The things you remember after a total eclipse
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Something you notice as you start to research total solar eclipses, as one does, is that we know exactly when they are coming.
If you plan to be in Florida on May 11, 2078 and want to see a solar eclipse, you are in luck. Miss that one? Don’t worry, there’s always Sept. 14, 2099. And that one passes right through Minnesota.
Not sure you’re going to live that long? There’s a total solar eclipse coming in a little more than two weeks.
Lest you think they happen all the time, though, the April 8 event is the last total solar eclipse that will be visible in the Contiguous United States until 2044.
And so I started poking around, at least curiously. What day of the week is April 8? (It’s a Monday). Is that during our kids’ spring break? (No, it’s the first day after they get back from break). How far would we have to go to see the totality? (Indianapolis is probably the closest major city to Minneapolis).
This eclipse is not terribly convenient. We will probably have to settle for seeing part of the moon pass between Earth and the sun.
Then again, we probably had no real business seeing the last total solar eclipse in 2017.
But our family went for it anyway.
It was our first big trip as a family of four. My wife’s aunt, recently widowed at the time, was living in Omaha. She was somehow eager to welcome two adults, a three-year-old and a nine-month-old into her home.
We were eager to go anywhere, just probably not on an airplane yet. Somewhere far enough that we were away, but not so far away that we would return home exhausted from the travel.
So it was settled: Nebraska. And despite not exactly knowing why, we built a lot of the late-summer trip around “The Great North American Eclipse” on Aug. 21, 2017.
It’s a little less than a six-hour drive to Omaha (a lot more with two small children). We visited there for a couple days, then trekked another hour to Lincoln on eclipse day.
The Lincoln Salt Dogs, an American Association baseball team, had planned a game that would coincide with the totality. They gave out the special glasses and were committed to stopping the action during the eclipse — and they did, for 26 minutes.
That, too, was a Monday. But it was summertime, and our kids weren’t school age yet anyway. The pace of life felt a little different, as I recall, though a lot of things are still pretty foggy.
This much is not: The eclipse started in the third inning. Our 3-year-old, who had been playing nonstop, became still. Murmurs from a crowd of 7,000 turned to what seemed like absolute silence.
At totality, it wasn’t complete darkness. It was like a faint dusklight (not the friscalating kind) combined with the purplish-gray of a sudden summer storm.
Confused birds swirled around. We stood beyond the outfield wall, suddenly colder, in complete awe of everything we knew about what was happening and everything that would remain a mystery.
I’m not sure life has ever been as quiet since that moment.
It was our first big trip with two kids in part because it’s just hard to travel with kids, period. But it had also been a particularly rough first nine months for what was then our youngest child (now the middle of three).
She was born with a serious virus that caused deafness in one ear but thankfully spared her otherwise — though we wouldn’t really know that until she was 2 or 3.
Then when she was four months old, she had to spend 15 days in the hospital — several in intensive care — after getting a double-whammy of nasty winter viruses not long after starting daycare.
After that, my wife dramatically cut down on her return to work, essentially taking a second maternity leave that was still in progress when we took that trip to Nebraska.
We were slowly starting to emerge from that haze. Our 9-month-old was getting bigger and stronger. She was not, though, of the age to appreciate the celestial wonder of a total eclipse.
When it was all over, we ran into eclipse traffic. A stretch of road that usually took 10 minutes to traverse ended up taking more than an hour.
She started crying somewhere in there.
She seemed to be saying to us: I went through a lot to get here, and you repay me by dragging me to a solar eclipse at a baseball game?
She wailed and wailed until we uncovered the secret formula: We played her favorite song over and over through the car stereo.
Every time it briefly finished and we had to restart it, she cried. Pretty much every time without fail, when the song started again, she was quietly content.
The song was “Last Christmas” by Wham!
How we ever figured out she even liked that song, let alone came to understand that it would be the only thing to soothe her on a long car ride, is the sort of lived experience that you will not find in any of the books alleging to prepare you for parenthood.
A few decades ago, long before adulthood, marriage or kids, I was a freshman at the University of Minnesota who needed a science class to fulfill a general requirement.
I was already working at The Minnesota Daily, which would become my primary education during four (OK, five) years of college, and it was more important to me that the timing of the class fit my schedule more than anything.
Astronomy was that class.
But I ended up falling in love with it, making lifelong friends along the way as many of us were pulled into the orbit of an enthusiastic teacher. I don’t remember a lot of names of my professors, but I won’t forget Lawrence Rudnick.
I was so committed to the astronomy class that I remember pulling over in the middle of the night on a drive back to my hometown in North Dakota to make an entry in my moon journal.
“Incredible moon!” I wrote, as it appeared giant, low-slung and just rising. Later on the same drive, I dutifully charted its place in the sky by using the width of my fists as crude measuring instruments.
There’s probably a better way to do that now, but I don’t want to know what it is.
A few years ago, when that same child who was a baby during the eclipse was around 4, she went through a major phase where it felt like every day I was writing down something amazing she said.
I would collect them on my notes app, sometimes releasing them onto social media. A lot of times, they would just come spontaneously from the back seat of the car, after she had been quiet and thinking for a while.
And I will never forget the time she asked me this: “Is the sun’s nickname the moon?”
I could write for another 50 years and never come up with poetry like that. Only a child’s innocence in wondering if the two were the same — just swapping places day and night — could produce it.
If she didn’t just sum up all of existence, the good and bad, the dark and the light, in one sweet sentence …
A few weeks ago, I took all our kids to the Science Museum to see Deep Sky, a movie about all the amazing things seen through the powerful James Webb Space Telescope. I’ve been thinking about the “Cosmic Cliffs” ever since, and our kids are still talking about the movie.
A few days ago, perhaps with that film still buzzing in her head, our same daughter — now 7, a first-grader — casually asked me on the way home from school:
If a planet went around the sun in one day instead of needing 365, would every day be her birthday on that planet?
I had to think about it for a minute, but that sure sounded right to me. I had to then point out that every day would be everyone’s birthday. And every day would be Christmas.
She didn’t seem to mind that.
Then I tried to ruin it with even more science, telling her that unfortunately any planet that was so close to the sun as to make it around in just one day would probably be far too hot to live on.
Earth, as I had been thinking about lately, was just right. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too close to the sun, not too far away.
A planet so “mid” it’s the only reason any of us exist.
But I shifted my attention to the back seat. I assumed my daughter had been learning about the sun in school, but I wanted to be sure. “What made you come up with that question?” I asked.
“I just thought it up in my brain,” she said.
Damn, I bet she’d love the total eclipse in a couple weeks. Maybe we can find a way.
Or maybe when she’s 27.