Memories of the recent eclipse.

Somehow, I missed the one specific fact with the last solar eclipse until the very evening before, that the totality is a categorically different phenomenon than even a very high percentage of coverage, and since I don’t own a car, by then it was too late to make plans and get out of town and travel just a little ways and see it.

Like, there were tinted glasses at the local library and I picked them up and people were saying what percentage we’d have and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones was mentioning the date of the eclipse, but somehow no-one was ever talking about the totality thing, and that information just escaped me until it was just past the verge of too late to make plans to go and see it.

Later, I found out that my one (tall) (skinny) (Latino-American) (just-graduated-from-high-school) coworker actually had been planning a camping trip the whole time and was down in some forest for several days with his dog – and yet he never said anything about these plans to me, until afterwards!

I also found out that the one local (gay) (Colombian) graduate student actually planned ahead a ton and figured out a rental car and a great park that he could go see it from – and again, he never told me any of this until after it was over!

The day of, I met some friends in a local park, and it was interesting to see the change in a familiar environment, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones said that only two customers came in the entire lunch shift that day at the restaurant, and she called everyone out onto the street to go see the eclipse.

As my one (former assisted-living client) with (disabilities) said, all of those coincidences with my not getting that information was very freaky, and it must have happened for a reason, and it was simply not my time to see an eclipse.

Somehow, I agreed with her – it was just too liminal and dangerous to be in that place then, and be exposed like that…

That was exactly when I was in the middle of my bringing into written form the outline of my gigantic research breakthrough, and it really was like some weird intense birthing process, and somehow I just feel that I was very extremely vulnerable right then, for the duration of that, until it was complete.