OK, we gotta start with it, right? It was pretty cool for those who were under the path of the total eclipse yesterday. It did not arrive at noon like the literary version. It got a little dim here around three pm here in the capital. The larger astronomic events served as a tipping point with a personal care visit, the onthly cleaning crew, a physician appointment and a thoroughly unsettling burst of unsolicited gastrointestinal malfeasance.

The few moments of dimness passed without further untoward incident, and the eys of the world turned from the heavens back to the madness to which we have become accustomed. We could start the litany that has now become routine and lost some of the startling aspects that had suggested this was all highly unusual, and in fact at distinct variance with the way things used to work.

The practical truths have been overwhelmed. We all knew war was brutal and a thing to be avoided. Despite the common sense, one of the headlines in the news was whether the Mullahs in Tehran had uranium enriched to 84%, with only 6% more to go for fissionable weapons grade capability. .

So there is that matter, which connects through ancient religious strife to others of long standing. We took a look at some aspects of that collision over a few drams of Monkey Shoulder Single Malt last night, looking over cruise notes from a Mediterranean adventure nearly a half century old. It was a markedly different and bi-polar Mediterranean world in those days.

Through legal if somewhat subterranean maneuverings, we had obtained the services of an Israeli driver named Sri. He was of a certain age, and his tales of actually participating in the fighting that surrounded the establishment of the new state on old ground. Some of the vehicles shot up in 1947 were not removed and touched up with Rustoleum anti-corrosion treatment to keep memory alive. We were attempting to visit places mentioned in the Bible, since our little party was all at least nominally Christian. Our driver was a Jew, and to reach some of the holy sites, we had to climb from the stones of the Second Temple past the solemn gold spire of the Dome of the Rock, revered by the third- and newest- of the three Patriarchal faiths.

The account of that little adventure was fun and is included in our book “Last Cruise of the Cold War.” But there was something powerful simply in the proximity of all the holiness still in conflict.

The Eclipse was useful as a means to distract us from an astronomic interaction between an object some 235,000 miles away passing before a much larger one 73 million miles at the center of our solar system, you know? Some of the pundits on the flatscreen covering the event were fun to see, since what was about to happen could not be captured on a teleprompter the day before. There were kids and giggles and astonishing images as the shadow passed northeast toward us from Eagle Pass here in the United States. And then on the screen we were back to coverage of cries of “Death to America” from Dearborn, Michigan, of all places.

We remember when Mayor Orville Hubbard was cited for his racial politics in the time adjacent Detroit was immersed in flames. Considering the changes just in our brief lives, we may see something as profound before the next total Exclipse a couple decades hence, you know?

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