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Thursday, and the Lunar Eclipse
May. 16th, 2003 03:08 pmI slept badly, got up before I wanted to, and had lunch with my mother. This is usually an easy enough procedure, but she wanted to go to Whole Foods. It's too far away from where she lives for her to make regular pilgrimages, but it's much closer to me, so if she had to come get me anyway, it made sense for us to go together.
I could have sworn that there is or was a Whole Foods way out on Highway 7 somewhere on the way to Minnetonka or Victoria or one of those places, in a little mall on the south side of the highway that also has a Noodles in it. So I thought that was where we were going. She knew where it really was -- Market Plaza, just past Lake Calhoun on Excelsior Boulevard, in that massively confusing space where Lake Street and Excelsior Boulevard and Minnetonka Boulevard and Highway 7 all pretend they are really one another, no wait, they aren't. But she didn't really know where that was in relation to my place. And there is a Noodles there too, so we thought we were talking about the same mall.
I told her we should just take Lake Street. She doesn't like Lake Street for driving -- it has potholes and idiots doing stupid things and construction and a lot of stoplights. This is true. So we drove back south to 50th Street and over to Xerxes, because she thought she'd gotten home on Xerxes last time and could retrace the first part of the route.
It was a classic spring day all bedecked with lilacs, crabapples, the beginnings of spirea, late tulips, daffodils in shady spots, azalea (yay, Minnesota Landscape Arboretum!) and creeping phlox and violets. I didn't mind the extra driving if she didn't.
You can't get there from Xerxes. There are lakes. There followed a kind of Carrollian Caucus Race wherein I knew what direction we were going but didn't know which lake was where, and she didn't know what direction we were going. Round and round and round we went. Finally we looked at her map, but it didn't have sufficient fineness of detail. We did finally get to Lake Street just north of Lake Calhoun, and I was all geared up to navigate us onto the right street for my mythic imaginary Whole Foods when my mother said, "Oh, it's right here."
She admitted quite gracefully that we should have taken Lake Street, and given how hungry we were while driving round and round we really did quite well.
Whole Foods is bewilderingly large; one thing I do like about coops generally is that they are not the size of the Mall of America. But I stocked up on the kind of soy cheese Simon's doesn't have, and soy yogurt, and tempeh, and other good things. I had a salmon Nicoise salad for lunch, and it made me extremely sleepy by the time I got home. I also found the balmy seventy-degree weather awfully warm. I didn't get much done.
Eric and I had postponed our usual Tuesday date until Thursday, so he could finish the last paper of his undergraduate career and so we could watch the eclipse together. We keep missing seeing major astronomical events -- or at least, we see them, but not with one another.
We'd planned to watch the eclipse from my back yard. I went out around 9:00 and couldn't see the moon at all. At 9:15 I could see it, but I began to have serious doubts about the viability of the back yard as a viewing spot. The neighbor's trees, amazingly enough, had been growing when I wasn't looking.
Around 9:30 I looked again. The moon, still huge, was still mostly obscured by trees. I could get a better view of it from the back landing, and after a moment I realized that that gray line crossing it was not a cloud, but the shadow of the earth. Eric called not long after, apologizing and hoping his lateness (the computer he was using at school crashed; it would) hadn't kept me from missing the beginning of the eclipse. I said I'd missed it, but it wasn't his fault, and that if he had a good view in his neighborhood maybe I should come over there.
I dashed about in a frenzy and ran for the bus. Maddeningly, the bus stop was on the wrong side of the street for me to see the moon. After a while I noticed that I was going to miss totality if I took the next bus. I went across the street to where I could at least see the moon, and called Eric to say disconsolately that I would stay here and watch it and get the next bus. I said we had bad luck with astronomy. He said at least we tried, and it was better not to be one of the people who didn't.
The people who didn't were irritatingly in evidence. Watching the blurred shadow of the moving earth climb up the yellow round of the moon, I decided that if I were dictator, those morons watching TV in their apartments above the Ace Hardware Store would be made to close their blinds, and the oblivious hordes driving their cars up and down Nicollet, intent on their own tiny concerns, would be made to stop and turn th damn lights OFF, and they could turn the stoplights off while they were at it, and the street lights, and oh, I could at least stand under the awning Theiss had put up on its building; that and my hat would block most of the light.
The shadow crawled on. I don't often feel that the solid earth is turning, but I did then. I thought of the Greeks, saying, look, that is a section of a circle; the earth is round.
A gigantic tow truck, blazing with unnatural yellow spinning lights, barrelled through the red light at 38th and Nicollet and came to rest right across the street from me, right under the moon. Oh yes, and absolutely no tow trucks allowed during eclipses of the moon. By putting up my hands in a complex gesture that probably made me look insane -- I had my hat over one ear, too, to block out the streetlights on the left of me -- I managed to see that surreal moment when the little flat disk of the faraway moon, pasted on the night sky, becomes a fully round three-dimensional ball, hanging just above the tree- and chimney-tops.
Down Nicollet as far as I could see -- about to 40th Street -- people were standing in groups of two and three, staring at the sky. I decided they could all live.
It was still there when the tow truck went away. The moon never disappeared utterly; it always had a thin glimmer around part of its edge. When it looked as if it might stay that way for a while, I called Eric and said I'd get the next bus. He said he had been doing very well by sitting in the bathtub, which is under an east-facing window, and looking at the moon through binoculars.
I got onto the bus. Lots of oblivious chattering people were sitting on the eastern side, which meant I couldn't sit there and look at the moon through the windows. Rrrrrr.
As I crossed First Avenue after getting off the bus, a clutch of teenage boys on bicycles rode the wrong way up the street, saying, "Is it gone? Is it all gone? Can you find it? Where is it?" I told them it was not that high in the sky and they should get away from the taller buildings.
