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I didn’t watch any of the Apollo 11 footage on TV or on the computer. I didn’t listen to any of the audio. At the time I just thought, well, I’m really busy. That is true with the next Merry book, DIVINE MISDEMEANORS due to hit the shelves in December I am rather frantically writing. Jon and I are also still working on the current comic issue of THE LAUGHING CORPSE. There is also some dealings with various things to do with the Anita Blake television show/movie. Can’t go into details, but let’s just say it’s added to my to-do list. In a happy, puzzling, Alice Through the Looking Glass sort of way.

I was excited about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the moon landing, and it was made doubly poignant for me by the fact that Walter Cronkite died just as it was all happening. He’d been the anchor that my grandmother loved, and had covered the moon landing in a well-informed, enthusiastic, and emotional manner that would be nice to see more on our news now. So, why, on the day did I watch, or listen to, nothing?

It took me a few days to figure it out, but I finally did the math. 40 years ago was a very different anniversary event for me. The moon landing was July 20th, on August 3rd we would get the call from the state police that my mother had been killed in a car accident. I always wondered why I didn’t have really strong memories of it all, I mean I was little, but it was man’s first steps on the moon. Why didn’t it stand out in my memory more? I’d never put it together that it was so close to my mother’s death. While the world was still basking in the glow of "one small step for man, one giant step for mankind," I’d had my own world changing event.

I kept meaning to watch the coverage, but I kept finding excuses not to watch. I worked hard and harder through all of it. Was some small corner of the child I once was convinced that there was some connection between the moon landing and my mother’s death? I don’t know. It’s a question best left for therapy, if it needs answered at all. All I know is that days before I was excited about Apollo 11 and the 40th anniversary, but when the moment came I wanted to be anywhere but watching it.

Was my mother excited about the landing? I don’t remember. I was so young, only six. I couldn’t tell you what my own mother liked on TV, or movies, for the love of God, I don’t even know what her favorite color was, but I know she was buried in my favorite color, because my family had me pick the dress. I was six and a girl and was still going to ballet class, my favorite color was most little girl’s favorite color: pink. My mother was buried in a pink dress. She didn’t own a pink dress. She, like me, didn’t look good in pink. Did some aunt or cousin have to shop and buy a pink dress?  Years later I would be going through the closets at my grandmother’s and find one of the dresses I remember my mother wearing. It was black and dark chocolate brown and she had looked beautiful in it. I thought, this was what she should have been buried in, and suddenly I thought, I was six, why was I picking anything out? My grandmother is dead, too now, so I can’t ask her why, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She would have answered that question as she answered so many others, "Why do you want to talk about that? It just upsets me."

That makes two of us. The difference was always that if something upset me I wanted to know why, what happened, I wanted to poke at it, tear it apart, dissect it. My grandmother always found that relentless search for truth one of my least endearing qualities. Now I use that same nearly ruthless pursuit of facts and answers to write. It helps give reality to my fantasy, and makes my books better, stronger, more real flesh and blood.  But it doesn’t do anything about that damn pink dress.