Coming Around to the Eclipse
Little Rock was to experience 89% totality. I cared about 11%.

My co-workers had been talking about it for months. They ordered cardboard glasses or made their own out of boxes. Some even booked trips to Nashville and southern Illinois to be in “the path of totality.”
I just came to work. I don’t know much about life, the universe, and everything, but an eclipse didn’t seem like a big deal to me.
Around 11, three of my co-workers rushed up to where I was sitting, glasses in hand, and told me “it” was starting. Apparently, I had chosen to sit next to the perfect window for their eclipse-viewing purposes. Without a word, one of them handed their 3D movie-esque glasses to me. Still a little skeptical, I brought the cardboard up to my face.
Total darkness. Startled, I peeled the glasses off to look at them again, almost asking, “Are these things even on?” I brought them back to my face, making sure that the squares of black film went over my eyes. This time, I touched my temple to the window and pointed my gaze straight up. And there it was. A circle of yellow, not much bigger than a pencil’s eraser, with a small chunk taken out of one side like an open-mouthed Pac Man.
It was tiny. Seemingly unmiraculous. Yet the fact that I was seeing this yellow dot was, in fact, a miracle. And that felt powerful.
I didn’t care much about the eclipse before because I like things to be concrete. I live my life from one day to the next. I make lists of small tasks I can easily cross off. I am also a natural skeptic. My world consists of what is in front of me. Because of these things, big, abstract concepts don’t sit well with my simple brain. Which is why the flimsy strip of cardboard that I had questioned moments before unlocked something for me. Suddenly, I understood hype about the eclipse because I could now take the scientific jabber — the moon and the sun’s paths cross, this only happens every few decades, the corona will be visible — and hold it up to my own lived experience.
Rarely, from my perspective at least, does our tiny view of the world align with the big picture. I’m not a Flat Earther by any means (I believe science even if I don’t understand it), but I still envy astronauts for being the few people who can say, who can know, that the Earth is round after seeing that blue sphere suspended in space.
How intoxicating is that? To defy our own humanity and all its limits to grasp something bigger?
We reached max totality right around lunchtime. After we finished our sandwiches and salads, my co-workers and I gathered once again at the window to pass the glasses and take glances. I felt almost giddy, disobeying what I’ve been told my entire life and boldly staring straight at the sun, my feeble human eyes protected. (Why don’t people walk around with solar glasses all the time? They make you feel invincible!) I removed the glasses, held them out to a friend, and asked with a giggle, “You want a hit?” Drugs. Science. Magic. I was starting to think they all felt the same. Regardless, my head was swimming.
Fast forward to the end of the day. I stopped in a local bakery on my walk home from work. As I scanned their glass display case, I noticed a tray of round sugar cookies. Each had a circle of glossy black icing to one side, then a sliver of white on the other. On some, the black circle was bigger, while others had more white. My eyes jumped from one to the next, trying to find a pattern. Then it hit me: eclipse cookies!
I ordered one along with my coffee and laughed at myself. That morning, the eclipse had meant nothing to me. A few hours later, I bought into the hype. Literally.
Then I bit into it, and it was delicious. Totality delicious.
