Buster

My next-door neighbor, Steve, and I watched the total lunar eclipse together last night.

Actually, I was peering at the overcast night sky when Steve came tapping up the sidewalk with his red-and-white-striped cane, and we just naturally started talking about why I was out there in the cold darkness.

While we discussed how to enjoy this eclipse through breaks in the cloud cover, a song my elder son once enjoyed was on earworm repeat-play in my right ear -- "Total Eclipse of the Heart," sung by Bonnie Tyler with Rick Derringer on the guitar and Roy Bittan on the piano.

We unlimbered the binoculars to compensate for Steve's functional blindness, and I could see from his face that their optics brought the moon came right to him.

I was almost equally blind (denied corrective lenses by my parents) and being held in my Grandfather B.L. Hinnant's arms when he placed his binoculars before my eyes so that I could see the first full lunar eclipse I can recall.

The vision of that moon is as vivid as was the living moon last night, and with it come B.L.'s gentle words, explaining the eclipse and how binoculars work.

I tried to repeat exactly those perfect words to my elder son George Rankin and younger son Jack when they were so young and we enjoyed eclipses together, using binoculars Grandfather Hinnant gave me decades ago.

I let Steve know when there was a hole in the clouds through which we could see the processing eclipse and, as the earth's shadow dimmed the moon, helped him reacquire the reddening image.

We were in a downtown parking lot between a church and an apartment building, pointing at the sky through a glare of streetlights and talking unselfconsciously about the progressively revealed wonders as the eclipsing moon danced amid the silver filigree of framing clouds.

For their unspoken reasons, others paused to join us in marveling at the nighttime sky. I was barely aware of most of them because they came and went almost as silently as passing ghosts.

I do recall talking with a red-haired neighbor and her boyfriend.

"My father told me about this," she said, among other things.

"My friend Johnny Horn tells me there won't be another lunar eclipse visible here until 2010," I responded, my mind on how thoughtful her father was. (Maybe I should have said the next total eclipse will be at 3 a.m. , December 21, 2010.)

Someone in a grey Buick pulled into the parking lot, car lights off, careful of their engine noise.

Steve lent them his field glasses for a moment and we chatted about his food delivery business until his cellphone hummed in his hand, calling him away.

Just two old men, staring at the sky in a downtown parking lot and talking perhaps too loud together, somehow attracting passersby to join them briefly in contemplation of the astronomical event which played hide-and-seek overhead, and in my memories.