moon child

Virginia does not like this picture, but it is my favorite, because of her exuberance.

Hesitantly, Virginia asked me if I could help her put something in the paper about the birth of her daughter, 50 years ago today.
  Hell yeah! If it weren't for Virginia and her husband Randy, I wouldn't be here now. They salvaged as much as they could of the Goose after the flood and helped me rebuild.  So could I do her a favor? How about a thousand favors?
   So I wrote this:

Most people who are old enough remember where they were when man first set foot on the moon. But Virginia of Thomasville has a special reason to remember that day: She was giving birth to her daughter Annamaria. Virginia’s husband Randy was in the waiting room as she labored. “I didn’t really want to come in, because Neil Armstrong was getting out of the spaceship,” he jokes. An estimated 530 million people were also glued to the TV. But the eagle had landed in the delivery room too, and Anna was born. They called her their Moon Baby. Anna grew up and went to college and married and had Luke and Randi. She worked at MODOT for 17 years before leaving to join her husband, Randy (there are a lot of them here), at White Church Equipment in Pomona. Today, she turns 50. They celebrate with Moon Pies. Happy birthday, Moon Baby! 

Where were you? I was at a cafe on the square in Dwight, Il, with my friend Laura. It was her hometown. It was also Diana Oughton's hometown, and the following March, Diana would blow herself up in a Greenwich Village apartment while building a bomb for the Weather Underground. Needless to say, the Dwight folk knew each other. I had mixed feelings about the moon landing. It was a time when protesters thought the US was devoting too much money to the military industrial complex (Vietnam) and the moon race, and not enough to ending discrimination against blacks and women. And yet I was a science fiction buff whose first thought was, "We've only just now gotten to the moon?

   A month later, I was at Woodstock.
   The year of 1969 was a vintage year, for Virginia and Anna and me. 

I'm so excited! It's been forever since I was in print on paper! And Page 1!