Dayton Haggerty
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read
Epic Aircraft Eclipse Photobomb (credit: user cursetenj on Reddit)

Mother Nature

She can be your best friend or your worst enemy. I, myself, have two seasons of seasonal allergy relief, and unfortunately those seasons are the ever-shrinking Spring and Fall. Fall is my most favorite season, and not for the cliché reasons so many others claim. Yes, the pretty leaves. Yes the hoodie weather. YES the smell of burning leaves. But also because the leaking faucet that is my nasal cavity from May to August finally dries up from the sweltering Midwest summer and retreats until frozen death arrives in November/December.

As a further middle finger to my chosen place on the globe, a thunderstorm’s worth of ominous clouds rolled in right as the 2017 Solar Eclipse arrived on the scene yesterday. Throngs of disappointed onlookers outside my place of work were wailing in their contempt, as if God above had cursed them on purpose and was hiding this most majestic sight from their watery, paper-eyeglass shielded eyes. And, to their credit, their cries must’ve been heard because the clouds parted just in time to see the eclipse at its greatest glory — near totality. It was an awe-inspiring sight to those lucky enough to see it. I donated my glasses to a Diagnostic Imaging department in need (Oh, the irony!), and came back to my office to continue the work that is Information Technology in the 21st century and completely missed the lunar fireworks.

I did not, however, go without a glimpse of the party for very long. Eclipse fever was all over the nightly news when I got home last night, with reporters on scene all over the country sharing their elated first-person accounts of the celestial show of the century. People clapping. People cheering. People marrying. People crying. People raising their hands for the glory of God. People praising God. People thanking God. People pointing to the shrouded Sun and claiming it as evidence of a single, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-loving deity smiling down from above on His dim creation.

I wonder, did the dinosaurs mark an eclipse with such… reverence? Such… excitement? Such… such… dare I say, lunacy? (pun most definitely intended) I remember hearing a story about how Christopher Columbus tricked the native Caribbeans into slavery by raising his hand towards the sky as an eclipse was just starting and tricking them into believing he had the power to steal the Sun from the sky and therefore asserting wealthy white dominance over a doomed race of pitiful brown souls for centuries to come. Are we really no further along in our collective intelligence than we were in the 15th century? When nearly all of the planet’s so-called advanced civilizations still believed it was flat? Praise SCIENCE, people! Mathematics predicted this event decades or even centuries before its arrival! Praise human intelligence for bringing this event to our attention years and months and weeks and days and hours before it happened! I laughed like a madman at those fools. And those people are breeding, for crying out loud!

Oh well. At least the lead story on the news last night was about Americans and even other nationalities coming together to experience something beyond political contempt. Beyond threatened nuclear war. Beyond my own jaded outlook on such “wonders of nature.”

My reward for such natural disdain this morning? A rain shower, just as I was leaving for work.

Yeah, Mother Nature… I love you, too.

)

Dayton Haggerty

Written by

Just your common, ordinary, everyday I.T. nerd struggling with label printers, end users, and oh… LIFE!

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade