How we Became Eclipse Junkies

The connection isn't obvious? Then let me explain.

Barbara was a PhD candidate in the cross-disciplinary field of Religion and Literature, in a degree program jointly administered by U.C. Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. Remember, this was the seventies. She was casting about for a thesis topic and decided to take a break and go to India and Nepal.

Barbara will someday be forced to write a book about her trip. She got hepatitis in Nepal and was carried out in a basket by hired porters. She was crudely propositioned by supposedly celibate gurus. She stayed in places from which your eurotrash backpacker would have fled in panic.

Everywhere she went, she observed a spiritual fervor and fascination that had no apparent parallel in the West. She noted the profusion of festivals, processions, observances, temples, and pilgrimages, and wondered what, if any, were the equivalent expressions in the U.S.

Finally, after nine months of adventure and peril, she returned to her parent's home. She strode into the living room and announced "I'm back!" Her father growled "Quiet! The game is on!"

Barbara had an epiphany. So this was the western obsession, the expression of passion, the equivalent fervor! She decided to write her doctoral thesis on American football.

I met Barbara in 1982 when she was completing the thesis. I helped copy-edit it. It was in the form of a comic novel titled "Instant Replay / Sudden Death". As an ex-hippie, I was disdainful of American spectator sports. One of our first dates was to attend a party to watch the Forty-Niners win their first Super Bowl. Now we were both hooked.

In 1991, the Forty-Niners won their fourth Super Bowl, in New Orleans, by a score of 55 to 10. (Some might find such a game to be boring, but we've watched the video tape twice!) Barbara was disappointed that we hadn't gone to see the game in person. For consolation, she insisted that we go to Mexico that summer to see an eclipse. We'd heard that they were interesting, and so we decided to see one. After all, it was conveniently near.

Of course we discovered that one eclipse is never enough. Our immediate reaction after the eclipse of July 11, 1991 was "Dang! Where is the next one?" When we got home, we immediately started planning to go to Bolivia for the eclipse of 1994. And then Rajasthan in 1995. And so on...