At Nibula Elementary School in rural Nebraska, excitement had reached fever pitch, with an entire week of educational activities centered around the upcoming solar eclipse. In fact, just an hour before the sun’s rays would disappear, there was a pep assembly scheduled for the kids, where the PE teacher, Mr. Piercing, had invited in the town’s state champion high school baseball team, all crack players, to play the parts of the nine planets in the solar system. The baseball boys paraded into the gym that day, each wearing a jersey of a different planet and its name emblazoned in bright orange letters while three hundred elementary kids wildly applauded them and the team began orbiting around the gym like one beautiful baseball universe.
Representing the sun in this makeshift eclipse model was the entire cheerleading squad from Nibula High School – fifteen tumbling gals whose cartwheeling entrance caused kids to squeal and cheer. As the cheerleaders gathered to create a human pyramid to simulate the brilliant sun rays, one child could not contain himself and fell off his bleacher seat into another row of kids, causing a wave like dominoes until the last one dumped himself out, flat, onto the gym’s wooden floor.
The moon in the model was played by the baseball team’s impish water boy, whose acned complexion, gray and pitted, likened itself to a smaller version of a lunar landscape. He had been given the role of the moon out of sympathy for all the disgusting jobs he suffered through during the regular season, like cleaning cleats, scrubbing out grass stains and putting antifungal powder on the feet of the star catcher, Larry DiGregory, a giant of a young man, who had picked off the Dan D’Josery at second in a throw that was clocked at over one hundred miles an hour.
There was some disagreement, however, about who was to play the planet Pluto, a planet that rarely sees the light of day at the far reaches of outer space. Current science held that Pluto was still considered one of our solar system’s planets and as such still deserved recognition in the rotation of the baseball players as they marched through the gym and carried out their interplanetary responsibilities. Knowing little about science, Mr. Piercing decided to give the tiny planet of Pluto to Larry, an error in scientific judgement, and then place Pluto in its rightful place in the solar system, which was some three hundred light years away. In terms of planet earth, that meant that Larry would be rotating outside the school building on a dead run, in order to accurately represent the speed and distance of Pluto, and while the catcher was trying his best to keep up with the other rotating ball players planets inside the gym, he was now only on his second lap because he had to periodically stop to scratch his chronic athletes feet.
Back inside, in anticipation of the eclipse, the pep assembly had rocketed to star performances. Kids in the bleachers were eating popcorn and wearing huge eclipse glasses they’d made in Home Economics, now called Domestic Health Engineering. At the appointed and highly anticipated moment, the conjunction of the moon and sun and earth, Mr. Piercing had planned to flip a switch on the giant overhead scoreboard, which would spotlight the towering fifteen cheerleader pyramid, a flaming yellow construction of golden yellows girls exaggerating the brilliance of the sun.
Sadly, given his mediocre science background, Mr. Piercing knew even less about light and shadow than he did about the planets, so that when he turned on the spotlight, it shone across the pyramid, and highlighted the standing cheerleader at the top, projecting the shadow of her anatomy on the opposite gym wall. The spotlight also temporarily blinded Mr. Piercing, rendering him unable to find the switch and turn off the penetrating light. It stayed on an uncomfortably long time. Teachers yelled at kids and told them to cover their eyes and look down or away and it was if the eclipse had happened too soon. All educational benefits gained by Mr. Piercing’s model of the solar system being acted out superbly by the State Champion baseball players was completely lost by the lurid and suggestive shadows of the cheerleader dancing on the gym wall.
When the light was finally switched off and kids were quieted, the real solar eclipse outside was nearly at hand, and the entire school of kids was hurriedly ushered out into the common’s area where they donned their flimsy glasses again and looked upwards. However, as the moon penetrated the plane of the sun’s rays and futuristic faces of kids looked skyward, subtle changes in nature, unnoticeable to the casual observer, were also taking place around them.
