Happening, experience, event – eclipse

On Monday’s momentary darkening:

• Let us wait a few weeks before we check in with the Arkansas Ophthalmology Society to see if the members’ patient count has grown, or by how much. Actually it might be only a couple days before we learn how many of our friends and neighbors have damaged their eyes, and how badly, by disregarding expert medical advice, and common sense, and chose to take in the solar eclipse without proper protection.

It seemed half the brick-and-mortar businesses I stopped by in the days before the Big Event had a give-away stack of sun shades, and the other half offered them for a song. On a couple parking lots near our home street vendors had set up, and were hawking what they purported to be “approved” spectacles. Hmm.

• As it happens – pure coincidence – I spent two hours on Monday morning in the waiting room of our ophthalmologist, scanning the internet via smartphone for additional evidence of mass insanity, an easy enough search. My dear wife was a few yards away, under light anesthesia and a light blanket and the light application of the scalpel, elements required of the procedure that will enable her to, uh, see the light. Rather, to see more than the light. Yep, cataract surgery, one of the marvels of our time. Some of us of a certain age can recall when lens replacement required weeks of recuperation, the patient commanded to remain prone and as motionless as possible. Today, it’s in at 7, home by 9, bandage off the following day.

It occurred to ask the doctor how many new patients he anticipated the eclipse would bring, but on reflection it seemed a bit cynical of me. Besides, he was on to the next cataract patient.

• Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders had declared that the state was prepared to provide any and all needed assistance to public and private sectors during what was anticipated to be a huge influx of eclipse junkies, Arkansas being among those states directly in the path of the phenomenon. Why, as many as a million visitors could flood the Land of Opportunity for the opportunity to experience the – experience. Rather fewer than projected showed up, to the dismay of many a merchant and restauranteur, but that’s life.

• A half-century ago, a somewhat similar occasion was referred to as a “happening.” (In the 1970s there were a lot of “happenings.”) It was not an eclipse but a comet, a fireball named Kohoutek, named for the Czech astronomer credited with first observing it. In the months before Kohoutek became visible in North America it took on a mystical air. To some it became a philosophical, even spiritual touchstone, the harbinger of a cosmic alteration of human consciousness that would change our species for the better. Somewhat like this year’s – happening.

It didn’t work. But it sold a lot of tshirts.

• The total eclipse lasted but a few minutes; lesser, partial blockages a little longer. It was easy to understand how, not that many centuries ago, humankind regarded the experience, or happening, or moment, with fear and loathing. And equally easy to understand why astrophysicists regard the eclipse with delight.

Sabine Stanley, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has “always been amazed that total solar eclipses are possible,” she told the Washington Post. “The sun, an 870,000-mile-wide ball of gas over 90 million miles away from us gets completely blocked by the moon, a 2,100mile-wide ball of rock 240,000 miles away. If the sun were a bit bigger or closer, or if the moon were a bit smaller or farther, totality would not occur. There’s no scientific reason for this; it’s a wondrous coincidence.”

And an invaluable one. It has helped the experts determine that our moon is actually moving farther from us, at a rate of somewhat less than two inches per year. Which means that the moon eventually will be too distant, too small, to block the sun as it did this week. A total eclipse, then, was a thing to savor in the year 2024. The next one, for prime viewing from Arkansas, will occur in 20 years.

Try to catch it, if you’re still around, because total eclipses will be a thing of the past – in another 600 million years.