A Tidings of Magpies

"...But what about the men themselves? What about the 39-year-old pilot who returns from the moon and knows with a mortal certainty that he has already done the most noteworthy thing he'll ever do and now must keep himself busy for the next half-century? What about the existential whiplash that comes from being on the moon one week and in your living room the next — and having to find your own way to process the vast gulf between those two worlds? "I remember coming back to Houston after the moon, and my neighbors had a barbecue for me," Dave Scott, commander of Apollo 15, told me. "I thought, 'What am I doing here?' " And what happens when the press pack moves on, when the interviews stop and the faces of the flyers once limned with light become lined with age? "Remember where you're standing when the spotlight goes off," Lovell warned me once, when our book was a best seller and the movie it spawned was in theaters. "You'll ...

Oh, to be thirteen again and watching this for the first time. The feeling of possibilities...

by Robert Bly ...Turning toward Milan, we see the other one, the moon, whole and rising. Three wild geese make dark spots in that part of the sky. Under the shining one the pastures leap forward, Grass fields rolling as in October, the sow-colored fields near the river. This rising one lights the pair of pintails alert in the shallow pond. It shines on those faithful to each other, alert in the early night. And the life of faithfulness goes by like a river, With no one noticing it. please note: photo by zanmanzmama