watching the eclipse

I watched the Lunar Eclipse two nights ago on the telephone with my family. It was forty something degrees and so it was ridiculous to be standing on the formerly front steps of our house in my bare feet and a white undershirt.

I still wear white undershirts because My dad taught me to. My dad taught me to wear white undershirts under my dress shirts and he taught me to tie full windsor knots on my ties, also how to polish my own shoes. And though i wear blue jeans most days and dress shirts and suitcoats from decades that have been long gone, I am still, believe it or not, fastidious about tying my tie knots well, keeping my shoes relatively shiny and wearing white undershirts under all of my t-shirts. I am also keenly aware that these habits make me a kind of relic, but I'm a nostalgic guy and October is Nostalgia Month, so...

The eclipse two nights ago was more like a celebration of the arc of a whole life bound up in the moon on one night. We walked around the carefully manicured walking path at Jackson Park with Jaelyn adn Addison. I chilled with them at the playground while Lynn raced around the perimeter, tucking her three miles into the end of a busy day. As we walked West toward the playground the end of the sunset was so blinding that we squinted and tried to ignore where we were going, Looking at our feet or each other instead. By the time the night was over, an almost full moon, white and huge was dangling just above the horizon.

"It's like a big Light Bulb!" wondered Addison. And we watched it out the side and front of the minivan as it beckoned us back to Casacommunitas.

Marianne and I somehow got on the topic of Pot Lucks from the good old days in Baptist Church Basements and Recreation Centers. I observed that there weren't so many casseroles at the pot lucks at our Akron Christian Reformed Church -- was this a denominational difference? She didn't think so; she described the changing landscape of Pot Lucks at the church I attended as a teenager.

"I'm noticing a lot of buckets of chicken, vegetables and salads bought whole at local grocery stores. You know," she said, "Someone should probably write a paper on this." (write a paper? I think: that's the kind of solution that I usually offer...anything vaguely interesting that ever emerges at an academics party -- immediately gets relegated to a probably-good-paper topic...The really great parties render books)

"It's a travesty." I agree, "Everyone knows that if you don't bring your food in a corningware dish and if there aren't melty-burned-y marks on the side where the food has sealed a covenant between your kitchen and the church community, that YOU SHOULDN'T BRING IT to the potluck.

"I'm thinking someone could go back to school and do sociological studies of potlucks...."she's dangling it in front of me like a thick juicy worm, "What do these events say about us? You could write another thesis."

"It's true," I confess, "I never liked any work so much as graduate school." I'm salivating by this time, but not over chicken and egg and creamy noodle casserole memories -- but about the possibilities of tracing:

upward mobility and globablization and the shifts of family structure

and in my Human Subjects Review Board Clearanance Documents I would describe my research methodologies:

I will stand in long snaking lines around the perimeters of cement block rooms with tile floors, waiting eagerly toward the fold-up tables covered in the culinary evidence of the collective values and coherence. I will mark my own role as participant observer with the thick nuance of performative richness that my informants embody. In our lines we will clutch our plastic silverware and our compartmentalized plastic plates and we will try to distinguish the smells hovering and blending above us in the air. I will cast a jealous eye with my neighbors toward Hazel Priest's mini-slow-cooker; wondering whether enough of her swedish meatballs will still be there by the time arrive. I will speculate aloud with my co-participants crafting theories that estimate how many meatballs might be in that small pot and how social norms will limit the number that most of the parishioners before us will allow themselves to pile on their plates, and how many people will repudiate those norms to take a bigger helping? and how many of those people are in line before us? And if we don't get meatballs is it really worth our while to wait this long?

The moon is swallowed at first by a greyish shadow of us. Hard to believe that that brilliant light can be so dulled by another little celestial orb 864,000 miles away. And then the greyish shadow turns into something more like a milky yellow. Which I like better. Yellow is my favorite color for nostalgic light and the disappearance of the moon tonight seems like a nostalgic occasion.

I've thus far convinced Daniel and Ryan and my Mom and Marianne to come outside and watch the eclipse with me. They are all 300 miles away from me in Michigan, but the distance is eclipse by this little cell phone which will, itself, later in the conversation fade like a waning moon. But Marianne stays on the line with me until we are both cold but the moon is eventually swallowed by the shadow of us. It turns purple and orange and every other unbelievable color or a bruise healing slowly. No matter how many lunar eclipses I live to see, I will never stop being astonished by this final moment in the process. The moon as a dark shining bruise dangling above the stark branches of late October Maple Trees.

The porch steps which used to lead from the front door of our house down to a little road next to a park are cold and I go inside. Some developer in the early 1950's decided to remove that road and suddenly, randomly, the back and side of our house became the front. Her majestic front porch opened to a wide stairway and a sidewalk which dead ends eventually into a wide ball of Burning Bushes, still pink and fiercely red with Autumn.

What is the distance between the selves we are now and the person we were then? Half an acre and an absent road? 300 or 864,000 miles? Or should we measure the light from the past that still eminates from who we are now? Brilliant as a white bulb? Shadowy and grey? Yellow and soft?

Or maybe our memories are a beautiful bruise that we live through like lunar light...