that we first landed on the moon: July 20, 1969. We were on vacation, out in Yaphank, which was the rural part of Long Island at the time. The Zeltmanns were there, and they had a small black-and-white television. We had been following the mission since the Saturn V rocket took off on the 16th. That Sunday afternoon, we all crowded around, watching a simulation of a little capsule dropping onto another orb.
Forty-eight years later, it is hard to describe the awe of the moment, but at the time, there seemed nothing greater than that, after thousands of years of humans looking at the moon in the sky, there was a man about to set foot on it.
Nurse Vivian prayed a rosary throughout the descent because she feared that the satellite was nothing but dust and that the lunar module would sink far below the surface. However, with the words, “Houston, Tranquility Base. The Eagle has landed,” we knew that all was good. We got into the old green Montego and drove 60 miles back to Ozone Park so that we could watch the first moon walk in color.
Two items went astray that day: As we arrived back in Queens, Nurse Vivian said, “Kevin, I forgot that it was your birthday! We don’t have a cake.” And in the grand scheme of things, an 11th birthday was of significantly less note. But the Carvel ice cream store was closed. Nurse Vivian searched the cupboard, but, alas, no Duncan Hines cake mix. No chocolate chips. Only a bowl of apples left on the table from the week before. My father, Pop, used to say that the way you could tell the difference between the shanty Irish and the lace-curtain Irish was that “the lace-curtain Irish had fruit on the table, even when no one in the house was sick.” So even though we didn’t have a couch in the living room, we had a vessel full of apples.
Nurse Vivian improvised. She tossed a stick of butter into the freezer. (Her secret strategy, unlike popular practice, was to roll the frozen butter with her wooden pin, and it melted into the softest crust an Irishman ever tasted.) She sat watching the coverage, peeling apple after apple. She laid out wax paper on the dining room table, sifted flour, and rolled a pie crust. She filled that dough with apples, cinnamon and nutmeg, and put it in the oven just as Neil Armstrong opened up the door and stuck his leg out. A moment later, he placed his foot onto the soil with the historic words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
At least that is what I, the budding grammar nerd, heard, and it bothered me. He had left out the “a” in front of “man,” to indicate that this was one step for this particular Navy pilot, but that it had a larger meaning for everybody on this planet.
Turns out that I wasn’t the only one bothered by the lack of an indefinite article. Armstrong himself insisted that he had stated the “a” but no one could hear it because of his Wapakoneta, Ohio, accent. I totally get that. With the remnants of my Queens accent, people insist that they cannot hear the “R” when I say New Yawk. Pop, also a Queens native, would say, “The R is silent, like the P in ocean bathing.”
For almost 50 years, computer programmers, linguists and communication scientists have searched for that “a,” finally noting that there was a 35-millisecond bump of sound between the “for” and the “man” that would have been too brief for human ears to hear.
The missing indefinite article, like the missing birthday cake, wasn’t really as important as the intent.
What mattered was that Armstrong envisioned that this moment be shared with the family of humanity. What mattered even more was that an hour later, while we watched Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant a flag on that brave new world, the lights in the living room went out. I turned around, and there was Nurse Vivian, limegreen oven mitts holding a pie with a candle in it, letting me know that as history rolled out on that waxing crescent, the birthday of one little boy from Queens still mattered.
The missing indefinite article, like the missing birthday cake, wasn’t really as important as the intent.