Well, That Happened

…And it was just as amazing as advertised. Really, how often does that happen these days?

Now that we are back in full daylight (a day that does not look like I imagine one on Mars would look like) and we are recovering from our eclipse ice cream sundaes (trademark), I wanted to offer a couple of brief thoughts. Because there’s just no way I’m going to be able to write about anything else today.

First, I want to say that I think it’s hilarious that the Total Solar Eclipse has turned every home into a homeschool. Without any guidance from public school science classrooms or sent-home flyers, families (whether led by the adults or the children), have had to get educated on both the physics of the phenomenon and the tools with which to experience it. If only we could do this all the time!

Second, I was thinking today about how in our society we rarely experience the same things at the same time. This is the age, after all, of niche TV, personalized music curation, and the Google Bubble. There have been very few unifying events in recent years; things that we all saw or felt as a people. September 11th was one. The last few presidential elections (for sure the most recent one).

Maybe this is due to our living in this part of the country, in the sweet spot of totality, but I can’t remember one thing being on the minds and lips of pretty much everyone I met in the way this has. I have to say, it makes me feel nostalgic for the way things used to be when what we watched was whatever was on tonight and what we did was whatever was going on down the street. I understand that this makes me sound old.

This morning we sat at the picnic table on the front lawn (or the white sheet we had put down to catch the radiation shadows) and saw that everyone on our street was doing the same thing. Everyone making frequent sun checks with their eclipse glasses; oohing and aahing at the (very) appropriate moments; getting the same emergency alerts on their phones about why we shouldn’t look at the sun without our glasses or park on the dry grass. I didn’t have to look at mine because someone on the corner was reading them out loud.

Later, as the moon was easing itself back out of the way, I took the girls for a walk in the neighborhood and found that most people were still home, and outside: watering flowers, sitting in tailgater chairs. A typical conversation, as I overheard: “Well, that was pretty neat.” “What?” “That was pretty neat.” “Sure was.”

It’s so heartening that we can still agree on things.