Just Like The Real Thing

They sat by the window eating their Oberweis milkshakes with a box on the table in front of them. From their seats they commanded a first class view of the sidewalks and the people walking by in the late morning, but their attention was focused elsewhere: on their shakes and on the box sitting unopened on the table.

Oberweis shakes take a while to eat, and although they serve them with a spoon and a straw, the straws inevitably go unused. "Eating" is indeed the appropriate term. So finishing a shake there takes quite a bit of time, certainly more that these two would have preferred with the box beckoning to them from the tabletop.

When their shakes were finally done, the boy turned to the box and opened it. In a flurry of pulling and ripping, he took it out of the plastic wrap and opened the ends. It held plastic pieces of Apollo: a command module, a service module, and a lunar module complete with detachable descent and ascent modules. And they all docked together just like the real thing did.

The pieces were shiny, some of them silver and some of them gold, just like the real things. The command and service modules were silver and had a hatch that opened and three seats for three astronauts. Two of the astronauts could be put into the lunar module, just like they really did in 1969. The service module had a high-gain antenna (or was it S-band?) and a main engine that gimbled, just like the real thing. The lunar module came with scientific apparatus: a solar wind detector and the Apollo Lunar Scientific Experiment Package (ALSEP), just like they really had back then. And there was a little plastic American flag.

The boy struggled to fit the modules together. The young man sitting across from him smiled in evident joy at the boy's excitement and his race to assemble the pieces. The man struggled to explain them to the boy.

"This is a model of the Apollo that landed on the moon before I was born," the young man explained in an Italian accent. He ran his hand thru the boy's hair, and they both smiled ear-to-ear. The young man sat back and watched the boy completely absorbed in the interlocking, shiny modules.

That is when Trudy and I sat next to them with milkshakes of our own. In spite of the fact that I had a vanilla Oberweis shake in front of me, I found myself drawn to those shiny interlocking modules. They were just like the real thing. Memories of July 1969 flashed thru my head: a black and white television with lousy reception turned continuously on, Walter Cronkite and Jules Bergman and Tom Brokaw talking continuously with cool little Apollo models in their hands, getting to stay up into the morning, explaining things to my family, and fuzzy images of astronauts bouncing around on the moon after days of agonizing waiting. I couldn't focus on my milkshake and watched the boy instead.

The detail on the toy was amazing. And the boy didn't have it all quite right. He was trying to dock the command module into the descent module's engine. And he was telling the man how it worked but was getting it all wrong. After a few moments, I leaned over in his direction.

"You know," I said, "these are like the REAL THING," I pointed to the shiny modules. "And these are like the real instruments they took to the moon and left there when they came home."

The young man looked up with expectant glee, "Are you a SCIENTIST!?"

"He worked for NASA," Trudy said, but her words were drowned out by the boy.

"They LEFT them on the moon!?"

So I proceeded to explain the instruments, and the docking and undocking, and the lunar landing and reascent. And I mentioned that one astronaut remained in lunar orbit while the other two went down to the surface.

"They left him BEHIND!? Is he still there!?"

So I proceeded to explain the docking and undocking and the lunar landing and reascent while he continued to try to dock the modules in all sorts of amazing configurations.

By this time, our shakes were done, and it was time to leave. But the boy had only just begun playing with the shiny pieces and was no longer aware we were in the room. But the man was thrilled to have an "authoritative" explanation of this toy that he had just bought for this boy he clearly loved so much. And they were both still smiling ear-to-ear. Trudy was, too.

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Vacationing at Oberweis Dairy in Oak Park, IL.
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