Eclipse Viewing Is Obvious Column Material For (Almost) Everyone
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By Coulter Fussell
I’m writing my column a little later than usual because I’m waiting for the famous solar eclipse to happen as it will make for easy column material. Over the years of my writing this column, happenings have tended to settle themselves into one of two distinct categories: Column Material or Not Column Material.
And this distinction doesn’t innately include a judgment on the value of any said event. What I’m saying is that, on a personal level, this eclipse is most exciting because it will fill some paragraphs in my column! I also predict that the eclipse will make our town’s power go out. The chances are pretty good.
I remember the last once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse we had in 2017. I was waitressing a lunch shift at a fine dining restaurant on the Oxford square. Everyone in the restaurant was running outside to witness the moon cross paths with the sun. People were coming out of stores and restaurants in a fervor of excitement stemming from the deep instinctual essences of our ancient beginnings.
Except for the two fancy, older women I was serving. The women never once made any iota of recognition that there was a once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse actively happening above the heads of millions of people, including their own, across the entire hemisphere. The women were seated directly beside a giant window and the wispy, fluttering shadows that the eclipse cast were flitting through their white wine glasses onto the bowl of marinated Italian olives they had ordered as an appetizer.
The women chit-chatted with each other and asked me for second pours of wine. With resignation, I put my eclipse glasses in my apron and took their lunch order during the 120 seconds that the moon was actually passing in front of the sun right outside in the sky.
Anyway, the two women enjoyed their lunch but would have definitely categorized that solar eclipse as Not Column Material. And the great celestial-born lesson here is that immense and behemothic events may be eye-witnessed by all of humanity across our Earth but it will not satiate a single human being’s need for an extra side of ranch.
This was also exemplified by another waitress friend of mine who watched that same eclipse through a kitchen colander in the alleyway behind Ajax Diner. There’s something to be said – I’m not totally sure what – for that.
Eclipses really do have incredible marketing teams — the special glasses without which you go instantly blind no matter what, the Airbnb reservations, the RV rentals, the Weather Channel updates, the various raptures, the eclipse-tracking apps, the scarcity model…it’s a whole package.
My youngest child was nervous that he didn’t have special glasses for this eclipse so I told him that he could watch it the old-fashioned way by just being outside during an eclipse like the whole of human and animal history seems to have managed just fine. He reminded me that they all went blind.
The 2024 eclipse over Water Valley has now come and gone. It was cloudy. But our town’s power stayed on! Which is more than I can say for the sun.
