Astronomical

I stood out there on my back porch, staring out into the midnight sky, and in the back of my mind came this lonely thought: "Why didn't I put anything on my feet?" There I was in my bath robe, marveling at the blood orange directly overhead that had begun the night as our silver moon. This lunar eclipse brought memories of every flashlight, globe and tennis ball example I had ever created or witnessed in my youth. At that moment I understood that our sun, the flashlight was directly behind me, standing on the globe. The tennis ball was now in my shadow. This experience sent me back inside to wake my family.
And suddenly I was my father. Waking his sons and wife to witness this celestial anomaly or that. I remember standing in my parents' back yard, gawking up into the blackness with the assurance that I would see the comet called Kohoutek. I was, along with most of the rest of the planet, let down. The fire I had expected to see and the blinding flash that I might have hoped for never materialized. I stood there, shivering, looking at what appeared to be a faint gray smear of cotton trailing across the sky. But my father made sure that I saw it.
Much in the same way that I dragged my son out into our own back yard to tip his head back and stare in awe at the only winter solstice lunar eclipse in the past three hundred years. He blinked. He squinted. He adjusted his eyes to being awake in the middle of the night. "Cool," he said as he started to head back inside.
Was he looking at the same thing I was? This natural wonder? This astrological coincidence that had been waiting for centuries to appear?
Yes, he was. My wife was more enthusiastic, but still felt the need to warm herself in her cozy bed. I continued to stare at the slowly returning moon as it dipped behind layers of clouds. I tried to give the moment some significance. It was significant because there aren't that many nights when I find myself awake past midnight these days. It was significant because it happened on a winter's night that allowed us to see it without a thick layer of fog. It was significant because it linked me with all those other fathers who stood in their back yards, trying to coax their families to commune with the spectacle that was this lunar eclipse. I leaned against the rail on our deck and watched the light return.