The Smiling Sidewalk

 

Today I worked on campus, and my coworkers were all duly impressed with Travalon's photos of the total eclipse. Then at lunch I went on an inadvertently long walk with my colleague because I thought the carillon rang the three-quarters hour but it was actually ringing one, so I thought I had fifteen more minutes to walk when I should have been heading back into work. Nobody said anything, but I feel guilty and will make up the time. My colleague was surprised that I hadn't headed back to work when the carillon rang. She also laughed at me for taking this photo, but sometimes the sidewalk just smiles up at you.

In the afternoon we had the big department meeting with all the faculty, and as always I took minutes. The chair said we should all take ten minutes to talk to the person next to us, so I was going to ask the faculty member on my left how his kids were doing, but the faculty on my right started talking to me, and it turned out she had taken her son to Bloomington, Indiana to see the eclipse, so we just yakked about the eclipse the whole time. She wasn't on the campus there when it happened, but she was close enough to the campus to hear all the cheering when the moon totally blocked the sun. To me, it was a deeply spiritual thing, partly because it looked like the Eye of God up in the sky, but mostly because I feel like the fact that the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun but also 400 times closer, so that they appear to be the same size and we can have total solar eclipses, is too implausible to be a coincidence. I feel like this is some of the most concrete evidence for a Divine Creator that we have.

Here are some photos of the loot we acquired on this trip. First are the two rosaries I bought in Benton just a couple of hours before the eclipse.

When I showed the rosaries to Travalon, he saw this sign he hadn't noticed before. It's like it was made especially for him!

These are the things I got at the antiques mall in El Paso (Illinois) on Sunday.  

From left to right: a tiny fork pin, an orange rosary with a Celtic cross on it, a St. Anne's chaplet, a purple rosary, a missionary rosary with very small, delicate beads, an Infant of Prague chaplet, and a wooden rosary. The orange rosary fascinates me because if it's Irish and orange, then it's Protestant, right? But... it's a rosary. Who can explain this? I'd love to know the story behind it.

Famous Hat