The moon launch

I was in Acoaxit, Massachusetts, which the people there now call Westport. It was where we spent our summers, even though we were from the Philadelphia suburbs, where most went to the New Jersey shore. I was eleven years old. 
Like a lot of those who spent summers in rented houses, we didn't have a television. I was at the house of people who lived in Acoaxit year round who my family and I didn't know well though we were on friendly terms. The man's business was selling flowers and he had greenhouses on his property. They had a son named Scot and a daughter named Lynne. Scot was a few years older than me. So was Lynne, who was older than Scot. She was the closest thing I knew to a hippie. She took speed and ran away one summer and hitchhiked to California.
Ted Kennedy had drunkenly driven a car off a small bridge in Chappaquiddick two days earlier and a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne died in the accident. Drowned. She was twenty-eight and Kennedy handled it so badly that it ruined Kennedy's chances of ever being president. It wasn't until the last ten or fifteen years of his life that

Mary Jo Kopechne

Kennedy, who died of brain cancer in 2009 at age seventy-seven, rehabilitated his reputation to any degree. Because the Kennedys were Massachusetts icons, the accident was such a topic of conversation that the moon landing wasn't as big a deal where I was as it was in most other places. I think I was the only one in room I watched it in. My father was elsewhere, talking to the greenhouse man. The other kids were elsewhere. I wish I had lived in a city then and was a few years older. From what I've seen lately, it unified people for a short time in a positive way, the way a hometown sports victory can do for a few hours.

Acoaxit, Massachusetts.