DID YOU SEE the eclipse? What did you think? Chad and I watched from our backyard, sharing a pair of glasses I snagged from a table in front of the library. The weirdest part for us was the silence, when all the birds stopped chirping. Aside from that it was relatively anticlimactic compared with the rainbow that Chad, Michaela, and I had seen the day before. We'd been cooped up nearly all day, bickering just to have something to do. Then the rain stopped and we went for a walk and our moods lifted immediately. The rainbow breaking through the clouds felt like what it was, a reprieve.
On the other hand, the rainbow was a spontaneous event. The timing of the eclipse, pretty much down to the exact second of its occurrence, was determined years ago. There's a lot to be said for unplanned experiences, like bumping into friends who invite other friends and then you have a party. But simultaneous collective experiences are diminishing, or at least that's how it feels to me. Apart from the Olympics, or other sports competitions, I can't think of many other moments when I know I am experiencing the exact same thing in real time as my fellow Earthlings. So even if my eclipse wasn't spectacular, I still appreciate having shared a cosmic phenomenon with millions of strangers.
Speaking of shared experiences, I received many thoughtful notes after last week's letter. Thank you. It always feels good to know you aren't alone. It also made me realize how common neurodivergence is yet we still discuss it as though it were a smattering of instances. I think this is changing, but not very fast. It is easier to think of ADHD as a superpower than a disability. But superpowers aren't a real thing. Disabilities are a real thing. For which we as a society have to make accommodations.
Three Things That Kept Me Going This Week
This documentary about a mock government set up by high school girls in Missouri gave us much to talk about. It tracks a couple of different girls throughout the week-long program. It was fascinating to see their ambitions shift and evolve as they learned about the political machine and confronted gender inequities at several different levels, from irritating limitations set down by the Girls State administrators to the devastating Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Bianca G. recommended this podcast to me and the first episode was intriguing enough: paranormal activity in man's childhood home leads him to investigate the 1937 murder of his wife's great-grandmother, which, in a pretty extraordinary coincidence, happened in the house next door. But the second episode, when the story takes some extremely surprising turns, sent actual chills up my spine. Officially hooked.
Rainbows and eclipses are free—to those of us in the free world. This essay, written by a formerly incarcerated woman about the 2017 eclipse, is a poignant reminder of the ways that incarceration deprives people of not just their freedom, but any opportunity to participate in a collective experience, to feel part of the world beyond the prison walls, to feel human.
Final note: When Michaela read this comic she immediately wanted to pull the exact same prank on her class at school. I told her firmly that she could not pull any pranks at her school and that I remain deeply embarrassed to this day about having done that. We reached a compromise: she could pull a similar prank on Chad. So she wrote a note that "would self-destruct in five minutes," we put it in a pink envelope and signed it Ivanka Trump, she went outside, put the envelope in the mail slot, rang our front doorbell, and then ran around to the back door. Chad got the letter and rolling-on-the-floor-laughing hilarity ensued.
For the record, I don't endorse this—I doubt that it is good parenting to teach your kid how to pull a prank—but in the end I guess it was harmless good fun.
Claire