From the Barn to the Moon in a Lifetime

My Grandpa Grandy, Laverne E Grady, witnessed remarkable technological advancement.

Lives don't usually begin and end on significant dates, but are coincidentally punctuated by remarkable events that we use as convenient bookends; we define generations by dress and music, decades by politics, and eras by great figures (literary, scientific, religious minds that shape generations).

In Grandpa Grandy's case, he saw the invention of the automobile and watched man land on the moon, and was around long after to see handheld calculators and computers and many other modern marvels transform his world.

Let me tell you a very short story:

Grandpa Grandy recalled his father, my Great Grandpa Grandy, getting his first car, a Model-T. Upon driving it into the barn for the first time (no garages in those days), he said "Whoa"[1] and drove the car right into the barn wall.

That is the end of the very short story.

That grandpa went on to become VP of GTE. Flown to Washington for his retirement dinner. Met President Nixon (I always thought they happened on the same trip, but I think they were different), and left this world humbly and better than he found it.

There is no comparable mortal event that I can think of in the history of humankind than the first moon landing. If you weren't there, no amount of memorabilia, books or Youtube videos can convey how life changed that day.[2]

Anyone below a certain age has grown up in a world where space travel is an everyday occurrence. That's how it is with all things. A phone call, a recorded song, a movie, a trans-Atlantic flight - they are trivial to us, but the world stopped once at each one and stood in rapt amazement.

Tom Hanks is making a movie based on Major Matt Mason. There's no way a film can capture the relationship a child has with a toy, but since Hanks absorbed the same sounds and images I did, at least there's a possibility he can express the magical edges.
 

[1]
If you don't know, "whoa" is what you tell a horse to stop. Great Grandpa Grandy, like all of us, was a creature of habit, and was talking to his car.

[2]
I'll bet some of you have never seen it. It looked like this:

 

Started: 2012-02-27