More Eclipse Moments, Please

Together, that's how we'll make it through.

Our shadows, courtesy of the eclipse. Photo taken by me during 97% totality, April 8, 2024, Pittsburgh, PA

Subtract the two dozen (give or take) people standing in the library’s parking lot gazing upwards and this could have been any early spring afternoon in Pittsburgh: perpetual partly cloudy sky, temperatures stretching into the mid-60s, people going about their business on the nearby busy streets.

But, of course, this wasn’t a typical day; a total solar eclipse was happening overhead. I tend toward the cynical and felt this wouldn’t amount to much—certainly not the promised 97% totality.

Sometimes I’m glad to be wrong.

Between meetings I’d been playing my custom-created Total Eclipse of the Playlist, as you do, and had Coldplay’s mystical tune “Coloratura” in my head. As the hour approached, one of the librarians I work with took to the public address system to announce we were on the verge of “a most excellent convergence of two celestial objects in the sky” and invited all who desired to partake of this event to meet in the back parking lot. And yes, glasses were available for optimal (and safe) viewing.

Only one of my coworkers was in the office with me so we went outside and joined a small group. We waved to our neighbors, a group of eclipse watchers on the roof of a well-known language-learning tech company. We oooohed and aaahhhhed as a chorus, counted down to the moment of totality as if we were in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. We watched the clouds swish by and the moon make slivered crescents of the sun. We took brief breaks to stretch our creaky necks; at one point as I did so, a collective gasp emerged from the crowd. An airplane was in clear view, flying right across the dark side of the moon. Can you imagine, we marveled, the feeling of being on that flight?

Someone pointed out the changing light, the breeze, our deepening shadows. I snapped a picture, struck by how organically representative we were regarding races, genders and gender identities, ages, economic classes, educational levels, political parties—and how, for a brief shining moment in time, none of that was known or even mattered. From our shadows, we were indistinguishable. We needed something like this, I realized, the collective we along the path of totality that began in a country where we vacation and want to erect walls and continuing onwards through the red states and blue states and the purple states. How long had it been since something made us stop, look up, wonder? And how long had it been since that experience was shared among millions?

I took the rarity of this in with Coldplay reverberating on repeat in my mind—And up there in the Heavens, Galileo saw reflections of us too, Pluribus unum, unus mundus/ And all the satellites imbue/ The purple, yellow, green, red, orange and the blue/ Oh, it's a crazy world, it's true — and, because I’m currently in a ring of grief where she’s always at the forefront, thought of my much-missed best friend Cheryl up there in the heavens and suddenly had this eerie sense that she too was watching this spectacle, as if we were in the same stadium but separate, her section being a bit more premium seating than mine. April 8 marked exactly five years and one day since we did something similar—spending two hours together doing nothing but sitting on the edge of Mallory Square in Key West waiting for and then watching the sunset. There’s a legend that, as the sun sets over the Gulf of Mexico, a green flash appears, an atmospheric occurrence that bends the sun’s light from below the horizon. The colors of the spectrum disappear according to those with the longest wavelengths, with green, blue, and violet last. The purple, yellow, green, red, orange and the blue/ Oh, it's a crazy world, it's true. We didn’t see it, but that’s okay.

We are all grieving, hurt, and lonely in this crazy world, it’s true. More of these eclipse-like moments would do our collective souls good, but they’re kind of rare on the magnitude of this level. The next eclipse in the United States won’t occur until 2044. God knows what condition the world will be in by then, and more than a few of us alive today will likely be hanging out in the heavens. Until then, we’d do well to remember this experience, to hold it close while seeking out the humanity in each other, acknowledging our smallness in the universe, capturing that sense of awe and wonder, and sharing it in the moments we can.