"So how was it? How was...the moon?" You have no further questions. Because he went to the moon. And now he’s sitting here, at your table in a dark and crowded D.C. restaurant. It’s disorienting. The moon! The crescent and the eclipse, the waxing and the waning, the cheese—the lunar glow hanging right there, night after night on the periphery of your busy coming and going. No matter what your age, gender, politics, nationality, social or financial standing, every single person inhabiting the planet Earth has the same reaction to him. Holy crap, Buzz Aldrin, you went to the moon!

You smile at him, your face opening the way every single face in the entire world opens when it encounters him. Because he is: Buzz Aldrin. And we are: mankind.

He takes note of your smile, and just as quickly looks past you. It’s the same way with everybody. It’s your pregnant anticipation: I can’t wait to hear the amazing synthesis of moon wisdom you are about to bestow upon me.

He has no idea what to do with that. None. He’s turning 85 this month. He went to the moon when he was 39. Mankind has been coming at him with your same smile ever since. What do you expect him to do with that?

He orders the veal. He’s wearing a lapel pin of his famous moon footprint in miniature, cast in pewter. He’s wearing a tan corduroy jacket, a tie with pictures of planets all over it. He’s wearing bracelets, big beads. Turquoise on one wrist and a string of translucent alien faces or something on the other. "And all of a sudden here’s a rocket," he’s saying, his voice low and gravelly, as he tries to make plain what landing on the moon can do to a man’s life. "And you’re gonna get on top of it and go somewhere. People are interested. People want to be able to put down in writing something about how you were feeling." He gesticulates when he talks, the bracelets clattering. "Look, we didn’t know what we were feeling. We weren’t feeling."

The jewelry is distracting. There is more. A gigantic double watch, two faces fused together like heads on conjoined twins. There are gold rings, a moon, a star, diamonds, a pinkie ring, many rings. What is up with the jewelry? It’s confusing. Wait, jewelry?

Never mind all that. You have no idea what to do with all that. His jewelry, your pregnant smile, the distance between you and him is a chasm and you don’t know how you feel about that. Imagine how he feels about that. He doesn’t know how he feels. He’s been feeling this way ever since he came back, fell spectacularly out of the sky in July of 1969, splashed into the Pacific in an airtight capsule with his Apollo 11 crewmates Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins.

He’s a museum piece. He’s a mascot—for Team Universe.

He talks in very long paragraphs about rocket science. Orbits and going to Mars and the "Aldrin Mars Cycler." He holds three patents for things like a modular space station, and he started a foundation devoted to advancing space education. "But this is not what you want to talk about," he thankfully says, and so you say let’s get back to that day you went to the moon. It was a moment for the world, a particular historic moment when scientific, military, and nationalistic interests intersected perfectly—and him and Neil and Mike blasting off atop a Saturn V as if in celebration of that perfect union. And doesn’t he have a perspective on that? A way of thinking about that?