Moon Rocket Bottle Opener

Oakland

This may have been a gift from my old friend David McCutchen, an artist and inventor who shares my love for dinosaurs and rocket ships. It’s surprisingly heavy, and one can easily miss the bottle opener attachment at the bottom. Years of display in the direct sun on my kitchen windowsill has faded the once bright paint, and the traces that remain look like they were applied by a child.

The playful model reminds me of the afternoon and evening I spent interviewing astronaut Buzz Aldrin in 1999, the 30th anniversary of the first lunar landing. I met the vital, blue-eyed astronaut—he was then 69—in his Wilshire Boulevard apartment, and as an opening gambit, asked him which questions he was most sick of.

“Don’t ask me ‘how it felt’ to walk on the Moon,” the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot cautioned. “I’m sick of that question. It’s unanswerable.”

About an hour into our conversation Aldrin warmed up, and began to tell me how it felt after walking on the moon. “Once we came home, we were in quarantine aboard the U.S.S. Hornet,” he said, “in case we’d picked up any moon bugs. We were there for three weeks. During that time, the Hornet crew brought us newsreels of people all over the world, watching the moon landing together. Big crowds in Times Square, Paris, Tokyo, Brazil. It was a global event, an experience shared by millions of people around the world.

“I remember Neil (Armstrong) turning to me and saying, ‘We missed it!’ And it was true. Every person I’ve met, for the past 30 years, has told me exactly where they were at the moment we walked on the moon. We were doing it, but we didn’t share in that experience. Neil, Michael, and I were actually up there—but we missed the whole thing.”