When I was in the fourth grade, my math teacher, his name was Mr. Hauser, called my mother to come into a conference. It was always my mother who went to these conferences, my father was not interested in my schoolwork although he was always bitterly disappointed in me as a student. He felt I had potential, he said, the parental kiss of death.

According to my mother, Mr. Hauser broke down and cried when he informed her that I was going to have to be held back yet another time because I seemed unable to grasp or  learn math or long division or the multiplication tables. He said he had tried everything, but had given up hope, and he wanted her to know that. That was not the only conference she attended that year or in many other years. Today I would have been tested and drugged right away and sent to a special class.

My mother said she patted him on the hand and told him she understood I was a willful and independent child, but she said I was not like the other children, and she had come to terms with it, and she suggested that he try to do the same thing.  She said she felt sorry for the poor man.

I don’t really remember what happened next, but I still can’t do long division or multiplication. I feel badly for him too.

The second time someone told me I was not like the other children was when our class went on our first Whale Watch off the coast of Newport, R.I. Everyone was absolutely thrilled at the sight of our first sperm whale, that is, everyone but me.I thought it was pretty boring to sail for hours to see this giant mattress spouting water and floating on the surface.

I just didn’t get why people were so excited about it, the whale didn’t do much but swim and spew some water. And he was hardly graceful or exotic. When my teacher asked me what was wrong, why wasn’t I jumping up and down like the other kids, I just told her there was something wrong with me, I wasn’t like the other children, I didn’t much care for the whale watch.

I love nature and live in nature, and am married to a pagan who would live naked in the woods if she could, and who cries over sick plants and trapped spiders. But I don’t like Whale Watches much and cannot imagine camping on the hard ground.

She knows I am not like the other children, or like the other adults either, but she has chosen to love me anyway, poor thing.

I was reminded of this today when I went to the Mansion to watch the eclipse with the residents there. To prepare, I even read Annie Dillard’s classic essay, published in 1982, titled “Total Eclipse,” it has thrilled millions of readers, including me.  In this legendary work of non-fiction, Dillard wrote “seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”

So now, a chance for me to get excited about a total eclipse, even though I could only see a partial one in my upstate New York town. I could watch the
“totalitiy” of the eclipse on TV or on the Internet, it was being streamed all over the place.

The staff of the Mansion was doing heroic work  trying to get the residents excited about the eclipse, the TV had been turned on hours earlier, each resident personally invited and encouraged to attend.

It was not going well when Red and I arrived. People looked grim and detached, many were not watching at all. A  number of the residents expressed much more joy and excitement about seeing the dog than watching the eclipse – total in some parts of the country – on the big screen.

Mostly, the residents were stone-faced. One staffer came in to open up the curtains and point to the sky with great enthusiams: “look, look,” she shouted, “you can see the light dimming a bit. Can you believe it. ” One of the residents who had been petting  Red turned to the woman sitting next to her and said in a loud whisper, “has she been tested?”

I wanted to give the staffer a decoration for trying so hard.

I think I shared the feeling of the residents that this much ballyhooed and hyped fussing over the eclipse somehow eluded me, I was not excited, nor was I over come with wonder as were so many people on TV. The programs reminded me of the forced joviality I used to watch on New Year’s  Eve from Times Square, this kind of studied and manufactured merriment that left me scratching my head wondering what was wrong with me.

The Mansion staff is nothing short of heroic when it comes to activities – there is always something going on – but the eclipse just seemed to go right over the head of the residents. I asked one of them if she was bored, and she shrugged and said she didn’t wish to be ungrateful – she loved the staff for the way they loved her – but she wasn’t sure what this had to do with her or her life.

Besides, she said, the sun was moving very slowly, they had been sitting in front of the TV for an  hour, and nothing much had happened other than a baseball game in South Carolina had gone dark for a few minutes. “Is that important?,” she asked me.

Well, I said, it is to a lot of people, it either hits you or it doesn’t. A woman I know well posted a message on her Facebook Page saying the eclipse was almost certainly responsible for the violence in Charlottesville last weekend. It would never have happened without the eclipse, which is known, she said, to greatly affect human behavior. Hmmm, I thought, perhaps i didn’t belong there.

I think the Mansion is a reality check in some ways for me.

It is so hard to put myself inside the heads of these people, as often as I see them, they live in a different world than me.

Why should they care about the total eclipse that had transfixed so many millions of people? What did it have to do with them and their lives?

The experience of aging is primal, life reduces one to a kind of evolving narcissism, especially when people are removed from the world and everything they have ever known and loved.  And when something hurts every day and their bodies are stuffed with medicines that cloud their heads.

I remember when I taught my story-telling class, this same group was excited and eager to participate, their eyes were gleaming, their hands were raised, no one asked why their stories were important. Their stories were their testimony, they had everything to do with them.

“I’m tired,” one resident said, “whether the sun comes out or not, I need to go to my room and lie down before dinner.” And she got up and using her walker, limped out of the room. Peggie called me over to her, gave me a great big hug and whispered that tomorrow was her birthday. How wonderful, I said, what would you like for a present? She smiled, “I like stuffed animals,” she said.

That was  a lesson for me, one I have seen and felt before. It was up to me to go where they are, not to ask them to go where I am.  They taught me that in hospice, but it is hard to remember. You go where they are, the  teachers said over and over again. Not where you are.

And what can we offer them, really, but our world, given that we have removed them from theirs?

It is possible to do that, and that, I think, is the challenge of this kind of work. I didn’t push anyone to get excited about the eclipse, and neither did the staff.

Beyond that, here I was once again in my life, feeling very different from the other children outside of this room, but very similar to the ones inside of it. There is surely a connection there, a bunch of lost children, some child-like and living apart from the world. There are more lessons in that, but I will have to think about them.

Red and I left the Mansion as the eclipse ended, we went straight to the Battenkill Book store where I bought Peggie a stuffed panda and a hand puppet in the shape of a dog. I’ll bring it to her tomorrow. It will matter.