Birds, for example, thinking it was evening and time to roost, skittled about, confused as if they were supposed to end their day and the temperature suddenly dropped ten degrees. The wind became silent, shadows took on new and unfamiliar shapes, and kids looked around and saw only pinhole silhouettes of their friends.
As the moon shifted slowly in the heavens, slivers of crescent light began to pass over the commons, and the wind suddenly picked up again, and the glasses, which had barely fit in the first place, flew off and scattered across the blacktop. Since children had been warned they could be blinded if they looked up at the sun, they frantically reached out to find glasses, hundreds of them falling to their knees and screaming in panic, feeling around on the ground.
From above it looked like a colony of ants who no longer knew each other. Tiny and helpless, many of the kindergarten kids had only recently stopped taking a daily nap and using a sippy cup. The notion that they could adapt so quickly to a life with no sight was an unreasonable option, and some began to sob there on the asphalt, thinking perhaps that they were destined to be blind for the rest of their lives and would have to be sent to a special school and have to study braille or get a seeing eye dog or learn how to eat all over again with adaptive silverware.
It was just too much to bear for them on a day that was supposed to be fun and exciting, and that had been sold to them as a cross curricular and multi-international adventure. There were, looking back, parts of this event that could have wonderful academic benefits, but right now, as the solar eclipse bore down overhead, the future did not look bright for three hundred elementary ant-children scrambling around on the shadowy ground.
Furthermore, with children reaching blindly to find their solar glasses, they began to run into each other, bumping heads so hard it sounded like the local the Nibula bowling alley on a Friday night. Wailing for their mothers, they held on tightly to one another, knowing this blinding cosmic event might be the end of any life their parents had promised them.
All this time, enormous Larry, all 265 pounds of him, was still simulating the planet Pluto, and on his thirty ninth rotation around the school, so that when he entered the commons area he was in a full sweat and his feet were a mess. There before him, crawling kids were crying and screaming hideous screams as if they were being burned alive. Thinking it was true, Larry ran into their midst and picked up two kids, then two more under his other arm and carried them directly into the sun, straight to the gym. Five others blindly stumbled towards his voice and jumped on his back on the way, while another grabbed on to his leg and dragged behind. When he got to the door, Larry turned and immediately went back for eleven more, and carried them to safety too. At this point, Larry was now wearing dozens of solar glasses and looked as if he was some kind of mirrored super-hero, one that could redirect the dangerous rays of the sun safely away and back up. Trip after trip, Larry continued to carry out kids by the dozens. While other teachers and coaches cowered behind the dumpster, Larry, it was said, carried one hundred and twenty-eight kids to safety that day, dumping each load at the gym and showing no concern for his own safety, went back time and time again. While Larry did contract a ghastly case of double pink eye that day, not one child lost his eyesight to the solar eclipse. Not a single one.
The next day, after the pledge was recited and the lunch menu was given, the principal announced it would be indoor recess. The motion detector lights that had been installed earlier that year to save money were taken out, and regular bulbs that stayed on all the time, day and night, were reinstalled. In an emergency meeting, PTSA voted to order a commemorate plaque with Larry’s name on it and place it out in the Common’s Area to commemorate the catcher’s quick actions under the solar circumstances. One of the first graders had called him the Solar Express, and the name took, and his title was added on the plaque under Larry’s name along with a picture of him carrying the janitor piggyback to safety.
Another pep assembly was suggested in honor of Larry, this time without cheerleaders, but it was voted down 22-20, with the deciding votes coming from two parents who had particularly bad eyesight. Instead, a celebratory pitch-in dinner was scheduled on Saturday outside in the park, but at the last minute the location was changed, and relocated to the basement of the VFW where there were no windows, and the overhead lighting was on a dimmer switch that could be adjusted at a moment’s notice so that it was not as bright as the sun, but bright enough for everyone to see Larry blow out the candles on his cake with black icing that said only, “Pluto.”