Totality

Just in time, the clouds thin then move away completely. The moon inches over the last fingernail sliver of sun. Head tilted back, I stare upwards with my dark glasses off. A star, no, our bright neighbor Venus, gleams below and to the right of the sun and the moon. It’s 1:41 in the afternoon. From minute to sun-covered minute, the air has cooled in incremental fashion. A welcome change. It’s already getting too hot for my liking. The dusk-like darkness presses strangely against my eyes.

Totality.

Birdsong gets lost in the sudden eruption of children’s screams; delight, awe, excitement, wonderment, maybe even a little fear. I feel that joyous scream, as spontaneous as the elementary school’s children, someplace deep within me, but I hold it there inside. I let the wonder swirl.

I smile at their delight and at mine.  

What a thing this is to be reminded of space, the solar system, the orbiting of one object around another. Of miles and light years. Of things I know or used to know. For instance, that the moon is roughly a quarter of a million miles away. That it’s our only natural satellite (don’t get me started on unnatural satellites and space junk). That the sun is 93 million miles away, in astronomical units. And that it takes 8 minutes for the sun’s light to reach the earth.

After I learned that fact, for a creative assignment in school, I once did a watercolor painting of the sun at its setting and called it Eight Minutes Left.  

I recall how I had thought about what it would be like to have those last eight minutes of usual light before darkness, and not know it was the last, if the sun were to be extinguished.

With Venus in the daytime sky, I think of how, in high school or my early college years, I used to see it shining in the early mornings and wondered what star it was. How, in those days before the internet when information came from specialists, librarians, books, grandmothers, I called an astronomer to ask what I was seeing. How he told me it wasn’t a star and used leading questions to get me to answer my question myself.

How I took Astronomy at college and, through a telescope, got to see Saturn’s rings. Maybe even Jupiter’s Great Red Spot; that everlasting storm. How then, and later with the zoom lens of my camera, the moon’s craters shadowed and gleamed as if they were within my reach to explore. How Buzz Aldrin recalled the “magnificent desolation” of the lunar landscape when he stood on the moon’s surface. How I dreamed of my own feet imprinting their shape into the dust of the moon.

Three minutes and fifty-five seconds go by way too quickly. A tiny fingernail sliver of the sun peeks out as the moon continues on in its consistent orbit. I can no longer stare upwards without my eclipse glasses.

The air heats up again. Birdsong interrupts the new silence. The children have, evidently, gone back inside to school. After another moment, I go back in to my work, staring at the lesser light of my computer screen.

Not long later, I post a poor picture of the event online. A friend responds by saying, “That’s the second solar eclipse you’ve been in the path for! Seems lucky to me!” (I had been in Oregon in 2017 for the eclipse dubbed the “Great American Eclipse” as if it could be claimed by America.) It is lucky. It is wonderful.

Days later, a work friend and I are talking about the eclipse. She says, “I loved all the astronomers and meteorologists crying because they were so overwhelmed.”

I tell her about the school children’s delighted screams and how that made my experience of the eclipse that much greater. She says, “I’m gonna cry reading this.”  

Because shouldn’t we be moved—by personal experience or vicarious experience—to tears or laughter or screams by the wonder of the planet we stand upon, the gaseous star that gives us light and life, the natural satellite that pulls our tides in and out with its gravitational strength, and the stretching expansion of the universe?

I hope I always am. For what a thing it is to be in space. What a thing it is to be alive. What a thing it is to have both darkness and light. The covering of clouds and bright blue sky. The twinkling of stars and the brilliance of planets. Daytime and night. The sun and the moon.

What a thing it is; the totality of it all.