Holding onto one’s heroes can be tricky in today’s world. Pavlik Morozov turned out to mostly be a fiction. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya shouldn’t have ever gotten herself involved with those fascists. But Valentina Tereshkova? There was nothing so sacred in my childhood as the space race. I can still remember staying up as a young child to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. Our television was black and white, of course, but more importantly I think it was somehow in the middle of a light brown wood console – it’s that I remember, the large piece of furniture in the corner of our “den,” with a fairly fuzzy, smallish screen in the center. More important to my future was Yuri Gagarin. After all, there’s no way my suburban Chicago high school would have offered Russian language if it weren’t for the threat of that brave young man, that spaceman, the reason Neil Armstrong was so eager to enter space, and his commanders so eager to send him. (True, I’ve heard it ...
A blog about travel and staying put, reading and writing, food and food for thought.