It wasn't the two minutes, it was what happened in them

I was surprised when I looked at Facebook this morning and saw comments from several people I know about Monday's total eclipse of the Sun.

Just past totality.

Several of them said they didn't see what the fuss was, that the eclipse wasn't anything all that special.

All I can say is, they didn't see what I saw.

What I saw, at 2:38 p.m. in Paladin Stadium at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

For about 20 minutes before the moment of totality, the Sun became a smaller and smaller crescent as the Moon covered more and more of its surface.


Then with about a minute to go, it looked like the facets of a diamond, with about eight or 10 separate points of light. Then all of a sudden, the lights disappeared. The view through the special protective glasses was 100 percent dark.

It was truly amazing.

Then for the next two minutes or so, we could look at the Sun without using the glasses. I look a couple of pictures that look nothing like the one above, but they were what I saw at the time.

It was a glorious two minutes, well worth three days and a 400-mile round trip to South Carolina. The main reason it was so difficult was that I'm not a real good planner. I started looking for the special glasses three days before the eclipse -- at least a week after everyplace they were being sold had run out.

It was still 72 hours off, but even the 21st century fallback for everyone -- Amazon.com -- couldn't promise to deliver the special glasses till Tuesday.

Essentially two days too late.

It's like I said back when we lived in California to explain my shortcomings in the planning arena:

"My wife is the reason we have earthquake supplies. I'm the reason we have "Animal House" on videocassette."

Figuring if we went to a site where people would be watching the eclipse, someone would be selling extras at an inflated price, we looked at the map you see here.

At our location an hour south of Atlanta, we were going to be able to see 95 percent totality. That might sound good, but essentially it was missing the whole point of a total eclipse.

The total eclipse was visible only to a band of territory from Oregon in the northwest to Charleston, S.C., on the Atlantic Ocean, and we were going to have to travel at least about 175 miles to get there. Furman University not only was a good location geographically, the university was going to put on a program -- and hand out free glasses.

My shot at 2:39.

All the hotels within a hundred miles or so were either sold out or charging exorbitant prices. We wound up at a Best Western in Braselton, Ga., nearly a two-hour drive from Furman in normal conditions.

Even though the eclipse wasn't till mid-afternoon, and Furman wasn't handing out the glasses till noon. we didn't know what to expect as far as traffic. We left before 7:30 a.m., and amazingly we were pulling into the parking lot at Paladin Stadium before 10 a.m.

We had made it, but we were left with nearly five hours to kill on a hot and muggy South Carolina summer day.

The time passed slowly.

Incredibly slowly.

But the Furman program helped. An astronomy professor explained what an eclipse was and how it works, pointing out the difference in distance between Earth, Moon and Sun and telling us some of the things that would happen as the sky darkened.

It didn't get that dark, but it changed enough that crickets in a copse of trees behind the stadium began chirping as if we were well past sunset. The marching band played from time to time, and shortly before totality, we got the inevitable "Also Sprach Zarathustra," the Strauss composition most Americans know as the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

It was definitely worth the wait, especially that moment that the sky went dark and the Sun vanished.

It's rare that I see anything after nearly seven decades of living that makes me catch my breath.

That did, and being able to look directly for two minutes after that and see the corona was every bit as special.

When I saw the comments from friends in Northern Virginia and Southern California that they had seen nothing special, both were in areas where there was less than 65 percent coverage.

Of course it was nothing special.

What was special was 100 percent, and it had been worth three days, hundreds of dollars and hours melting in the hot sun.

It was only two minutes, but it reminded me of a nice little movie from the '80s, "Vision Quest," in which Matthew Modine prepares to wrestle an undefeated state champion. A co-worker of his says he's taking a night off from work to see the match.

Modine says what the heck, it's only six minutes.

His co-worker explains.

"I was in the room here one day... watchin' the Mexican channel on TV. I don't know nothin' about Pele. I'm watchin' what this guy can do with a ball and his feet. Next thing I know, he jumps in the air and flips into a somersault and kicks the ball in - upside down and backwards... the goddamn goalie never knew what the fuck hit him.

"Pele gets excited and he rips off his jersey and starts running around the stadium waving it around his head. Everybody's screaming in Spanish. I'm here, sitting alone in my room, and I start crying. That's right, I start crying. Because another human being, a species that I happen to belong to, could kick a ball, and lift himself, and the rest of us sad-assed human beings, up to a better place to be, if only for a minute...

"Let me tell ya, kid - it was pretty goddamned glorious. It ain't the six minutes... it's what happens in that six minutes."

It was the same for the eclipse.

It wasn't the two minutes.

It was what happened in the two minutes.