Eclipse 2024 April 9, 2024
The sky didn’t fall; but the world felt just a bit weirder on account of this once-in-a-lifetime event that nearly blinded me to witness.
“Momma told you not to look into the heart of the sun, but
momma, that’s where the fun is,” Springsteen once sang.
Some idiot from The View tried to sell the idea that the eclipse
was the result of climate change (she also said our recent earthquake was as
well), proving once again just how deluded these climate change fools are.
Still, I fell into the hype partly because the next
opportunity won’t be for 22 years, by which time I’ll likely be dead, or just
as likely, blind.
I keep thinking of Mark Twain and his prediction about Halley’s
Comet, how he was born with its arrival, and would pass off this mortal coil
when it returned, and he did in 1910, just in time for local officials in Lodi
to name their new school after him, to which my grandfather and all his siblings
attended.
These are all markers in our lives, and as significant as
those the ancients attributed to “the gods,” these marvel of nature we get
brief glimpses of, predictable to some extent, yet as important in the passage
of our lives as history itself, but immutable, immune to the whims of new
generations that seek to change the meaning of what once was.
I keep thinking of how significant the attack on Pearl
Harbor was to the generation that preceded ours, my underage father desperate
to get into the war, my still even more underage uncles who could not.
By the time I was born ten years later, it was already ancient
history, just as 9/11 is to the current and somewhat deluded generation we call
Gen Z.
I remember interviewing the then 101 year old lady in a
Bloomfield nursing home back in 1997, shocked at the fact that her then-deceased
husband had been Thomas Edison’s chief aide, and that she had known Thomas Edison
personally.
I’m sure if I live long enough, younger people will marvel
at the fact that I remember seeing John F. Kennedy being driven down Main
Street from Paterson into Clifton in 1960, and living through the Cuban Missile
Crisis, the Kennedy Assassinations, MLK’s, the moon landing, Woodstock and all
the various anti-war protests, having known Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, one of
the people on Ken Kessey’s bus, and some members of the Charles Manson family.
All of these things seem important, even significant, when what
I miss are the people who lived during my time and are now gone, and I retain
the living memory of their passage, only to see their lives eclipsed.
I hope to be alive when the next eclipse comes, but I’m not
counting on it, the way Twain did seeing the return of a comet, I’m just – as John
Lennon put it – hanging out here and wasting time.
And having seen this eclipse, I’m grateful I’m not yet
blind.
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