{"id":5113,"date":"2009-07-20T12:45:28","date_gmt":"2009-07-20T17:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5113"},"modified":"2009-07-20T12:45:28","modified_gmt":"2009-07-20T17:45:28","slug":"two-small-steps-for-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5113","title":{"rendered":"Two Small Steps For Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why yes – I do <\/em>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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

As I recall, Mom was there; Dad was (again, if I recall correctly – and I was <\/em>six, for crying out loud) was off teaching summer school.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Maybe 9\/11, although that was very different, obviously.\u00a0 The whole world just doesn’t get behind much of anything anymore.<\/p>\n

But there was a double-shot of excitement for me, that day.\u00a0 When Dad came home, he brought…my first guitar!<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, and probably under $20 at the time.\u00a0 It was missing a string.\u00a0 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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 \u00a0 As I recall, Mom was there; Dad was (again, if I recall correctly – and I was six, for crying out loud) was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,6,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-mitch","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}