I have been smiling since this afternoon and I keep laughing when I think about it and I’m not entirely sure I can explain why this matters as much as it does to me.

At the end of the second moonwalk today — after Shepard and Mitchell had set up experiments and collected samples and spent the EVA doing serious work — Alan Shepard reached into the side pocket of his spacesuit and pulled out a Wilson Staff 6-iron clubhead. He had smuggled it aboard the spacecraft.

He attached it to the handle of a geological sample collection tool — a long rod that the crew uses to pick up rock samples — which gave him something like a one-iron. Then he set a golf ball on the surface.

He swung. One-handed, because the spacesuit doesn’t give you full arm range of motion, especially in a pressurized suit. The ball went, maybe, 40 yards. He shanked it a little. “There it goes,” he said. “Miles and miles and miles.” (Not quite miles.)

Then he placed the second ball. He swung again. This time he caught it clean — as clean as you can with one hand and a spacesuit on. The ball flew out of frame on the television camera and he said: “Miles and miles.”

I know this is silly. I know this is a man using Moon time — expensive Moon time, the limited hours of a moonwalk — to hit golf balls. The first golf played on another world.

But here is what I think about when I laugh at this: Alan Shepard has been waiting ten years to get back into space. He was grounded. He had surgery. He managed the astronaut office while other men flew the missions he’d trained for. He did everything right and was still patient about the unfairness of it. And now, at forty-seven, on the Moon, he hit a golf ball because he could, because nobody was going to stop him, because he had earned whatever small absurdity he chose to commit.

The Moon is a place where people can play golf now. Not just stand in solemn wonder. Play golf. Hit a ball and say “miles and miles” and laugh. And that — that lightness, that refusal to let the wonder become entirely solemn — seems exactly right to me. Life is wonderful and sometimes ridiculous and both of those things are true at once.

Shepard is going home tomorrow. He’ll leave his golf balls in the Fra Mauro highlands. Millions of years from now, if anyone ever digs through the accumulated regolith, they’ll find a Wilson Staff golf ball, slightly pocked by micrometeorite impacts, and they’ll have to figure out what it is.

I’m still smiling. I think I’ll be smiling about this for a long time.