They gathered around the wooden console television that set in my grandmother’s living room. My grandparents’ house always smelled of delectable southern food like fried chicken, slow-cooked hand-picked greens or purple hull peas doused in bacon fat that we would pick out of the pod ourselves. It was her living room though, there were other parts of the house that I attributed to my grandfather.

Just memories that sit hidden right now as I memorialize the ghosts that sit in my past in a small town in northwest Tennessee.

I was four and I do remember the first moon landing. I remember the excitement of the adults. In later years when my sister was a bit older and we had a few Apollo missions under our belt, I do recall her asking my Nanny is Jesus was on the moon because she thought she saw him. My grandmother told that story for years, although I do not recall what mission that was.

Yet I do remember the first one only because of the unbridled and nervous vibration going on amongst my family and their friends.

Neil Armstong died today and you’d have to live under a rock not to know that. He was amazing. And I feel in love with a sentence about him today from writer Bill Barol that I wanted to share.

He seems to have sensed that the music was in what he did, not what he said, and that for the rest of his life he could never say anything that would measure up to the enormity of the achievement for which he had become the unwilling public face.

I attribute Armstong with the stars and the moon. The photos from the moon are still some of my favorite ones on the planet and I do see the irony that they weren’t taken on this planet, so there.

And it was a time that we worked together in this country and not against each other. Pres. John F. Kennedy said “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Godspeed to you Neil Armstrong as you showed us that everything is a risk. You even said it and it is why it is the name of this post.

The risk he took was worth it. I hope upcoming generations can follow your bravery and the depths of your compassion and your exquisite ability to know what your actions did and that words in your later life were used sparsely and effectively.

I still smell the fried chicken at my grandmother’s home. I also remember the giddy hope that filled the room after he took his first step as we moved toward the ’70s.

It something you don’t forget.