Finger Lakes Time Insight Piece.
by Mike Rusinko
April showers bring May flowers.”
— Traditional
It’s been difficult to decide where to land on the Eclipse of April 8, 2024. Law enforcement, hospitals, and local businesses have been planning for what might happen for over a year and a half. The idea being most of what might happen will be good, but deep down nobody really likes surprises. Now schools are out and businesses are closing early. Wegmans will shut its doors for 30 minutes, my normal time spent navigating self-checkout. On one hand, this sounds serious. On the other hand, I picked up my vision-saving, eclipse-viewing paper safety goggles from my friend’s furniture store. OK, we’re also looking at a new mattress, but seriously?
Just how are we supposed to take all of this?
The ancients took it very seriously. The Babylonians temporarily replaced their king with a stand-in for the day of the eclipse, just in case chaos ensued. The next day, they killed him. How’s that for totality? The Ancient Chinese believed that during an eclipse a dragon had stolen the sun from the sky. Really. The Ancient Romans were so upset by an eclipse that they skipped Sunday sauce and ordered take-out. Not really.
So, mankind’s record during eclipses is not great. A war broke out once over eclipse hysteria. So did a truce, once. What a horrible coin toss. We can hope for the best. Veterinary scientists are preparing to monitor bird and mammal behavior during the big event. Hopefully we’ll take our cue from the animal kingdom and mark the occasion by just settling down. In truth, the long weekend calls out for day drinking on a galactic scale. On that topic, it seems like the Corona Beer people missed eighth-grade science and a huge promotional tie-in. Oh well.
The night sky is filled with countless faraway suns. We call them stars, and most have names. But doesn’t our main source of life — our star — deserve a name? I suggest something from another time that just sounds old, but not the Latin name Sol. I was thinking Saul. It echoes to King Solomon from the Old Testament and also Saul from mornings at the Y who, by the way, could wear a towel once in a while in the locker room.
We have only one moon, and we call it moon. Jupiter, which clearly dominates the solar system and the naming rights effort, has over 90. They all have names. One of them has a movie of its own. Google “Europa.” So maybe we could stretch and give our one moon a proper name? I offer up my sister’s name because Lynne appreciates a little lunacy, is always a bright, beautiful object in my sky, and like the moon she has a dark side.
The National Weather Service has released historical data that puts the afternoon of April 8 at about a 70% likelihood of being cloudy and a 30% likelihood of being sunny here in the beautiful Finger Lakes of Upstate New York. People that live here could have probably ballparked that number on their own. But that’s what we’re working with. I’m practicing for the big moment. I go into the hall closet and close the door behind me. It’s dark-ish. I come out after about three minutes and pretend to check out of the hotel room I reserved two years ago.
Maybe Saul will get a chance to shine and then get covered up by Lynne. Maybe we all get to experience a very rare cosmic alignment that’s just about magical and worth acknowledging with joy. Maybe for a few minutes we get a reset on the bizarre socio-tronic world we occupy. For a moment we put down our toys, and experience something bigger than all of us, happening across time zones and neighborhoods, and yet still shared by all of us, together.
Mike Rusinko is a commercial lender at Lyons National Bank. He is also the former Host of the Finger Lakes Morning News on WGVA. His writing has appeared in the Finger Lakes Times and other publications. He and his wife Carol live in Penn Yan.