Eric met me on the sidewalk outside his own building.
Pamela
I could have sworn that there is or was a Whole Foods way out on Highway 7 somewhere on the way to Minnetonka or Victoria or one of those places, in a little mall on the south side of the highway that also has a Noodles in it. So I thought that was where we were going. She knew where it really was -- Market Plaza, just past Lake Calhoun on Excelsior Boulevard, in that massively confusing space where Lake Street and Excelsior Boulevard and Minnetonka Boulevard and Highway 7 all pretend they are really one another, no wait, they aren't. But she didn't really know where that was in relation to my place. And there is a Noodles there too, so we thought we were talking about the same mall.
I told her we should just take Lake Street. She doesn't like Lake Street for driving -- it has potholes and idiots doing stupid things and construction and a lot of stoplights. This is true. So we drove back south to 50th Street and over to Xerxes, because she thought she'd gotten home on Xerxes last time and could retrace the first part of the route.
It was a classic spring day all bedecked with lilacs, crabapples, the beginnings of spirea, late tulips, daffodils in shady spots, azalea (yay, Minnesota Landscape Arboretum!) and creeping phlox and violets. I didn't mind the extra driving if she didn't.
You can't get there from Xerxes. There are lakes. There followed a kind of Carrollian Caucus Race wherein I knew what direction we were going but didn't know which lake was where, and she didn't know what direction we were going. Round and round and round we went. Finally we looked at her map, but it didn't have sufficient fineness of detail. We did finally get to Lake Street just north of Lake Calhoun, and I was all geared up to navigate us onto the right street for my mythic imaginary Whole Foods when my mother said, "Oh, it's right here."
She admitted quite gracefully that we should have taken Lake Street, and given how hungry we were while driving round and round we really did quite well.
Whole Foods is bewilderingly large; one thing I do like about coops generally is that they are not the size of the Mall of America. But I stocked up on the kind of soy cheese Simon's doesn't have, and soy yogurt, and tempeh, and other good things. I had a salmon Nicoise salad for lunch, and it made me extremely sleepy by the time I got home. I also found the balmy seventy-degree weather awfully warm. I didn't get much done.
Eric and I had postponed our usual Tuesday date until Thursday, so he could finish the last paper of his undergraduate career and so we could watch the eclipse together. We keep missing seeing major astronomical events -- or at least, we see them, but not with one another.
We'd planned to watch the eclipse from my back yard. I went out around 9:00 and couldn't see the moon at all. At 9:15 I could see it, but I began to have serious doubts about the viability of the back yard as a viewing spot. The neighbor's trees, amazingly enough, had been growing when I wasn't looking.
Around 9:30 I looked again. The moon, still huge, was still mostly obscured by trees. I could get a better view of it from the back landing, and after a moment I realized that that gray line crossing it was not a cloud, but the shadow of the earth. Eric called not long after, apologizing and hoping his lateness (the computer he was using at school crashed; it would) hadn't kept me from missing the beginning of the eclipse. I said I'd missed it, but it wasn't his fault, and that if he had a good view in his neighborhood maybe I should come over there.
I dashed about in a frenzy and ran for the bus. Maddeningly, the bus stop was on the wrong side of the street for me to see the moon. After a while I noticed that I was going to miss totality if I took the next bus. I went across the street to where I could at least see the moon, and called Eric to say disconsolately that I would stay here and watch it and get the next bus. I said we had bad luck with astronomy. He said at least we tried, and it was better not to be one of the people who didn't.
The people who didn't were irritatingly in evidence. Watching the blurred shadow of the moving earth climb up the yellow round of the moon, I decided that if I were dictator, those morons watching TV in their apartments above the Ace Hardware Store would be made to close their blinds, and the oblivious hordes driving their cars up and down Nicollet, intent on their own tiny concerns, would be made to stop and turn th damn lights OFF, and they could turn the stoplights off while they were at it, and the street lights, and oh, I could at least stand under the awning Theiss had put up on its building; that and my hat would block most of the light.
The shadow crawled on. I don't often feel that the solid earth is turning, but I did then. I thought of the Greeks, saying, look, that is a section of a circle; the earth is round.
A gigantic tow truck, blazing with unnatural yellow spinning lights, barrelled through the red light at 38th and Nicollet and came to rest right across the street from me, right under the moon. Oh yes, and absolutely no tow trucks allowed during eclipses of the moon. By putting up my hands in a complex gesture that probably made me look insane -- I had my hat over one ear, too, to block out the streetlights on the left of me -- I managed to see that surreal moment when the little flat disk of the faraway moon, pasted on the night sky, becomes a fully round three-dimensional ball, hanging just above the tree- and chimney-tops.
Down Nicollet as far as I could see -- about to 40th Street -- people were standing in groups of two and three, staring at the sky. I decided they could all live.
It was still there when the tow truck went away. The moon never disappeared utterly; it always had a thin glimmer around part of its edge. When it looked as if it might stay that way for a while, I called Eric and said I'd get the next bus. He said he had been doing very well by sitting in the bathtub, which is under an east-facing window, and looking at the moon through binoculars.
I got onto the bus. Lots of oblivious chattering people were sitting on the eastern side, which meant I couldn't sit there and look at the moon through the windows. Rrrrrr.
As I crossed First Avenue after getting off the bus, a clutch of teenage boys on bicycles rode the wrong way up the street, saying, "Is it gone? Is it all gone? Can you find it? Where is it?" I told them it was not that high in the sky and they should get away from the taller buildings.
Eric met me on the sidewalk outside his own building.
Pamela
