1:19pm, August 21, 2017

"Mark, why is there a bag of Cheerios on the counter?"

"I needed an eclipse box."

I knew exactly what he was talking about. Mark wanted to build one of those boxes with the pinhole in it to watch the eclipse. I built one once. Many years ago we had a partial eclipse just like the one we went through yesterday. What I remember about it was that it was underwhelming. For that eclipse I had a large box that I put my whole head into. I could see the tiny dot of the sun projected on a piece of white paper, and watched as a tiny shadow slowly encroached upon that bright dot. One thing that I remember vividly is the dappled sunlight coming through the trees. It projected many little crescent suns on the sidewalk in front of our house. Mark's eclipse box had come about because I couldn't find him any of those viewing glasses. On Sunday when we were driving home from Indiana, Mark made me stop at every gas station just to see if they were selling them. They weren't.

"Come out to the backyard with me. It's almost time for the eclipse."

"I don't think you're going to see anything. It's clouding up. Besides, from what I remember, it doesn't really get all that dark unless you have a total eclipse"

"Come on, the sun is shining. I don't want to miss it." Mark insisted.

So about fifteen minutes before the eclipse was scheduled to peak, Mark, I, and the dogs, all went out into the backyard. Mark's Cheerios box worked like a charm. You could see the little dot of light at the far end of the box with a little bite taken out of it. But the sky wasn't really much darker than normal.

"What time is it?" Mark asked.

"Umm... 1:17"

Mark was nearly vibrating with excitement. I don't know what he thought was going to happen, but at exactly 1:18pm a large, thick cloud rolled across the face of the sun.

"Ahhhh....  what happened?"

And then at the peak of the eclipse, at 1:19, the magic hour with the clouds still obscuring the sun, Mark looked up into the sky.

"How come it isn't dark? It just looks like any other cloudy afternoon." Mark whined.

And that it did. I had been telling Mark that it wasn't going to be all that spectacular. I told him that it looked like clouds were moving in from the west. It turned out that the super hyped eclipse that caused Mark to get super excited, was a dud. So I took Mark's eclipse box with the aluminum foil that had the pinhole in it, and put the bag of Cheerios back in there.