I just read the news that Gordon Lightfoot has died. Given his age and condition, it’s not surprising, but still, it’s a shock. He was my number one favorite musical artist.

I’d heard his hits on the radio, of course, all through high school, and loved “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” when it first came out, not knowing at first, that it was based on a true story, but it wasn’t until the late seventies/early eighties that I really got into his music.

Someone had left Gord’s Gold at the Cape House, and I just totally fell in love with it. A lusher re-recording of many of his hits from the sixities and early seventies, it’s a great album. I so fell in love with the storytelling of the “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”, which tells the story of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, that I listened to it over and over until I knew the lyrics:

There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run
When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long before the white men and long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real

But time has no beginnings and history has no bounds
As to this verdant country they came from all around
They sailed upon her waterways and they walked the forests tall
Built the mines, mills and the factories for the good of us all

And whеn the young man’s fancy was turning to the spring
The railroad mеn grew restless for to hear the hammers ring
Their minds were overflowing with the visions of their day
And many a fortune lost and won and many a debt to pay

The song then switches to the viewpoint of the industrialists, who developed the land, and to the “railroad men” who envisioned “an iron road runnin’ from the sea to the sea” After this section there is a bridge, the tempo changes, and he switches viewpoints again, to the “the navvies who work upon the railway/Swingin’ our hammers in the bright blazin’ sun“. I can see this section in my mind’s eye, almost cinematically — yellow filter with the sunset behind, semi-slow motion silhouette of a worker swinging his sledge hammer to drive in the spikes.

Another bridge, and the original melody resumes, and the song’s camera pulls back, to show what the workers have accomplished, and the cost: “We have opened up the soil/With our teardrops and our toil”

The last stanza reprises the first, with one important addition:

For there was a time in this fair land
When the railroad did not run
When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long before the white men and long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
And many are the dead men
Too silent to be real

The storytelling in this song just blew me away. Pop music, at least the music you heard on the radio, was typically just love songs. This, this told a story. It was the first song I learned, (and to this day, if I want to test a keyboard, I’m apt to rattle off “There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run).

I fell in love with Gord’s Gold down the Cape, but it wasn’t mine, and I had to leave it there. The first album I owned was a birthday present that fall: Dream Street Rose. Again, a great combination of songs, including “Ghosts of Cape Horn” describing the sailing ships that rounded the Horn.

I started working around that time, and was able to start picking up his albums for myself. A concert of his, around the time of Shadows, was the first concert I ever went to. I must have seen him half a dozen times, at various venues in Boston, and the South Shore Music Circus. I picked up all his albums through the nineties, and most of his earlier work. When he appeared on PBS’s Soundstage, I recorded the audio off the TV, and nearly wore the tape out.

Nothing lasts forever, though, and while he never lost his songwriting ability, his wonderful baritone started to become reedy and thin. I started to find him unlistenable around the time of A Painter Passing Through, and stopped going to see him and picking up his newer music. I still love his older stuff though, especially the era from the seventies to early eighties, and feel like a big chunk of my musical life is gone.

My Aunt Dot died this morning. She was quite a character, and I’ll miss her.

Aunt Dot in June of 1981

Dot had a hard life. She married my Uncle Billy, and they only had a short time together before he died, leaving her a widow in her late twenties, with three small daughters. About a decade later, her oldest daughter, Susan, died a few days after Christmas, after being thrown from a horse.

Dot was a hard worker. She had help from Grandma and my Aunt Anne, her parents, and  her husband’s brothers (including my Dad), but she worked hard to raise her daughters, earn a living, and keep house. In later years, she’d talk about how she’d get up around 4 to clean house and then go on her way.  When she went for a walk, it was more of march– and you had to walk fast to keep up.

