Where were you when...

Historical events that shape youthful memories

My mother loved to recount how, as a young girl, she watched her father fiddle with the ‘wireless,’ trying to improve the scratchy reception, so that he could hear whether Charles Lindbergh had successfully completed his flight across the Atlantic. A generation later I saw Mom’s delight on July 20, 1969, when American astronauts walked on the surface of the moon. For my grandfather, in his youth, an airplane flight across an ocean was inconceivable. For my mother, a trip to the moon was the stuff of science fiction. Thank God, they both lived to see the “impossible” happen.

To be honest I was not nearly as excited as my mother about the Apollo 11 mission. It was a momentous occasion— I still remember the television reports vividly— but it was not a surprise. I had expected that a moon landing would happen in my lifetime. So I didn’t notice the 56th anniversary of that event this past Sunday, until I saw that Pope Leo had called Buzz Aldrin, the surviving member of the Apollo 11 crew.

Then, reminded of the historic occasion, I asked myself— not for the first time— whether was some great new human achievement in my lifetime, something as exciting to me as Lindbergh was to my grandfather and the moon landing to my mother, something that I never expected that I would live to see.

My answer: The fall of the Berlin Wall. What about you?