When I was a teenager, I lived in a pair of shorts that looked like the brown and white mottled hide of a Holstein cow. I loved those shorts with an inexplicable fervor. Why was I so excited to walk around in cow pants? To be fair, at the time, America was in the middle of the Age of Aquarius. Hippies ruled. Clothing choices veered in all directions, mostly questionable.

My father worked at Fafnir Bearing. Every year during the two-week mandatory factory break, we’d visit my grandparents in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1969, our trip coincided with the Apollo 11 moon launch. On the day of the launch, I brought all of my clothes, including the beloved cow pants, to a laundromat at the end of the street. I needed to wash my clothes before leaving Florida to go to a teen camp in Vermont. I can’t remember why I didn’t use my grandmother’s machine, maybe it was broken.

Just before the launch took place, I abandoned my drying clothes at the laundromat so that I could run outside and watch the rocket blaze skyward.  As a teen, I possessed lots of optimism but little geographical knowledge. St. Pete is located on the west coast of Florida. Cape Canaveral, the site of the launch, is on the east coast, 135 miles away.  Even if my vision was as excellent as Superwoman’s, I could not have seen clear across the state. So, at blast off, I gazed upward into an empty blue sky.

Bitterly disappointed, I returned to the laundromat to discover someone had stolen my clothes.  Double heartbreak. Who would want size 2 cow shorts?

Soon after, I headed to Camp Blessing, a place situated in the middle of a beautiful apple orchard in Saxtons River, Vermont. On the day of the moon landing, a farmer-philosopher-local sage named Russell Allen showed up at camp with a tiny television and lots of hope. He felt that we campers should be able to view this momentous event in real time. Russell rigged up the TV with tin foil and a wire hanger. Then he fiddled and fiddled a little more, trying his best to get reception. We heard static and saw snow. What more could we expect? We were nestled in the hills of Vermont and this was well before the days of cable. Eventually, a grainy image emerged on the screen. Along with 600 million people worldwide, we watched Neil Armstrong take one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.

Journalist Graydon Carter once said, “History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.” In my case, the opportunities missed may have been for the best. I believe having my laundry stolen is evidence of a Benevolent Force at work in the universe. Who knows how my life would have turned out if I’d had the opportunity to spend my adolescence wearing cow shorts?

And yes, I did miss seeing the moon launch, having been 135 miles off the mark. Yet, viewing the moon landing on a tiny TV at that lovely apple orchard in Vermont more than made up for missing the launch. So, maybe Mr. Carter is only half right.  Perhaps we can view history as an epic tale of both missed opportunities and unexpected good fortune, which is just fine by me.