Listen to this story: If you’re in the car, or cooking, or just lazy… you can listen to me read this story for you, in the audio file below.
Well, it’s eclipse week. My son’s fourth grade teacher sent a note around on Sunday night, it said to let her know if you didn’t want your kid staring directly at the sun on Monday. I let it be. Sounded fun.
Then the time came. Here in Southern California we weren’t anywhere near the zone of “totality”, but by mid-morning the atmosphere did shift somehow. The light outside my office window thinned, if that makes sense. Other than that, things seemed pretty normal. The local cats, occasional bird, traffic noise, sirens.
I thought about the poor fourth graders whose parents might have said “No” to the viewing. I wasn’t organized enough to get the special glasses in advance, so I kept my head down. Went and did the groceries while everyone was distracted. The supermarket was still busy. What is it with the supermarket?
The kids came home with their eclipse safety glasses (now just blinders, basically) and my daughter showed me various sun and moon related art projects. “So you saw the eclipse?” I asked.
“Yeah,” they said, flatly. “Did you?”
I told them I missed the action, and will have to wait another few decades, I suppose.
It all reminded me of the hullabaloo surrounding Halley’s Comet, which last appeared in our skies when I was the same age as my son, ten. I wrote about that seven years ago, not long after I’d embarked upon the exercise of writing tiny pieces, short enough to fit in one Instagram frame.
Tomorrow pre-orders begin for a book I’ve put together, Red Sun, Dandelions & Other Stories, collecting over five years of those works. Here’s an early link for my TBH family to order. I called them “stories”, but in truth they navigated between all sorts of forms over the years; flash fiction, mini scripts, poetry, micro-memoir and other unidentifiable genres.
I hope you’ll check it out on my site tomorrow (April 12th, LA time), or at the link, and maybe order one. I’d very much appreciate the support, as always.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the Halley’s Comet story, as it’s presented in the book. It’s called 2061, for the next year when that particular celestial wonder is set to grace our skies.