Wednesday Walk: Grandpa Eclipse
My grandpa loved eclipses. At least I think he did.
Welcome to Willoughby Hills!
Every Wednesday, I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together and see where the path leads…
Learning Something New
After a few weeks of erratic posting, I was hoping that I had gotten back on track last week. But then Sunday came and the post that I had half written at the time had to take a back seat.
At our new house, we had a crew in last week refinishing our pine floors. The updated floors look really nice, and it was well worth it to have this work done while the rooms were empty of furniture.
We spent the weekend at our new house, but my wife noticed when we arrived that we didn’t seem to have hot water. I went down to check the water heater and noticed a flashing light. I counted how many times it flashed (seven) and then read the corresponding decal on top of the gas valve to determine that we had a flammable vapor fault.
Apparently, the polyurethane that the flooring crew had put down triggered a sensor in the water heater that caused it to shut down for fear that if the water heater flame ignited in the presence of the flooring fumes, it could cause a fire or explosion.
In all of my years at This Old House, I had never heard of a flammable vapor sensor and had no idea that water heaters had them. I did some Googling and learned how to reset the gas valve to clear the fault. Once I did, we were back in business.
Needless to say, I didn’t get around to finishing my wiring and hitting publish on Sunday.
But if you ever find yourself without hot water after working with oil-based finishes, perhaps my little anecdote will come to mind for you again.
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Eclipse Memories
On Monday, I spent the afternoon at my kids’ school watching the eclipse. In our area, we were in the 90% range of totality. The sky got dusky but not quite dark, though the air got cold and quite windy as the moon was passing in front of the sun.
There was a large swarm of mosquitoes (or some other flying insect) hovering overhead. They were all in a formation and just kind of bobbing in place, much like a news helicopter over the scene of a bad traffic accident. If I were in Biblical times, I may have thought the world was ending.
As the eclipse was happening, I kept thinking of my grandfather for some reason. I have a very distinct memory of watching an eclipse with him when I was younger.
It’s kind of funny because he has no other connection to astronomy in my memory other than the one eclipse we watched together some thirty odd years ago. He didn’t own a telescope and never seemed that interested in what was happening beyond the clouds. The closest other association I have with him and space is a behind the scenes photo from his days as a Navy photographer where he’s adjusting lights for a pilot in a high altitude suit.
As I thought back on watching the eclipse with him, I started to remember that I may have been home sick from school on the day that particular eclipse happened. I asked my sister about it, and she had distinct memories of watching the eclipse at school, so that gives credence to my theory.
I remember watching most of the eclipse on TV with both of my grandparents. It was in a picture-in-picture window during the afternoon network programming of either game shows or soap operas. Through a camera lens, it looked more like a computer graphic than a live celestial event.
But then, my grandpa brought me out into his backyard and showed me how we could observe the eclipse using two paper plates, the top one with a pin hole in it held maybe a foot above a regular plate.
The pinhole acted like a lens, focusing the sunlight onto the lower plate, allowing us to see the shape of the eclipsed sun without looking up at the sky. My grandpa was a professional photographer, and I remembered being impressed with how his little viewing rig resembled a camera in its most basic way.
Years later, during the 2017 eclipse (the one where Trump looked at the sky without any protection), I copied my grandpa’s crude rig for my colleagues at This Old House as we observed that eclipse.
As I sat on the lawn with my kids watching this most recent eclipse, I couldn’t help but think about how strongly I associated eclipses with my grandpa, even though it was pure happenstance that we happened to view it together.
I wondered if I was forming a core memory for my own kids and if someday they’ll remember me as being somehow associated with eclipses or other spacey things.
It’s strange how random coincidences become associations that become defining character traits. It makes me wonder about the folks who I’ve only had incidental and brief contact with over the years, perhaps somebody who I met briefly for a shoot and never saw again. What random moments from my time with them still stick in their mind?
When I was a kid visiting Walt Disney World, there was a woman in front of us watching a parade with her kids. Her husband was behind us, and the woman turned to him several times, asking “Martin, can you see?” My sister and I repeated that phrase ad nauseam for probably five years after that. The woman who uttered those words probably has no memory of even saying them, yet that phrase is seared in our childhood minds.
It was nice to remember my grandpa on Monday, even if eclipses weren’t really his thing. To me, they always will be.
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Other Wednesday Walks
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.