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.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under History And Its Making, mitch, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.