Nows and Forevers

I’m not a football fan really, so what the heck am I doing at the NFL Draft?

Working, of course. And I’m going to watch the actual draft from my own TV.

Not to brag, but that’s my (temporary) view from Pittsburgh, where Acrisure Stadium and the NFL Draft stage is on the right and Point State Park and the fountain and the rest of the NFL Draft Experience is being held.

Brief stop alongside the road in Sharpsburg, Maryland, on the edge of the Antietam National Battlefield, a place that matters in my family history.

It’s where my maternal great-great-great grandfather, Robert Roberts of West Pittston, Pennsylvania, saw his first combat of the Civil War on Sept. 17, 1862, as a member of the 81st Pennsylvania. The worst of the worst, too: The Sunken Road, where more than 5,600 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed across an 800-yard line in less than three hours.

I visited here in depth in 2005 with my father, but I haven’t been back since. Antietam is the country’s bloodiest day in military history for good reason: 22,270 killed or wounded in a single day’s battle in the Maryland mountains.

My great-great-great grandfather survived that, survived Gettysburg, went all the way to Cold Harbor in 1864 and then spent the rest of the war in a Confederate prison camp. He went back home and lived with his wife and kids til he was killed in a mine blast in 1878 age 42.

Robert Roberts is buried a few steps away from the graves of my mother, my grandparents and great-grandparents. I have been going to his grave, along with my other ancestors in West Pittston Cemetery, my whole life. No one alive when I was born remembered him nor his wife, Ann, who died in 1915.

But my great-aunt Jeannette, the family genealogist, told me his story many times.

And Roberts’ plot also holds Hattie (Harriet) Howell, my great-great aunt, who died at age 20 in 1907. She died suddenly, as one did in those days, of an internal ailment. The Howells were too poor for a grave so Ann Roberts let her be buried with her husband and, eventually, her.

Hattie’s death so profoundly impacted her older sister, my great grandmother, Helen (Howell) Jones that she named her daughter (my grandmother) after Hattie.

And my grandmother named her first child, my mom, after Hattie. And, just before my grandmother died.

The past matters, and my family’s journey went through this ground.

One of the highways I take into work was shut due to an accident so I had to take the long way — the long, long way. But on the bright side, I took a road I’ve never gone before and I was stopped in traffic and saw these nice flowers. Never would have seen them on the highway.

Trans Lunar Injection for the first time since December 1972.

Yes, I’ve got rocket fever again. But then again, I always have rocket fever.

I’m always up for a ’60s and ’70s throwback, and this is definitely it: The Artemis II crew will be doing a modern-day Apollo 8 mission — a little further out but still awesome —and I’m all in. I wrote a column for The Hollywood Reporter on 40th anniversary of Apollo 8, that’s how much I dig it. I even watched the coverage of Artemis I, which didn’t have any astronauts aboard, back in 2022.

I was a toddler when Apollo 8 launched and in elementary school the last human trip to the Moon, but I do remember it. And even though it was a long time ago, there are similarities to that time and now: mission to the Moon, deeply divided country, America in a war.