One man and one night

 Frank Borman died the other day, and now I am compelled to get ahead of myself. I swore I would never do this, being the slave I am to the proper order of things. This is especially true when the holidays come around.

First comes Halloween and then comes Thanksgiving, and then (and only then) comes Christmas. That's the proper order. So no giving the middle finger to the middle holiday by trotting out Christmas lights and Santa displays and 24/7 Christmas carols as soon as the calendar hits November 1.

But Frank Borman has ascended again to the stars. And that means I've been thinking of Christmas Eve these past few days.

You know Christmas Eve. It's the night before the birth of the Savior if you're of the Christian faith, and there is wonder in it and anticipation and a benevolence to the star-scattered darkness. 

For me it's a night of the visceral, as most things are when you look back at them from a certain age. It's watching the flame flicker as you hold that candle in your hand and sing "Silent Night" at the end of Christmas Eve services. It's walking out at midnight into a snow globe one particular Christmas Eve, a swirl of white filling the sky and shrouding the streetlights. 

It's turning on the TV, on Christmas Eve in the torn year of 1968, and listening to Frank Borman read from the book of Genesis as he and Bill Anders and Jim Lovell orbited the moon in what amounted to a closet.

And the Earth was without form, and void ...

And on the TV screen, sliding beneath us as Borman read, the very embodiment of a formless void: a desolate gray lunarscape of craters and rocks and profound emptiness. . The melding of image and word could not have been more perfect, nor more mesmerizing.

Or at least it was for me.

I was 13 years old that Christmas Eve, and a hopeless space fanboy. I knew the names of the astronauts and who crewed what flight and how each flight went. But even I didn't understand, until much later, just how much a leap into the unknown Borman, Lovell and Anders were making on the Apollo 8 flight.

Until then, man had never left Earth orbit. Until then, no one knew what would happen if we did. And until then, no one knew -- really knew -- if we had the technology to aim a tiny seedpod at a tiny dead rock in the vastness of space, and grab enough of its meager pull to hitch a ride around it.

If we missed, Borman, Lovell and Anders would still be out there today, adrift for all eternity.

Because we didn't, we got the wonder of Christmas Eve 1968, at the end of a year when America and the world needed some wonder.

I don't know what compelled Frank Borman to do what he did that night, but it was the perfect balm for a year in which Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated and the country nearly tore itself apart over an increasingly pointless war half a world away. It gave us back some perspective, physically and otherwise. 

Three men whirling around in a frail bubble of air an impossible distance away?

Now there was some perspective for you. 

Three men looking back at an Earth that was merely a blue marble hanging in space from where they were?

There was reason to give us pause, and to make at least some of us realize our commonality -- not as Americans or Russians or Vietnamese or Chinese, but as the human race.

And the Earth was without form, and void ...

And then, as we watched the surface of the moon slide beneath us, Borman signed off with holiday wishes from the three  star voyagers to "all of you ... all of you on the good Earth."

The good Earth.

Tell me we can't all use the reminder sometimes.