There is something magical and powerful about a vast group of people gearing up to witness a solar eclipse together at the same time.
My partner and I had such an opportunity on April 8 in Boston, but we were totally unprepared for totality! (95% of it, to be perfectly accurate.)
John had spent nearly five hours bicycling to libraries, pharmacies and spectacle stores all over Boston trying to find two pairs of protective eclipse glasses. All of them had already been grabbed.
But then, I got lucky. At the art school where I was teaching a class that morning, a student said: “The library is giving out free solar eclipse glasses at noon!”
Talk about the planets aligning in our favor!
Gear in hand, we walked to Highland Park, ready to be wowed by the cosmic event.
At 1:30 p.m., we were the only people there, but around 2 p.m. more people started coming in, bringing picnic blankets, baskets of food, beer, their children and their dogs.
