Meme, Episode Two

 

When I was a kid, I used to hide out in the “cold” room under my parents’ basement stairs, which was an unfinished crawl space that housed various root vegetables and my father’s surplus beer.   The room was about two feet by four, and, at its highest, not more than three; that is, much too small for grown-up bodies but the perfect size for a four-year old me.

Leaning against the room’s brick wall was a framed news clipping from the Toronto Star, which my father had saved the day after the Apollo 11 moon landing.  I used to stare at the clipping for hours, entranced equally by the promise of space travel and by its fragile skin of newsprint, and I distinctly remember wondering how the future could so closely resemble the past.