"We Stopped Dreaming"

I remember years ago when Apollo 13 had just come out on video, I was in Saturday Matinee and they were playing it on the store's TV monitors. They had gotten to the point in the movie where the Saturn is lifting off the launching pad. I was just standing there watching, and a man about my age was standing next to me, mesmerized.

"Do you remember that?" he asked me.

"I do," I said. "We saw a couple."

"God, I wish I had," he said. His young son was with him. After a while he came up and stared at the screen, but after a moment he looked at his father and said, "Dad, what's that?"

"That," his father said, "is a spaceship."

His son looked at the screen, with a skeptical expression. "A spaceship? Really?"

"Yes. Really." He paused. "It was a real spaceship." His voice almost broke as he added, "And it was ours."