Today the Google icon tells us it is the fiftieth anniversary of the first human space flight. Yuri Gagarin blasted into space on April 12, 1961.

1961.  I was six years old.  I think it must have been that spaceflight, rather than Sputnik, when Mom and Dad took us out to Winchester Road to watch the “star” fly across the sky.  I don’t think I would remember that had I been three years old, but either way, remember it I do.  I don’t recall the weather, or the time, I only remember my little self with people around me telling me to look up, there it was.  And then it was only me and the little star floating across the dome of the sky.  I can see that little star in my mind’s eye so clearly, it was magic.  Of course I didn’t realize what it meant, that within my young lifetime we would land on the moon and send people back and forth to a space station like it was a corporate headquarters in New York.

There was a time in my twenties when I really rued that I hadn’t been born stronger and smarter – I would have jumped at the chance to go into outer space.  Some folks think it’s a waste of money, and I can understand that, but I think it is out there for our challenge and our awe.  I think it holds secrets of the continuance of humanity, secrets of eternity, secrets of God.

Who knows what the future holds?  It may be that within the next twenty years I will be rich enough (yeah, right) and they will have figured out a way to send old people up there is some ultra-pressurized-easy-chair kind of way.   I always say I was born to late (I love antiques and souvenirs of bygone days – I even have a tintype photograph I found in an antique store of someone I don’t even know from the Civil War era) and that I was born too early (just missed the space age).

Maybe I’ll get another chance in another lifetime someday, but I’m a little sorry the little girl on Winchester Road was too little, too late.