This is a memory from about 1958, back in the beginnings of the “Space Age.” But as you will later learn, this use of “satellites” doesn’t involve outer space.

Rock n’ roll was happening on the ground, while rockets were propelling Sputnik and Vanguard into orbit around the earth.

Although this is an early recollection, a few images remain almost crystal clear as to what I saw and heard on that late ’50s evening.

Memories from the opposite end of that decade are in no way as clear (I was born in 1951), seeming hazy as if awaking from a deep sleep. Since the “post-life” sleep is death, perhaps the fogginess of our early memories comes from having not yet been fully awake from the great “pre-life” sleep of 13.8 billion years (latest estimate of the universe’s age). But it does seem, though, that after such lengthy, preparatory “winks,” everyone would be wide awake and rarin’ to go!

This memory of a “rock n’ roll evening” comes not from inside an auditorium, but from the parking lot of a now non-existent place on West Innes, just before the railway bridge. At the time, the bridge was denoted Southern Railway, later Norfolk-Southern. I have a 1960s memory of the “Southern” signage on that bridge being written in a more cursive, fancier flare than the sort appearing on railroad crossing signs.

I remember the air being warm and humid, logically pointing to summertime.

That open-air concert took place at a little restaurant called Donut Dinette, with a DJ’s involvement. The word “dinette” sounds like something small; and the dictionary defines “dinette” as a small informal dining area adjacent a kitchen, not for the “putting on of the show” like a formal dining room. The Donut Dinette was a similarly “small” place, but its parking area worked fine for putting on a rock n’ roll “show.”

To the best of my memory, a stage had been set up for the rock n’ roll concert, getting the show “off the ground” literally, for spectators’ enjoyment of both sight and sound.

For that time period, I prefer calling it “rock n’ roll” instead of “rock,” since “rock” brings to mind the excesses of some of its later practitioners such as those who were smashing guitars (and pumpkins too, I guess), although Jerry Lee Lewis had some notable late 1950s “excesses” of his own.

I remember the concert beginning while some daylight was yet left. As the sunlight waned, the concert’s electric lights waxed, or seemed to, an effect of the natural light fading away.

One effect of those lights, besides illuminating the rock n’ roll band (of which my brother Joe was the drummer) seemed to make the stars dim into invisibility (the stars in the sky, not the “stars” on stage).

Artificial light assumed the earlier role of the candle, attracting moths to its incandescent “flame.” Anyone attempting a collection of the butterfly’s nocturnal “opposite,” could have amassed an extensive one in the course of just a few hours.

The paths of both largest and smallest moths, even “candle flies” stood out in the wired illumination.

The single memory of that long passed, Donut Dinete evening (music, more than food) forever connects early rock n’ roll to early space exploration, at least in my mind.

The illumined, “winged satellites” moved erratically to a more hep “music of the spheres,” each zig-zag flight becoming an orbit about an electric star.