When I was 16, I heard that there was going to be a total eclipse and the best place in the world to see it would be Mexico.
For years (and years and years and years) my dad had talked about wanting to go to Mazatlan.
It was March, and the eclipse would be happening in July. So I found out everything I could about how much it would be to go there and told my dad everything I found out and he started looking into it and making phone calls and one day I came home from school and he told me we were going to Mexico to see the eclipse.
We did go to Mexico. But he had ended up getting the tickets for June, not July, and so we didn't see the eclipse in Mexico, tickets were just cheaper in June and it was going to be an easier time to go. Nevertheless we had the greatest time. We stayed at a hotel on the beach and the things that stick out to me now are a bus tour, drinking orange juice every morning and getting stung by a jellyfish.
We watched the eclipse at home. Standing out on the lawn of sun-bleached bermuda grass without a monsoon cloud in sight, we waited for the light to go out. After weeks of avoiding daylight hours (I became completely nocturnal during high school summers), we were prepared with the glasses my dad used for welding and pieces of paper stuck with a needle to create pinholes. I remember it seemed like it got cloudy, very cloudy, but without any clouds and it was strangely quiet.
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I met my friends on the rooftop of the Clarendon to see this most recent eclipse. When I first got there they were playing that Prince song that has the lyrics "You can always see the sun, day or night" - then I kept listening to all the other songs to see if they had lyrics with the word "sun" in them. I went downstairs to Gallo Blanco to get beans and guacamole, because they have the best beans and guacamole you could ever hope for. I kept thinking about that eclipse that happened when I was a teenager that made my dad take us to Mexico.
I started taking photos of the people on the roof. Everyone was seriously! so! excited! to be there to see an eclipse that it really was not hard to take photos of them, even though I didn't know them.
Jennifer and Jennifer and Amy.
People on the roof were really excited about how their shadows were shimmery and just kind of weird.
Me. Thanks, Amy, for taking a picture of me.
The eclipse through really thick, dark plastic that one of the people on the roof handed to me, asking if I could take a picture through it.
The sunset after the eclipse.
