2009-07-16 - 2:04 p.m.

I don't know what it is, exactly, about the where-were-you-when memories, but I love them, and I have my own, which I also love, and you have yours, which I would love if I knew about them. That was a complicated sentence, but coming up next are some images: I'm too young for the Kennedy brothers but I certainly know what I was doing when I heard about the twin towers falling. And I love hearing my dad's stories about how he watched Nixon's resignation and where he was (Wyoming) when the astronauts first walked on the moon.

So I was reading, this afternoon, the New York Times's collection of moon stories and the few that really struck me had to do with hearing of the moon walk secondhand. Ursula K. Le Guin was on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. She didn't see the astronauts on TV, or hear the radio broadcast, or any of that. She heard about it later that day, or even the next day, through the ship's newsletter. I don't know why, but that remove seems important to me, or poignant, or somehow warm. Maybe it's just narrative power, like how a girl with a little something on can be better than a girl with absolutely nothing on. I like both, of course, but the point I think is that a little--if it's the right stuff--can go a long way.

Anyway, I remember one night when I was about 21, doing drugs with some friends, and I had this thought: Let's fucking send a poet into space! It seemed so momentus to me, and so simple, such is the power of that particular drug. And though my enthusiasm for this simple notion has dimmed, the warm kernel of it is still there. I'd read that poem. If just the other night Pablo Neruda could make me look at naked breasts in a new way then I'd bet there's also a poet who can make me look at the planet, or life, or something, anew.

Here's to the moon. Here's to giant, round rocks in the sky. Here's to stories, too.

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