Eclipsing

I HEARD SOME FOLKS EXCITEDLY discussing next month's total eclipse of the sun. "I cannot wait until April 8!", one of them enthusiastically exclaimed. I understand why, but begged to differ. "Yes you can", I wanted to say, but didn't. You can wait for anything and everything, anticipation is indeed the better part of desire, and, well, you have no other choice, but to wait..for everything, including the next moment. One thing I've learned over an increasingly long life is; never hasten the future. Don't wish away your life. Or, as Einstein sagely said: "I never think much about the future. It arrives soon enough". Every old person on the planet will tell you that life goes by like a flash, and there is no reason to hurry it along mentally,emotionally. I too am very excited about the coming eclipse, partly because I luckily live perfectly situated within the path of totally; the eclipse will indeed be total in my neck of the woods, the sun will be completely obliterted, briefly; but, yes, I can wait, and am enjoing the waiting. We are expecting tens of thousands of tourists to descend on our modest little state as the magic day approaches. If its cloudy all will not be lost: for a few magic minutes the day will turn completely dark, like midnight, and we will all freak, clouds or no clouds. Who knows? Maybe new religions will be born, right here in my territory! More likely, the old ones will be dusted off, and intoned, briefly... Doubtless ancient religions were inpsired and shaped by these occasional disappearances of the sun god from the sky in broad daylight. For a few terrifying minutes, the world seems, literally, to be ending. Thank goodness we moderns know better..or do we? I remember an eclipse in, I believe, 1964 or so, when I was a kid. Then, on March 7, 1970, when I was nearly fifteen, a high school friend and I projected the partially eclipsed sun (we were not in the path of totality) onto a viewing screen through a small telescope, and we took a picture of us, standing there together, next to the telescope, the half eaten sun plainly visibie on the projection screen. We were so young. My friend is long dead. I wish I still had that picture. August 21, 2017 seems like yesterday. On that grand solar eclipse day, my neighborhood was given a near total but not total total vanishing of the sun, on a nice clear summer day. I stood in my front yard, my neighbors stood in theirs, of all of gawking and gaping in utter, primitive amazement for about ten minutes or so. I rmember thinking that this would be the last eclipse until April of 2024, and that that was a long way away in the futre, but, really, maybe, not so much...Turns out, it wasn't. The past seven years went by in a flash. How surprising, right? I believe the next eclipse will be in the twenty forties some time, I cannot recall the exact date. Maybe I'll still be alive, maybe I won't be. Either way, I have been blessed. If I'm alive for the next eclipse, I will once again be excited, will pay attention to it, and will be very, very old. And once again, as I have increasingly done as I have aged, I will doubtless reflect once again on how incredibly rapidly it all goes by, almost as if having gotten done too soon.