Dot was also very plain spoken. She could say the most outrageous things sometimes. Because of this, there was a tendency to joke about her.  I used to say she’d make a good sitcom character with only a little exaggeration. “I was up at four to wash and wax the floors and polish all the plumbing, and if they think I’m going to to…”

And yet, she was a heck of a lot of fun to have around. She’d had a lot of sadness in her life, yes, but she’d learned how to live with it nonetheless, and enjoy her life. She enjoyed trips to Rockport on the train with her friends, or walks to Castle Island with my mother.  When she moved to Georgia to be closer to her daughter Ruthie, life around here became a lot drabber.  I’ll miss her.

It was a shock to hear that Neil Armstrong died yesterday; it seemed like it was not so long ago that we watched him step out onto the lunar surface.

Of course, it has been a long time. I was nearly ten that Sunday in July; and very much into the space program. I read as much about it as I could, watched all the launches, and of course, there were the models. Dad and I built a model of the Saturn V together, and I’d also built a larger scale model of the three Apollo modules. I clearly remember the Gulf paper model of the lunar module, and I remember ‘flying’ it–with the aid of a string– from the Cape house stairs.

We were on the Cape that Sunday in July for our two weeks. That year, dad had picked up a secondhand mast, and he and my uncles were setting it up as a flagpole.

I remember running into the house around four to watch the coverage of the landing– with Walter Cronkite, of course. This was in the days before cable, and the picture was snowy and staticky. But I remember when they landed.

What I don’t remember noticing–whether it was because I was only nearly ten, or because of the crummy reception, or because Cronkite himself didn’t remark upon it, was what a near run thing it was. They landed with only about 30 seconds worth of fuel left. Armstrong had noticed the computer was taking them down into a field of boulders, and took over manual control of the Eagle to land them safely.

Once Eagle had landed, I went back outside, where Dad was finishing the installation of the flagpole. They’d set the base of it in concrete, and scratched into the wet cement ‘JULY 20 1969 – ON THIS DAY, MAN LANDED ON THE MOON’. The flagpole and inscription are still there.

The original official plan had called for the astronauts to take a nap between landing and doing the moonwalk. But soon, it was announced, they were going to go ahead with the moonwalk sooner — around 10:30. I begged to be able to watch it, but it was past my bed time, and off to bed I had to go (sulking). Soon, though, Dad came back up stairs, and told me I could watch it after all.

Being the Cape, reception was poor. And it took longer than expected for them to completely vent the Lunar Module, and for Armstrong to work his way through the tight front door of the LM. But eventually, we saw his shadowy figure bouncing down the steps of the LM, and onto the the front footpad.

Neil Armstrong was something of an accidental hero; his place as the first man on the moon is partly due to the happenstance of the astronaut rotation, and the influence of previous events, like the Apollo 1 fire, the deaths of the original Gemini 9 prime crew several years before, and changes to the program sequence, like the insertion of the lunar orbital Apollo 8 mission. And unlike the early European explorers, there is no one person responsible of the success of the Apollo missions. Neil Armstrong was simply the most visible (and somewhat reluctant) face of it. And yet, on the last few moments of the descent, it was his skill and levelheadedness that took them to the surface.

He was an intensely private man. His crew mate, Michael Collins, once described the crew of Apollo 11 as “amiable strangers”, communicating only the technicalities needed to get the job done. By way of contrast, his successor on Apollo 12, Pete Conrad, was very much of an extrovert, and insisted on bonding his mission into a “crew-crew”. I sometimes wonder if Armstrong would have preferred to have commanded one of the later missions instead, where the glare of publicity was less, and there was more focus on surface operations. The only exploring Armstrong got to do was a brief one minute run to the edge of a crater, near the end of the space walk.

On the other hand, he was a test pilot, and Apollo 11 was essentially the last of the test missions, where NASA was figuring out how to land a man on the moon. (I still remember the commentary on the fact that when the Eagle landed, they didn’t know exactly where. Later missions were able to land much closer to target).

Its been 43 years since Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and nearly 40 years since Gene Cernan left it. Cernan’s still the last man on the moon, something that would have been considered shocking back then. Someday, however, someone will go back there, and Cernan will yield his title.

Neil Armstrong, however, will always be first.