Forty years ago tonight, on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the Lunar Module Eagle and proceeded to take man’s first steps on the untouched surface of another celestial body, an event that was witnessed by the largest audience in television history, some 600 million awestruck viewers from around the world. 

 That number would have been slightly higher if Carl E. and I had been where we were supposed to be, rather than parked at the edge of a deserted gravel pit lake, engaged in explorations of a far more intimate  nature.  Carl was my high school sweetheart, and that night he launched his own mission into virgin territory, all within the steamy confines of a ten-year-old rusted-out Bonneville sedan.  I’d like to say that we flew to the moon, but in truth the experience was a lot closer to those early less successful Soviet efforts.  Still, with all the anniversary hoopla, I’ve been awash in nostalgia for days now, thinking about a summer that’s come to feel distant as the moon itself. 

 At the time, our family was living in a small town about thirty miles west of Detroit.  Today the sweet little Main Street is surrounded by sprawl, but back then the place had a real Lake Wobegon feel, its population made up mainly of tractor dealers and insurance salesmen and lumpish Lutheran potato farmers, a stolid and firmly-planted lot, not given to flights of imagination.  From their vantage point under the leaden skies of the Upper Midwest, breaking the bonds of Earth’s gravity must have seemed like a particularly tall order, even for the folks at NASA.

This wasn't true in my case, however.  Before the Saturn V rocket had managed to lift even an inch off the shimmering Florida tarmac, I was already floating on air, head-over-heels in love.  Carl was a fellow sophomore who’d occupied the desk next to mine in honors English for the entire school year without offering more than a quick hello until just a few days before classes let out, when, swept up in the giddiness of imminent release from the rigors of Hawthorne and Hemingway, he asked if he could walk me home.  He was a serious-looking boy, with dark hair and expressive hazel eyes, and the elegantly muscular hands of a classically-trained pianist, which he’d been since earliest childhood, an accomplishment that dazzled my romantic imagination.  Had I been in charge of the soundtrack that summer, he would have serenaded me with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or Henry Mancini’s Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet, a song that had been climbing the charts for months.  But this was the late sixties, when even nascent Van Cliburns in the middle of flyover country were succumbing in droves to the siren call of heavy metal, so I settled instead for garage band covers of every cut on the first Led Zeppelin album, with Carl on Fender Stratocaster in the role of Jimmy Page.

                Carl’s father had died of a sudden heart attack three years earlier, leaving his mother, a high school counselor, to hold down the fort.  His older sister quit school the day she turned sixteen and spent her days watching TV, throwing a ball for Fritzi, the family’s miniature schnauzer, and growing pudgy on a diet of ice cream and Gino’s Pizza Rolls.  The state of affairs at my own house wasn’t any closer to an episode of Donna Reed, but for two young people under the spell of first love, our elders existed as little more than background static, sort of like the grown-ups in one of those classic Charlie Brown specials, whose intrusions were limited to the occasional annoying “mwah-wah” from an off-screen trombone.

 During the school year, it took at least two hits on the snooze button before I could manage to emerge from my slumber, but with the advent of summer heat and surging hormones, I snapped awake at the thunk of the morning paper hitting our front steps, followed by the crunch of gravel in our driveway as my dad drove off to work.  I would creep out of bed and throw on some clothes, trying not to rouse my mother, and after gulping down a quick breakfast, I’d slip quietly out the back door and hop on my bicycle.  Our house was in the old part of town, while Carl’s family lived in a subdivision on the outskirts, one of several that had sprung up over the rapidly waning decade, leaving behind the tattered remnants of apple orchards and patches of corn fields that had long since gone fallow.  Carl would meet me somewhere in between on his own bike, and together we’d ride the back roads in the tepid morning air, heading for nowhere in particular, but always with an eye out for a good place to pull over and neck.

 When our lips weren’t otherwise occupied, we would lie on our backs in the still-damp grass and spin ambitious plans for ourselves.  I imagined my fame coming from somewhere in the literary realm, while Carl saw his own glittering future as a lead guitar player in the rapidly expanding rock star field.  Whatever our destinies, they would, we were certain, be forever intertwined.

