The Sun and Moon Together

If you saw the total eclipse, maybe you had the same reaction that I did: awe. Awe at the day turning midnight dark, awe at the sun lining up exactly behind the moon.

My partner, my friend Annie and I had driven up to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont that morning from Brattleboro. Once I had given myself over to Keith’s unshakable desire to see the eclipse, I’d stopped worrying about traffic and time spent away from work and anything else. And there was no shortage of traffic on our way: we saw big dogs hanging out of car windows, license plates from as far away as California and Colorado and I swear all the other states, a beat up Dodge Dart riding beside a gleaming Tesla.

We were heading for St. Johnsbury, the largest and most southernmost town in this particular swath of the path of totality, and we got a text from a couple other friends from Massachusetts who happened to be going there too. They were about an hour north of us, and suggested we meet up with them at Dog Mountain and Dog Chapel, just outside of St. Johnsbury to watch the eclipse. I had not heard of this mountain and chapel, and thought, What on earth could be better than watching the eclipse outside a temple built to worship dogs? But then the friends texted that St. Johnsbury was a parking lot, and they wanted to keep driving. They found a spot just off the highway in Lyndon, across the street from a Jehova’s Witness church. Eventually we met them at the spot, a small parking area by a hill and a field and an old covered bridge (only in Vermont). We tailgated, caught up, kept an eye on the sky, chatted with other people who’d pulled into the lot, and the mood was upbeat, excited even, like that before a concert or a big game.

The eclipse itself was bizarre and trippy. Just before totality, the light grew pinkish-gold, a bit darker, then darker still. We watched through our glasses as the corona appeared, and people clapped and whooped. We wanted to get back to Brattleboro to meet Annie’s wife for dinner, so we immediately packed up and left.

On the long, traffic-filled drive home, Annie asked what we’d most remember about the day. Keith is a scientist, and I knew he’d most remember the sight of the diamond effect, something he’d called the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen during a previous eclipse, and I was hesitant to admit it, but I knew that I’d most remember the strange sensation of all of these people everywhere watching the sky. Excited for the same thing. And not cheering on one team or protesting something or watching a concert. I admit that crowds have come to seem fraught to me, dangerous because of the potential for gun violence, but also for the implicit division. Someone is going to get irritable, maybe pick a fight. All of us, myself included, seem crabby or distrusting or even volatile lately. Eclipse day was blessedly free of this.

I miss not having a pit at the center of my stomach and soul, the dread that “end times” seem to have arrived too soon. I miss when we behaved as one society and tolerated each other’s political differences. To be clear, I do not believe that divisiveness itself is the problem. Hate is. And it’s been weaponized and used against far too many people. It’s been used to rally the aggrieved and rally those who’ve worked hard against hate itself.

I just submitted my final foreword for The Best American Short Stories. It was an emotional thing to write. When I started the job in 2006, this was a different world. Hate was not something I regularly thought about, nor was the overthrow of democracy, and Donald Trump was just a parody of a rich guy, an emperor with no clothes who popped up in movies and on his reality show. How did we get here?

As I wrote my foreword, I found myself thinking a lot about reading, this thing I have done so much of in the past eighteen years. And I thought a lot about the other series editors before me. Together, we have tended the series for over 109 years. This morning, I was looking over at my bookshelf and had the thought that reading is listening. Each book is really another person, and by giving ourselves over to this person, we are making space for them. It’s gotten harder for me to read full books in the past 5-10 years. It’s gotten harder to focus on reading, period. The combination of tech-induced distraction, the plethora of content available to us at all times, and the surplus of anxiety-inducing news and realities of life for anyone who has children and cares about other people has made sustained focus on the written word more challenging. Better, more disciplined people than I might not find this the case.

One of the things that I love about editing— freelance editing, book editing, not series editing, which is ONLY reading— is the sustained nature of the work. I’ll certainly miss many things about being the series editor of The Best American Short Stories, but frankly, I won’t miss the volume of reading and judging. It’s now been a few months since I’ve read for the series, and I’ve been enjoying the return of a part of my brain that I’ve missed: the listener part, the part that reads more for the good and the interesting than for the superlative, the important, the transcendent. Now my work is to help people write better— not to please a fickle industry that can sometimes seem too localized in New York, although of course if I can do this too, all the better. But the goal is to help people become what they want to be, write what they want to write.

We drove from Lyndon, VT down to Brattleboro, VT, a drive that should take two hours but took us well over four, but we had expected as much. Annie’s been into music from the 1920’s lately, and I admit I’ve been listening to disco (let’s call it nostalgia), and we listened to a bit of both on the way home, and then to the piano music that Keith loves. We talked, we sat in traffic, and so did everyone else, but no one beeped. When the traffic let up, no one sped or swerved past us or anyone else. Dogs again hung their heads out of car windows. Cars from across the country made their way south to wherever they were going on this clear day, the light soon waning, the countryside in Vermont green and vast and quiet. We finally got to Brattleboro after dark and went to dinner with our friends. We stayed until after the restaurant closed, and I felt tired and happy, glad to have joined the world in watching only the sun and the moon for one day.