To The Moon
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Art thou pale for weariness? Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, - And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?
It is a July night here in Georgia much like it was 50 years ago. The weather wavers as rains intermittently hit and run. Right now the night seems cool and serene. I can hear the cicadas echoing through the darkness sounding like they have as far back as I can remember here in the deep somnolent South. Yes, it's a July night much like July 20, 1969 when I sat in a darkened room and watched the Apollo lunar module touch down on the moon. Or did I?
I was a very new bride having married on the summer solstice—June 21, 1969. That was a magical year. I graduated from college on June 8th. A wedding followed shortly and THEN a moon landing. I can remember how utterly excited I was, we were actually landing on the moon. Neil Armstrong uttered some immortal words and it all seemed fantastical. (I looked that word up the moment I typed it as it seemed wrong. To the Question, Is Fantastical a Word? Here’s what I found at:
“It actually is a word. It means, depending upon where you look, something along the lines of seeming more appropriate to a fairy tale than to reality.”
What followed at that site was a disagreement about whether or not fantastical was indeed a word . . . a debate not unlike the current one that maintains we never made it to the moon. It was all a hoax, we were duped . . . we was robbed!
I don’t know. I never know anything for sure any more as senior status brings doubts as to just who is telling the truth. Did Stanley Kubrick, American film director, help NASA fake the moon landing? Again . . . I just don’t know. There have probably been fake-outs since time began. But was my beating heart the result of some great directing and fakery on a sound stage back in ’69? Were those guys in the command center truly the greatest bunch of actors ever?!! Did the whole Government and all the astronauts collude to present one gigantic lie? A lie as big as the moon?!!
We will never know for sure. You can go and check this all out, research the matter till you head hurts, and we may never find resolution. But I have to say when confronted with the real and the fantastical, I’ll take “fantastical.” If I was a wide-eyed believer back then, well, like Little Mikey in the ads—“I liked it!” I liked the idea that we had conquered space, had truly paid a visit to Percy B. Shelley’s moon dubbed “that orbèd maiden with white fire laden whom mortals call the moon.”
There’s just something about a July night here in Georgia that begs one to take a flight of fancy, to believe in the impossible. It is in the air, in the summer season. Lightning bugs glow across the landscape with some magical lantern capability and they light the way to the fantastical. So, “fly me to the moon . . .