 Then, about a week before the Apollo launch, his mother announced that she’d accepted a position with a school district in Phoenix, Arizona.  The Mayflower van was scheduled to arrive on August 20.  Mwah-wah.

“Why don’t you kids stick around?  We’ve got Jiffy Pop.”

 My mother was straightening the pillows on the den sofa while my father tinkered with the foil-covered rabbit ears on our Zenith console.  Our neighbors, the Shulkes, were coming by to watch the moon walk at our place, since we had the bigger TV. 

 “That’s okay, mom.  We’re going to watch over at Carl’s.”

 We’d told the same lie, only in reverse, to Carl’s mother.  The car we got from Carl’s best friend, a goofy-looking kid named Mike, who was a year older and played bass in the fledgling garage band.  I hadn’t yet turned sixteen, so car dates were still out of the question as far as my parents were concerned.  Normally, they might have made further interrogations about the logistics of my evening, but their attention was already focused on the TV, where Walter Cronkite had begun his lead-up coverage. We were home free.

 I guess I wanted to have some claim over him when he left, some way of making myself indelible.  The astronauts’ destination might have been a staggeringly distant one, but for a girl who’d never been west of the Mississippi, or even beyond the borders of her home state, Phoenix was, from my untravelled perspective, only a marginal improvement.  We parked at the edge of the water, glistening in the light of the soon-to-be conquered moon, and I could already feel him drifting away from me even as the first buttons were hastily undone.

 He wrote me several times a week for almost a year, and I’ve managed to hang on to the letters through a couple of marriages and more than a dozen moves, still in the same battered Kinney shoebox, a personal time capsule currently nestled in my basement next to several cartons of old LPs and a stack of Polaroid photo albums, the frozen images inside now discolored with age.  We spoke on the phone as often as our parents would allow; long-distance calls were relatively expensive in those days and placing one still something of a big deal.  There was always a hiss on the line, a sound that made me think of bird-scattered wires strung up across lonely miles of open prairie, carrying my voice to places I had never been, till it finally reached the ear of the boy I loved, the boy who would eventually tell me that it was time for us both to move on.

 “Hello, is this Carl?” 

 I’d hoped I wasn’t slurring my words.  I'd had a quick glass of red wine to fortify my courage. 

 “Yes, this is Carl.”

 Forty years gone by, and I still recognized his voice instantly, older and deeper, of course, but hearing it was like dropping down a wormhole to the past.  It had taken me just a few seconds to find him on Google, on a ten-inch laptop with more than 200,000 times the capability of the giant mainframe that guided the Apollo 11 astronauts on their historic voyage.  I’d done a little research before I dialed, though I didn’t find much; fame, rock n’ roll or otherwise, had eluded him.  He was living in a mid-sized city, married with a daughter in college, and he earned a living as a professional piano tuner. 

 As for my own high-flying dreams, they too succumbed long ago to Newton’s inexorable law.  My prose has largely been confined to the pages of advertising and promotional materials, and even in that world, my accomplishments have been modest; my last big paying job was writing copy for a line of industrial safety products.  But I’ve got a really great husband and a lovely home, and enough free time to land myself in trouble on occasion. 

 “Um, this is a voice from your past.  Distant past.”

 There was a slight pause on the line while the mental gears clicked, about the same duration as my Google search.  Then the unexpected reply:     

  “Heeeey, Janice!  Holy fucking shit, is it ever great to hear from you!”

 I read recently that Armstrong’s iconic boot prints are, in all likelihood, still up there in the dust of the Sea of Tranquility, along with the American flag he planted and a smattering of other artifacts from that first moon landing; everything just as it was forty years ago, preserved for all time in the windless vacuum of space.  Or at least until lunar tourism becomes a reality and they cordon it off and start selling tickets.  Which would be a real shame.  Some things, I've come to discover, are better left alone.

I quietly put down the reciever, hoping that my first love hadn’t gotten around to installing Caller ID.