Once In A Lifetime

Because no one else has, I wrote about the eclipse

There’s lots of things that people like to tell you are once in a lifetime.

Big vacations. Certain sporting events. Truly great meals. No-money-down sales at the KIA Store. We use the phrase so much, it’s nearly lost all meaning.

Maybe this could be one, though.

I always want things to be perfect, and I can’t help but be anxious about the fact that they might not be, even when things are largely out of my control; I’m a worrier. It’s hard-wired into me, and I’ll be damned if I know how to change it. What will it be like when we get there? What’s traffic going to be like? What’s the parking situation? What if (x) or (y) or (z) happens?

Whatever the opposite of going with the flow is, that’s me.

But I can’t control the sky.

I’d never experienced a total solar eclipse before. I’ve witnessed partial ones a couple of times—once as a kid, and then again in 2017. That last time, I stood out in the parking lot of my old job’s suburban office staring through eclipse glasses at a crescent-shaped sun with my coworkers, an experience that left me with dreadful FOMO and an intense desire to not miss the next one.

Even so, I’m not sure I’d have planned ahead properly if not for a coincidence in scheduling.

Last summer, the Cleveland Guardians announced their 2024 schedule, and I realized that their home opener would coincide with Monday’s total eclipse in Cleveland, the place I was born and still think of as “home” despite not having lived there for a quarter-century. I found what seemed to be one of the last available hotel rooms in Cleveland, bit the bullet on an already-gouging rate, and began an anxious ten-month wait. God, I hope this is worth it.

The best I could do last time around.

I want to give my kids special experiences whenever I can.

Sure, sometimes that’s a cover story for doing things I already want to do, but there really is something to be said about sharing special things with these still-completely-uncynical young minds—people who are willing to approach the world with the kind of wide-eyed, unguarded wonder that we should all aspire to have.

Of course, I’m also chronically worried about disappointing them.

(See a few paragraphs above. I’m a worrier.)

As we drew close to the eclipse date, I really began to fret. What if it’s not as special as they say? What if I’ve completely oversold this to them? What if we drive 350 miles and it turns out to be April in Cleveland, a place and time where sometimes it snows so bad they have to move baseball games to Milwaukee? Eventually, I had to come to terms with an uncomfortable truth: there is no amount of worrying on my part that can control the sky. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen.

We spent much of the day before at the Great Lakes Science Center’s Eclipse Fest, an event put on in tandem with NASA’s Glenn Research Center. The kids got to do all sorts of little experiments and meet some real scientists, and it was very fun even as I spent most of the time stealing glances toward the blue sky and begging it to stick around.

Just hold on a little longer. Please.

Of course, by Monday morning, clouds blanketed the city.

It’s okay. This was in the forecast. It’s supposed to blow through.

Hopefully it blows through.

Then? It blew through.

The skies opened up, save for a few wispy high-level clouds, and something as rare as the moon blocking the sun happened: a nice April day in Cleveland. We set up a blanket on the science center lawn, the most wholesome large crowd environment I’d ever been in, and basked in the happy-nervous energy of thousands of other people just as desperate for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We cast careful glances up as partiality began, and I kept reminding the kids to keep their glasses on even though they’d fully absorbed that rule days prior. (Thanks, PBS!) The sun shrank from a disc to Pac-Man to a cartoon crescent. They oohed and aahed, and I did too—but I wanted more.

A few minutes before totality, just as promised, the temperature began to drop. The light took on a genuinely weird cast, and the streetlights began to flicker on. The scientist-turned-emcee counted us down, warning everyone to leave their glasses on until…

now

For all my worrying, I hadn’t known how I’d react when (if?) it actually happened, but I cried. I screamed. I hugged the kids tight. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? I spun around to view 360 degrees of sunrise/sunset, and gaped at a corona far whiter than I expected.

I took a few terrible photos with my phone because it’s impossible to break the impulse to want to freeze a moment like this forever, to save it away in a picture you can come back to over and over again, but the pictures wouldn’t do any justice. There was no capturing a moment like this, and I’m sorry if I’ve used all these words just to say that words won’t suffice, but if this is where my limitations as a writer are, then I think I can live with that.

Here is my best photo from totality, which does at least capture the exceedingly-rare sight of people having a good time at Cleveland Browns Stadium.

On the drive back to Kentucky yesterday, we listened to the previous day’s episode of The Daily podcast, which is a great listen even after the fact. It profiles Fred Espenak, a retired astrophysicist known as “Mr. Eclipse” for his half-century of chasing these celestial moments around the globe. He describes the feeling of awe he felt as he witnessed his first total eclipse in 1970, and how it spurred him to see dozens more over the coming years. It’s an impulse I understand now—and I may have already said “what about Spain in 2026?” to my wife—but I also appreciate that I cannot ever recreate this experience. We cannot exist in this same place in space and time ever again, but we can remember the brief instant when we were forever.

It may have taken the moon and the stars aligning, but I finally managed to live in the moment.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

Now, enough of my self-indulgence.

Did you view the eclipse on Monday? I want to hear about your experiences!

Plus, a postscript:

My photos might’ve sucked, but my dear friend Lee Reamsnyder took some spectacular photos a few hundred miles south near Dayton, Ohio, and he was gracious enough to share them here:

Image credit: Lee Reamsnyder

Image credit: Lee Reamsnyder

Image credit: Lee Reamsnyder