The Moon Walk Night Thirty-Five Years Ago
07/20/2004 11:43 a.m.
From Maureen Lorna Matley's little red diary book

July 20, 1969

Tonight the astronauts were walking on the moon, and we all watched on television here at home, my family and Neil, who'd come over to see me. Then he took me for a walk to get cokes at the corner store, and we held hands all the way there and back. We stopped half-way there to stare at the moon, imagining Neil Armstrong, etc. up there, and after an excited silence, then my Neil asked me if I’d go steady with them. I said yes! Later back at the house he presented me with a ruby-coloured ring. He’d planned this all along.
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July 20, 2004

I had fun searching through my old diary boxes to come across this entry. Neil and I had been going out for a month, at the time. I was fifteen when we met, but he was nineteen. It started as me tagging along with my sister and her new boyfriend, whose best friend was Neil. Who knew when my sister wanted to include me in going out with her new crowd, that I'd fall in love? She ended up married later to Neil's friend, and having a wonderful boy with him, Kirk Matthew. She was four years younger than her man too. My sister is only l4 months older than me. Neil and I went together for three years, then broke up, but remained friends until we both married other people and lost touch. It’s funny, though, whenever there is talk of the first moonwalk, I think back to going steady for the first time, and buying cokes (a big treat since we rarely had them in my parents’ house except on very special occasions).

Do people still go steady, even? Well, that was the evening of two important Neil’s for me at the time.“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" (Armstrong from the Sea of Tranquility Lunar Surface, July 20, 1969), and it seemed a large step for Neil and I at the time. Some reports now claim that moon walk was a falsehood, others that Armstrong's wasn’t the first moon walk, but I do believe the 1969 moon walk really occurred.

I have many pages to re-staple and go over in pen in my diaries, as they’re fading, some I made the error of writing in pencil in my youth. Several of those are unreadable now, sadly. So I must take time aside and work on what I can in my old diary box.
- Maureen Lorna Glaude


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