The Old Blog in the Desert

Artemis II has gone skyward with all the confidence of a man who has never had to wait on a late train, and I stood below feeling a particular kind of disappointment, the refined, well-aged sort, like a cheese that has seen too many mice.

Now, don’t mistake me. I am pleased as a banker at interest that we have returned to pointing rockets at the heavens instead of at one another. It is a fine and hopeful thing, but I cannot help noticing that the future and I have failed to keep our appointment.

When I was a boy, I read every science fiction story I could lay my hands on, including a few that ought to have gotten left right where I found them. Those tales promised me a world where a man could step out of his house, tip his hat to the wife, and say, “I’ll be back by supper, I’m just off to the Moon.” Space travel, they said, would be as common as catching a Greyhound bus, which is a comparison that should have warned me from the start, as Greyhounds are rarely where they are supposed to be.

Then came 1969, and Neil Armstrong took his famous stroll upon the lunar surface. I watched it with the certainty of youth, which is the strongest intoxicant known to man. I said to myself, “Well, that settles it. We’ll all be up there directly. I’ll go first, if there’s a line.”

There was, as it turns out, a line, but it moved in the wrong direction.

The years rolled on, as years have a habit of doing when not supervised, and here I stand now in what I politely refer to as the winter of my life, though it feels more like late November with a bad wind. I have come to the sobering conclusion that I shall never set foot upon lunar dust.

I shall not bounce about in low gravity, nor plant a flag, nor even misplace a shot glass in the Sea of Tranquility. It is a personal disappointment, though I admit the Moon has borne the news bravely.

Still, I bear Artemis II no ill will. On the contrary, I tip my hat to it as it passes overhead, carrying younger and more punctual dreams along for the ride. There is something comforting in knowing that progress, like a stubborn mule, may refuse to move for long stretches but will eventually lurch forward just when you’ve given up cursing it.

And I take a certain satisfaction in imagining my grand progeny, fine, strapping individuals with better knees than mine, treating lunar travel as casually as ordering a sandwich. “I’ll be on the Moon this afternoon,” they’ll say, checking a device no larger than a deck of cards. “Back by evening. Traffic in orbit permitting.”

They will go not as pioneers, but as customers, which is the final and most convincing proof that a thing has truly arrived.

As for me, I shall remain here, earthbound but not entirely discouraged. I have learned that the future does come true. It just takes its time about it, and often delivers itself to the next generation, like a package addressed to your house but opened by your grandchildren.

It is not the arrangement I would have chosen, but it is a workable one. And if I cannot ride the bus to the Moon, I can at least stand at the stop, shake my head, and say, “There it goes, late as usual.”