Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I remember a night, when I was a kid. Sitting in the very back of a white station wagon, in the dark, driving through the night on the way home from my Aunt’s house. And we were listening to a radio play, everyone quiet. All in the dark, only the radio play and the car lights playing over the road.

There was a man, and he was an astronaut. He was in a rocket, in space, and that rocket had lost it’s way. He was on his way to death, when the fuel finally burned out, and there was nothing anyone could do. Except talk to him, on the radio, while he waited for the end. I think it was a long time, that we listened. I think the conversation got further and further away, until, in the end, there was silence. I still remember driving through that silence on my way home.

I remember going home from school because we were going to watch the first man on the moon, on the television. Though I don’t remember going home, and I don’t remember watching it, I only know that I did do that, and I remember it because it was so important, even at the time, even for a five year old. I remember that, and I remember all the excitement about space. The Jetsons, Elton John’s Rocket Man, David Bowie’s Ground Control to Major Tom.

I remember it today because I was sitting in a restaurant, and old fashioned kind of a place, lots of dark wood and dark upholstery, with a dark booth and a dark table, and Rocket Man came on on the stereo. I’ve been looking at all that stuff about the Moon; the big money-making dreams, the hotel schemes, thinking it was all some macho techno-gamble. But then I heard Rocket Man again, and I remembered. There was a time, not so long ago, when it was the stuff of dreams. And we were the dreamers.