The Total Solar Eclipse will Bring a Magical Shared Experience to Cleveland: Essay

Most days slip by, a quickly forgotten blur of routines, homework, work and errands. 

But the earthquake, the flood, the blizzard: those days, we remember. Sometimes, Nature orders us to stop and pay attention.

My husband vividly remembers the earthquake that hit Lake County in 1986 when he was a fifth grader, including his tornado-fearing teacher “throwing kids against the wall.” I remember, a spring day when I was 8 years old, the river rising near my childhood home in New Jersey, cresting its banks, filling first the park, then the streets around my house, then the yard, then our basement. And I remember the college road trip when a friend and I were stranded out of state in a blizzard for two days. 

We’d rather wish away some of these days than have experienced them. Yet, there can be something revelatory about these act-of-God communal events, even the negative ones. If we let them, they can bring us together. 

When my childhood home was flooded, we slept in a church basement with other displaced people while the water receded and we waited for our homes to be marked safe. When my college roommate and I were stranded by that blizzard, we knocked on the door of a roadside New York convent, and those kind nuns sheltered us for two nights. 

The magic of an eclipse is that we get the stop-you-in-your-tracks moment, the shared experience, the sense that we’re experiencing something extraordinary together, but without any of the danger and destruction. (Just please don’t look at the sun without protective glasses, OK?)

During the partial solar eclipse in 2017, there were hundreds of people on the Downtown Mall with us. We were there for, frankly, not much: a slight dimming, a mere suggestion of cooling on an August afternoon, a peek at a sun that looked like it had a tiny bite taken out of it. We passed an extra pair of gas station eclipse glasses to a stranger. “Look! You don’t want to miss this!” As slight as the event was, cosmically speaking, it was a human event. People were chatty, festive, happy. And I don’t think I remember that day so vividly just because it also happened to be my kid’s 10th birthday: the special lunch, the eclipse viewing at one Mall, and the ear piercing at the other kind of mall. The eclipse was just a simple shared joy, the fun of it enhanced by its rarity. 

I also remember looking ahead to this year’s April 8 eclipse, thrilled in advance by the once-in-a-lifetime promise of four minutes of total darkness in mid-afternoon and the chance to look at the darkened sun and see only the ring of its glowing corona around a black circle. (The next total solar eclipse in Cleveland will be in the year 2444!) I was gobsmacked in advance by how much time would pass between 2017 and 2024, how old we’d all be. Seven years seemed like a long time.

Predictably, that time has passed. Predictably, I’m asking, How did this happen? The little birthday girl is now six inches taller than me, a teenager who gives me skincare advice and lends me books. It seemed impossibly far away at the time, and yet the time has passed impossibly quickly. 

Life is a fog of ordinary days. This April 8, we’ll all stop what we’re doing. We’ll look up. We’ll pause time together, and we’ll remember it forever. 

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