A Journey Towards Totality

 A Journey Towards Totality

As most people reading this will recall, there was a total solar eclipse in North America on April 8, 2024. Mary Lou and I decided that the path of totality was close enough to home to justify a trip. This was our third attempt to see totality and our second successful one.

A good resource concerning eclipses is the website https://www.greatamericaneclipse.com/ , by the way.

The first was a total eclipse on August 21, 2017. At that time, I had not yet retired and it happened to be the first day of class. The UMKC campus was not within the shadow of totality, but totality was going to be roughly twenty miles away to the north or east. I was scheduled to teach that day. I went to my department head and asked for permission to cancel class. Unknown to her, I was carrying a letter of resignation/retirement effective immediately in a manila folder. She agreed with me that a total eclipse is a rare enough and spectacular enough opportunity to justify cancelling class. The letter stayed in the folder and was eventually shredded. I sent multiple messages to my students via email and other means announcing the cancellation and urging them to go to totality.

We decided to watch the eclipse from Liberty, MO. Clouds loomed from the west, and they didn't arrive until totality was nearly over. The corona was beautiful, and I feel lucky to have seen it for a minute or so. It was interesting to be in night-like darkness but to be able to see blue sky off to the south. 

Going to Antarctica has long been on my bucket list. When Lindblad Expeditions offered a cruise itinerary to Antarctica especially modified to be within totality on December 4, 2021, we jumped to reserve a cabin. From the voyage portfolio's daily report:

 "Captain Yuri and guest-expert Dr. Steve Croft had worked together to determine that a position of 55˚00‘S, 045˚22‘W would be the ideal place to witness this event." 

Except that it was cloudy. We watched the sea abruptly darken, be in total darkness, and then abruptly lighten. The highlight of the trip for me turned out to be South Georgia Island. On that island, you experience ice (less than Antarctica), enormous penguin colonies, history, mountains, seabirds, and sea mammals all within a fairly compact area. 

The April 8 eclipse was likely to be the last chance in our lifetime to see an eclipse without needing to travel an extraordinary distance. The closest place to go was Cape Girardeau, MO, but hotel choices were limited and the prices were four times the usual and customary price even eleven months before the event. That left me trying to decide between Arkansas and Illinois. I arbitrarily choose Illinois. With prices within totality being very high, I decided that we should stay at a motel in Columbia, IL (a bit southeast of St. Louis) and then decide which way to travel based on weather forecasts.

We ended up experiencing the eclipse in Pinckneyville, IL -- about a two-hour drive from our motel.  We ate breakfast at one of the smallest McDonald's I've ever seen. This time there was a thin layer of high clouds, but they were thin enough that we could see the corona throughout the totality experience. I was also able to make out two prominences and Mercury. Supposedly, a comet would be visible during totality, but I didn't see it.  We hung out in a grocery store parking lot and made friends with other eclipse enthusiasts prior to and during the partial eclipse. One friend had really great camera equipment and shared some of his past photos. I think the neatest one was a photo of a transit of Venus in front of the sun from about four years ago. 

Our eclipse glasses worked great during partiality, but partiality is only one percent of the sublime experience of totality. Most of our parking lot friends left when totality was over, but we decided to stay in our lawn chairs and relax for over an hour after totality was over to allow the traffic jam to clear and see partiality again.

One effect of being in the last third of your life is having the occasional realization that you will never do something again or that you've done something for the last time. This was probably my last solar eclipse. 

 A Christmas Story Christmas

I recently watched  A Christmas Story Christmas on DVD, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

This movie is a sequel conceived as a homage to A Christmas Story from 1983 and shown repeatedly in Christmas holiday marathons on some cable channels. The first movie is in some sense a movie about nothing: the plot is about a little boy ("Ralphie"), still young enough to believe in Santa, who wants a BB gun for Christmas. And yet it is about so much more. Jean Shepherd's narrator as the adult Ralphie looking back on his childhood captures childhood wonder, evokes nostalgia, and celebrates Christmas.  

If you love the original, you will probably enjoy this sequel. Conversely, if you don't care for the 1983 original, skip the 2022 version. The 2022 film rhymes repeatedly with the original: most of the child actors in the 1983 film play themselves as adults in 2022. Most of the action takes place in the fictional Hohman, IN (a lightly fictionalized version of Gary). We again see Santa in Higbee's. We see and hear the Bumpus hounds. Much of the music from the original returns. The adult Ralph narrates. The same types of scene transitions occur. The original house returns with most of the same furnishings -- even the shade from the leg lamp. Many events from the original find similar events in this sequel: we see again haggling over the price of a Christmas tree, childhood bullying, snowball fights, fuses blow, car troubles, and so on. Camera shots from the original are repeated such as a drawer filled with junk (originally the teacher's, but now a  publisher's). 

But a few things are changed. Scut Farkus grew up to be a nice man.  The Old Man is dead, and Ralphie's mother is played by a different actress. The plot is about Ralphie wanting to become a successful writer.

Events inevitably build towards a happy ending and I won't bore you with those details. If the original film is not among your holiday viewing favorites, this sequel is going to make you say, "Meh." And inversely: if you love the original, I think you'll like this one too.

Now for a spoiler: in the original book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd, we learn that Schwartz died in World War II. Since this occurs after the events in the movie, we don't know about it when we watch the TNT marathon. But a number of years ago, I tracked down the book and read it. A little throw away comment on the last page of the book hit me like a punch in the gut. In this movie, I was surprised to see Schwartz alive in Flick's bar. Somehow this different version diminishes the written fictional narrative. I don't find myself crying over the loss of childhood and the waste of war.