Missing Out – or Not

The eclipse has come and gone and I missed out.

All through the day, I received posts from jubilant friends wearing their eclipse glasses while sitting on lawn chairs and gazing up at a cloudless sky for the event of the century.  Meanwhile, I stood outside on our deck and looked out at the foggy landscape and up at the cloud-cast skies.  Then I drove up to Sacramento for lunch with two of my college roommates.  No sunshine on the way.  Just dim, cloudy skies.

My brother usually has a spectacular view of the heavens from his home in the King Mountain Range, but he couldn’t see to the end of his driveway. Forest fires had shrouded the lost coast with smoke.  He and my s-i-l had to stay inside, doors and windows closed, to get a breath of clean air.

Television can be a blessing at times, though most of the time, finding something worth watching is like going down a mine shaft, looking for the mother lode and finding fools’ gold instead.  This time we found a vein of gold.  Front row seats to witness the eclipse. After the fact, of course.  But who is complaining?  The eclipse I saw didn’t just last for a few minutes.  It was well covered by numerous stations.

I’m glad I live in the here and now and not in the way back when, in the olden days when you missed something like an eclipse, you had no opportunity to see it again – unless you were around for another hundred years.