Yes, the eclipse is there….. very tiny in the photograph through the glasses. My parents happen to live at an epicenter point of totality and it was my birthday…. so I drove to see them. (Plus I’m on my way to KillerNashville which is nearby. An amazing triple confluence of events.) Because I was really traveling to see my parents I confess to a near blasé attitude to the actual viewing of the eclipse. We had our glasses and I’d checked out the NASA website and learned a bit about watching and what to look for, but it wasn’t really caught up in the excitement. That changed once it happened. Twilight came, the cicadas (and crickets? what are those nighttime insects?) went wild, noisier than on most evenings, although that was possibly because our group had caught eclipse fever by this point. It was only twilight and we were excited. Total eclipse lasted for under two minutes and it was worth every moment of my 10 hour drive. I suspect mosts of us have seen a vast landscape, or seascape, or the stars at night or SOMETHING that we later saw in a photograph and said, that doesn’t do it justice. It is an aid to memory but doesn’t capture the presence, the awe inspiring nature of vastness, of something larger than the human race. The minutes of total eclipse were like that. Now, here’s my confession. I do believe that on the NASA video they said that during totality you could glance at the moon without glasses, so I did. I was spell bound. Literally. I’m sure it was a second or two that I looked. Because of this, I spent the entire night worrying that I will now go blind. (I’m not kidding here….) I figure I’ll worry about this for about two more weeks, so bear with me. 
My parents’ dog experienced the eclipse with us. He was more interested in the humans than the sun until the explosion. Yes, a solar explosion. Or that’s what it seemed like in the moment. Max ran for his life, as if the hounds of hell were on him and we hustled him inside to security. Of course it wasn’t a solar explosion, but a mega display of fireworks by the neighbors (fortunately behind us so we were distracted by the lights). Loud doesn’t describe it. Max the dog was terrorized. Golden doodles will forever carry a genetic marker that equates eclipse with incredibly loud frightening noise. 
We ended with Eclipse Birthday cake (two of us had eclipse birthdays, what are the odds!) and it was a fine close to an unexpectedly amazing day. What was your experience of the day?
