SUPPOSEDLY

Encaustic Wax Monoprint by S. Auberle

Sitting in the sun. Thinking of the moon.

July 20, 1969--forty years ago today. I'm sitting in the orange chair on the green rug, glued to the TV. My almost four year old daughter sits across from me, blue eyes wide, but bored, as we tell her how major this event is. Her eighteen month old brother is asleep in my arms.

The man stepping out of the capsule is a native of Wapakoneta--the town just up the road from my hometown in the Midwest of the USA, the west of Ohio. He is much older, or so it seems to me, but still, I think of him traveling the same roads as me, eating in the same little restaurants, going to the county fair. A simple time, a simple place, though the past few years had been anything but...the war, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and now this other-worldly event. It has all seemed other-worldly, even the fact that I am now a mom, no longer a kid, but responsible for these two innocents I've brought into a world like this. What was I thinking? But here they are, and here I am (supposed to be) grown up, and here is Neil Armstrong, doing something (supposedly) out of the realm of possibility and belief.

What next?

What's next is suddenly it's forty years later and those two innocent kids are now (supposedly) grown up, with kids of their own--more innocent children in a time even more frightening. And I am (supposedly) old, though I still wake up some mornings thinking what a nightmare I had--I dreamed I was old, and it seemed so real.

The world is older, Armstrong is older, even the moon--that ageless beauty queen is older. The footsteps on her have (supposedly) blown away if, indeed, there is wind on the moon. I don't know. I don't know if the flag is still there. I don't think I want it to be.

What part of space that is now (supposedly) out of the realm of possibility will be explored before these grandchildren of mine are grandparents?

Perhaps I should care, but I don't. Tomorrow is new moon and once again that silver orb will wax to her full, majestic beauty. Somewhere a little Russian girl will look up at her and dream of becoming an astronaut. An African boy will let her guide him through the dark veldt. An old Inuit woman will give thanks beneath her light. Somewhere in the world two people (supposedly) will fall in love--because of her. Like I did. And still do. Even if I am old.