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I met Buzz Aldrin when I was six. Y’know, walked on the moon with Neal Armstrong? Seriously — I’m not making this up. He walked on the moon, it wasn’t faked, I promise.

(Isn’t it a sad measure of our times that people are more likely to disbelieve in the moon landing than in my meeting an astronaut?)

I was six, and visiting my grandfather in Chicago for the summer. Grandpa was Aldrin’s financial adviser. Of course, at age 6 I was suitably impressed by his credentials: he had me at “astronaut.”

Just a week before he showed up, I’d been to the Chicago museum of something-or-other, seen a mock-up of the Mercury capsule, and bought a little plastic model of it.

My uncle Russell (only barely out of his teens at the time) encouraged my Apollo-landing fixation with his own posters and pictures of those images later misused by MTV (this was 1978; cable TV wouldn’t rock for another four years).

I was impressed with Buzz, but Russell had a terrible hero-worshipping crush on the man. Buzz was very patient and kind with us. My uncle got to drive Mr. Aldrin to the airport; and because I hadn’t pestered him too much, I got to ride in the back seat.

But a great big airshow had shut down traffic along Lakeshore Drive. The road to the airport was jammed up with slow-moving traffic. Plus, it was summer in Chicago, and the air conditioner wasn’t working very well. So my uncle was sweating it and getting really upset: here he was, privileged to serve his boyhood hero, but failing to get him to the airport on time or in comfort.

Buzz was fully aware of Russell’s discomfort. He couldn’t not be. But he did something then — something I would not forget — something that made me sit up in a crowded theatre some years later and yell out loud.

Buzz leaned back in his seat (they were bench seats back then — bucket seats were almost unknown) and winked at me. Then he closed his eyes, smiled, sighed, and announced:

He said it in a voice that made the rattling air conditioner go quiet. His voice had a serenity that dropped the temperature in the car ten degrees. Buzz was so calm that Russell and I both sat back in our seats and…smiled.

And this is the weirdest thing his voice did: it made the traffic move faster. Somehow, some way, the moment we stopped worrying about the traffic jam, it started to work itself loose.

I hear what you’re thinking: Where the hell did this Lizard business come from? Years later, a light bulb went off during this sequence of scenes:

These men were going where no man had gone before. The Mercury capsule is a tiny spaceship about the size of a phone booth. NASA was looking for men who wouldn’t lose it under pressure, who had a special talent for dealing with stress.

Because fear is one thing, but giving in to your fear will never save you. The ancient greeks named the servants of Hades ‘Pain’ and ‘Panic’ because both of them can kill your mind.

Lizards are cold-blooded. They can move fast when they need to, but they don’t know how to panic — they’re not built that way. NASA wanted men in touch with their inner Lizard.

From that day forward, it’s been a special gift Buzz gave me. Whenever stress gets to be too much, I close my eyes and smile that way (it’s the same smile Quaid has in that scene about 6:40 of the way through) and announce, for all the world to know, that I am a cold-blooded creature, and this heat feels good.

And you know what? It works.

Today, 40 years after leaving Earth for the moon, Buzz Aldrin has an op-ed at the Washington Post proposing that NASA go to Mars by way of the moon, using the Red Planet’s twin moons — named for the gods of fear and panic — as bases for exploration. I say it’s only fair to name the spaceship for some species of lizard.