The Eclipse

I’ve been thinking about one of my step-brothers a fair amount in the past couple of days. He passed away several years ago. I can’t say we were especially close; certainly not when we were older. Mostly, I think he’s a proxy for me to think about myself when I was a specific age – probably 7 or 8 years old. The first instance had to do with a question about the first radio song you remembered. For me, it wasn’t the first, but when I was eight, he lived in a small town in western Colorado. He got a transistor radio, and it seemed like that thing only picked up one music station. And that station had “Le Freak” by Chic and “My Life” by Billy Joel on heavy rotation.

My father and his second wife initially lived on a farm in rural Wayne County, Indiana  and then on a property with a fair amount of land in rural western Colorado. The second wife’s kids were of a similar age and genders: older girls and a youngest son. When my sisters and I would go visit my father, we’d pretty naturally split off by age and gender. Michael was a little more than a year older than me; and we would spend a lot of time together.  And at that age, all things space were very, very cool.

It was the mid-to-late 70s. The height of Space Age fever had passed, but it was still very much a thing. Out in the country, things in the sky loomed larger. We’d sleep out at night, and in 1978, there weren’t many satellites. We’d get excited seeing one blink against the sky. I’m sure we mislabeled more than a few airplanes. There was a meteor shower that looms large in my imagination. My guess is that this was the Perseid shower in the summer of 1979, but I couldn’t say for sure. In my memory, a huge meteor flashed overhead, traveling more or less directly over the lane leading to the house. (I have doubts about the quality of my memory – the orientation of the visual is a little too perfect for real life.) After that, the night sky had frequent meteor flashes. The night sky in western Colorado really has to be seen to be believed.

And, of course, there were the space shows. Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica were our favorites. We had Battlestar action figures: his was a cylon, mine was a “Colonial Warrior.” (I was jealous of his.) Which brings me to the eclipse. Yesterday, we went down to Bloomington for eclipse festivities at Memorial Stadium. William Shatner gave a spoken word performance. But that was only part of it – in general, space stuff brings out my inner eight year old. There’s a level of earnestness and wonder that tends to crust over with age. Cataracts of the soul or something.

Every so often, you can still be dazzled by the beauty of it all. A total eclipse is one of those moments. My wife and I went down to IU where our kids go to school. Cole is in the Marching Hundred which was playing in the event. Harper lives only a few blocks away, so she walked up and met us at the stadium.

Eclipse at Memorial Stadium

In addition to Shatner, astronaut and engineer, Mae Jemison spoke. One quote that stood out for me was her statement that “space exploration is based on the miraculous work of generations.” Shatner did a sort of spoken word thing, backed by an orchestra from the Jacobs School. In part, he used the eclipse to talk about our place in the cosmic scheme of things. For example, he referenced the creatures evolving over the earth’s millions of years experiencing eclipses from the shallow seas. Shatner sounded great for any age. For a man who is ninety-three years old, he sounded fantastic.

As for the moment of totality, if you didn’t experience it yourself, you’ve seen pictures that do the moment justice more than I can. Everyone experiences it differently. If nothing else, it’s something different that encourages you to take a minute or two and look around. For many, it’s much more. Maybe it’s spiritual. Maybe it’s a profound reminder that you are a very small part of a vast universe. Maybe totality is a moment of solidarity with the millions watching it with you or maybe with the generations over the millennia who have witnessed similar events with awe. At the very least, it’s not nothing. I reconnected a bit with my inner eight year old even while I was sharing a moment with my wife and kids that we’ll probably always remember.

On the way back to West Lafayette, there was some eclipse congestion. Normally, the trip takes a little less than two hours. Yesterday evening, it was more like three. Waze took us on county roads and state highways rather than the Interstates. At one point, we crossed over I-74 in a rural part of west-central Indiana, and westbound traffic was noticeably slow and backed up. Overall, not too bad for us though – an extra hour winding through the back roads was fairly pleasant on a sunny, dry Monday evening.

[Edited to add on 4/10/24]: This morning I came across a Shatner quote I’d seen before but found insightful and apropos to this post. It had to do with his experience going into space when he was 90:

I was absolutely wrong. The strongest feeling, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting so starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.