Editorial

Sitting with my copy of DEMM at a café table, I was approached by a man and his father, the latter smiling shyly. The son told me that the moon shot on the cover – especially with the man’s arms embracing it – had bought his father a wave of nostalgia.

It went like this.

As a boy, the father was a shepherd in Kazakhstan. While tending the sheep he would look at the moon and wonder if man would ever go there and if the moon was higher than God. His own father would tell him it was more important that God walked on Earth than man walked on the Moon. But then one day they heard that man had walked on the Moon; they couldn’t believe it. The boy was both excited and frightened. He was scared about being in space, but he liked the idea of rockets – he started drawing plans for rockets and talked of little else. His father got sick and could no longer work. The boy packed his bag and set off for the capital city to find a job to send money home. In those days the capital was Almaty and it was a was a long journey – he walked and hitch-hiked and he thinks it took him nearly two weeks to get there. He was only 12. He became one of thousands of street urchins and he scavenged for food in the market. One night he felt so homesick that when he saw a shop doorway lit by moonlight he curled up there to sleep, thinking that the same moonlight would be shining on his parents. In the morning, the shopkeeper fell over him and brought him inside for food. The story is longer, but my column is not, however the outcome is the shopkeeper made him his apprentice. The shopkeeper was a toymaker so eventually the boy did get to make rockets – toy ones. The little toymaker did well – his own children went to university. His son is an engineer. And here he is in Aotearoa. It feels as far away as the moon, he laughed. His son laughed, too, and hugged him and kissed the top of his head. I gave him the magazine.