Why yes – I do remember sitting in the living room on a balmy July day and watching, like everyone else in the world, Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. 

As I recall, Mom was there; Dad was (again, if I recall correctly – and I was six, for crying out loud) was off teaching summer school. 

It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t old enough to remember it – or who weren’t born yet – just how exciting that moment was.  Granted, I was very young, and I certainly couldn’t speak for all of society, but the nearest I can remember, there have been no similar events that brought pretty much the whole world together in excitement, worry and prayer like the first moon landing.  Maybe 9/11, although that was very different, obviously.  The whole world just doesn’t get behind much of anything anymore.

But there was a double-shot of excitement for me, that day.  When Dad came home, he brought…my first guitar!

It was a cheapo catalog model that some kid had left in his locker three or four years earlier; it was the kind of thing that’d cost maybe $69.99 at WalMart today, and probably under $20 at the time.  It was missing a string.  And after I banged on it a little, it went into the closet, coming out over the next seven years to serve as a boat, a fort, a rifle and any number of things, until that day in March of 1977 when I decided I had to be a guitar player, dragged it out, put two new tuning machines and six new strings on it, and started working my way through the Gene Leis chord book.