The best part was alerting our neighbors across the street, a mother and daughter who are two of four people on the block we’re on speaking terms with, that it was happening at all.

I’ll call my oldest friend Mary. She is at least 90, I think 92, a former Hollywood starlet who (by her pix) was a bombshell in her youth, now my co-conspirator in wishing horrible things for Trump. When I said I hoped that Trump would go too far this time, betting on his impunity at the last eclipse, and stare at the sun, blinding himself, then that he would stumble into traffic and be run over by a truck, she laughed, faintly, the rustling laugh of a fierce soul already half in Hades, that half-world the ancient Greeks imagined, a place of unhappy wraiths.

It is strange to think of Mary as a wraith, or unhappy. I’ve known her as fierce, drinking martinis with her daughter in their little patio across the street of an evening, both of them laughing often and the daughter (I’ll call her Jane) puffing away on a cigarette that Mary wouldn’t allow inside. I’d hear their husky laughter, and usually  I’d stop by to talk.

West Los Angeles is full of pretentious nincompoops, the kind who pass you on a double yellow to beat you to a stoplight a tenth of a mile away, who polish their fairly expensive cars under the blazing sun, who report their neighbors — anonymously — for building code violations or even for playing a baseball game too loudly on the radio. Mary and I would laugh over the neighbor who sued her because a tree fell and damaged a fence.

Sometimes Jane would ask me to help with some simple task, like moving a bureau. I was stronger than either of them. But as Mary had aged, they’d come out less frequently to their patio. Walking my dog in the twilight these days, I rarely smelled cigarette smoke or heard that husky laughter.

On the day of the eclipse, I took some pictures. Mary came out to look through our homemade box viewer in her pajamas, the same giraffe pattern she seems to wear all the time these days. Her hair is increasingly thin over her scalp, as the photos show. But there she was with us, and I’m really glad I have a record of that. There she was.

My wife pointed out that the next eclipse will be in 2044, and she hopes we’re all here to see it. Mary said she hopes so too. Her daughter put an arm around her. Jane, too, is getting old, and the muscles in her arm sagged under the strange eclipse-day light.

It may well be that neither of them sees the next eclipse. It may turn out that none of us do. But there we stood under the half light, marveling at a phenomenon that really is little different than somebody standing up in front of you at a show so you yell “down in front!” or the celestial version of some idiot racing to beat you to the stoplight. We promised to see each other again soon, and to be sure to greet each other at the next eclipse. Here was this little group of people, all of us mere people, gathered to take note of an astronomical coincidence. It was such a small group, so frail, but paying attention