Doolittle

Well, I hear you went up to Saratoga,

And your horse naturally won,

Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia,

To see the total eclipse of the sun…

-Carly Simon

It never would work, would it? 1972, 2017, and now 2024. Total Eclipse, hardly!

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs! I was stewing. What would I do with all that product, bought at higher prices that seemed reasonable for the enormous crowds who would appear…

Magically. Or not. The weather was dictating my fortunes. Weather! Of all things.

“You do what you have to do!” explained Doolittle, my better half. “It’s Niagara Falls! Break-even. Send it back! Refuse that last shipment. Don’t even take delivery on it…And if you take a loss, so what?”

“What?” asked my wife at the kitchen table. “Talking to yourself again?”

“Always!” I replied. She was fussing with a box of broken souvenirs that I had scraped together to return while I resisted the urge to deliberately break more so that I could cut my projected losses even further.

“Why do you do this to yourself?” she asked. “Made in China! The lot of it! No great loss!”

“So you say!”

She sighed and plopped down into a chair. “I do the books. We’re fine. It’s not like it was during the pandemic.”

“You compare this train wreck to the pandemic?”

Off she went in a huff. “Sort this yourself! I’m not fighting with you!”

#

Then it was like I was ten years old. I never noticed anything around me except what books told me I should pay attention to.

Book-mobile books, seven at a time or more, should do it. Do what? Oh, fix never being with friends or having a comfortable say in anything that happened in my life. Eclipses and I are like buddies—the extraordinary to my ordinary.

Um, is that me? In 1972, right smack dab in Nova Scotia, I was staring at the sun using photo negatives to shield my eyes a week to the hour before the eclipse was supposed to occur.

“Nothing’s happening!” Doolittle exclaimed. “Now, all the kids in the neighborhood are staring at you!”

Yelling like…little banshees, all pooped up and raring to inflict pain. On me! I beat a retreat into that bungalow that, save for the yellow-painted shingles, was like any other, with a cracked retaining wall and gravel driveway. A plopped-down nondescript whatzit it was. Perfect in every way.

After that, Dad has his say. “Get outside and play with the boys! Stop reading books all the time! Where did you get those negatives? Give them to me!”

“You’ll go blind staring at the sun,” Mom said as she served me porridge a day later.

“MOM! The negatives protect your eyes! I read it in a book.”

“I’m not taking you to any eye doctor, you hear me?”

#

The shop looked so empty! How is that possible?

“Calvin! Did a tornado go through here?”

I was speechless, my tongue hanging out. I’m barely through the door; my master key is still in my pocket, and long after hours, the help fills shelves and totals the take.

Calvin looked up with a huge grin. “It never stopped all day."

“Head home, the lot of you!” I rejoiced. Then I had to sit. “What on earth?”

“Exactly!” cooed Calvin. “Eclipse mania! Bonus time!”

“You can count on that!” 

I start filling the bank's deposit bag. I must be at the shop early tomorrow—there are too many shelves to fill.

#

I was daydreaming again about chasing girls. I hardly knew it, but back in 1972, it seemed natural to be in and through one house and then out of the other in record time, wrestling with them and talking garbage. Now, an eclipse hardly mattered to me. After all that reading I did?

But then it happened—sudden, like. One minute, clouds with sunshine filter through, and then bam! Seconds later, it's like someone switched the light. Dark. Oh, so dark! We screamed so much it made the dogs bark! Owwhooo!

I forget their names—Pauline, Sandra, or Roxanne? Afterward, they didn’t seem interested in my silly games—small wonder. I had to see it all in my mind: blackness eating the sun, a massive blot with everyone else so excited—TV stuff. So soon after, the man on the moon with his "one large step for mankind" spiel.

“Never mind!” Doolittle told me, “Thank your lucky stars, no eye doctor for you!”

#

But I'm still waiting for clear weather for THE DAY. The weather forecast is always so damn accurate. I’m up at them, counting my chicks before they are hatched. But with a hopeless rage, that feeling you get that spoils everything.

Niagara Falls Has Declared an Emergency! The headline blares. Like, really? All this does is snarl traffic, with main routes shut to accommodate unnecessary emergency vehicles if the million expected tourists don’t arrive.

“Que sera, sera,” quipped Calvin upon my entering the shop on Eclipse Day.

“I bet the police know the hotel fill rate by now!” I answered. It was too early to see much tourist traffic in the streets, and I was half an hour late for what should have been a ten-minute ride.

“Uh huh,” mumbled Calvin, gingerly placing souvenirs with beavers, Mounties, and droopy Canadian flags forward—as if there was any other way to put them—Made-in-China stickers at the back.

I could have kicked myself. If not for the closed roads, I would have cruised by all the hotel parking lots myself to know the score.

#

What a bunch of nonsense! Did I break even? Maybe. Whoever came was in a rush to party. Any excuse, as they say?

And Mayor Diodati had to admit that far from a million visitors, a mere two hundred thousand showed up! What a maroon! Declaring an emergency scared off thousands, not to mention thousands more in missed tourist dollars.

Can you be too careful and proactive?

After all, eclipse is not a superpower. It's just a suggestion, a bribe offered to anyone who would risk believing in it.

Pity the aboriginal tribes who stared at it so long ago. They believed and paid the price—blindness—confirmation for every unimaginable terror that unexplained things can inflict.

On the other hand, are we so much better off? As Doolittle told me:

“I’m at peace even if you are not. We’re just tourists clutching souvenirs along the way."