Looking up

It was mid-afternoon on an otherwise ordinary Monday for us “work-from-homers.” But for my son, who was lounging around the house in his PJs, it was an imaginary snow day, which in the first quarter of the 21st century, is just a way for schools to make a springtime withdrawal of banked time that, historically, had been allotted to winter folly when blizzards turned carting kids around into an unduly hazardous pursuit. 

It seemed kismet that on this day, celestial bodies had literally aligned to provide a special show all the same. 

My husband had set up chairs in the backyard and texted his son no fewer than 68 times since accidentally awakening the kid, drill-sergeant style, to get ready for his non-existent school day. 

“T minus 12 minutes until the start of the eclipse,” he heralded, on the never-ending loop of texts he sent to our phones as a kind of countdown.

“You don’t want to miss it!”

“There won’t be another one for like 27 years!”

… “Hey!” 

“Anyone?”

“*Grumble, grumble, all I ever get is the sound of crickets*!”

I would have responded but I was still scouring our house, looking in closets and through drawers for the pristine, cardboard light-filtering glasses I had saved from a college family weekend last fall. We didn’t heed the advice of the welcoming committee and set an alarm to “look up” between 10 and 10:35 on the second morning of our reunion - October 14. My mistake caused us to miss the annular eclipse entirely as well as the continental breakfast to commemorate the solar event.

Instead, I summoned my phone to text my son, and asked the boy to acknowledge his father’s request, knowing a response from a silent teenager would be a welcome blip on the flatlining radar. 

“Mom is looking for the creepy glasses she kept from the last 3D movie we saw when I was 8 … or something,” he jested. 

“Tell her to just Let it Go  … I have enough welding helmets for everyone. I don’t want any of us to miss this one!”

“Found them!

“... Trunk of the car, go figure!”

Oddly, I felt excitement by the time the three of us were gathered on the patio, slouching in the nylon chairs as our heads rested on the seat backs while we stared into the sun. 

The least of which correlated to what our filter-protected eyes could see: the moon slipping over the sun, slowly swallowing her up. 

Nor did the quieting of birds as the sky darkened rev my heart as much as the sudden realization that along with the … million people looking up at this very moment, the fourth member of our household was probably seeing the magic of the cosmos, too, even though she was hundreds of miles away.

I texted her a picture of the three of us in our get-up, and the best image of the eclipse I could manage without a similar filter for its mechanical eye. 

We were all there … 

The dad in his welding mask,

 The boy spun the glasses around his index finger like a set of car keys, with an expression that said:  “I came, I saw, and I wonder now how long I’m supposed to stay out here?”

And me … with my cardboard shades … smiling up at the sun.

…. 

“So that’s where those glasses went! I've been looking for them everywhere.”