Just two old men, talking to the lunar eclipse

My next-door neighbor Steve and I watched the total lunar eclipse together in downtown Raleigh last night.

Actually, I was trying to catch glimpses of it through the low-hanging clouds and Steve came tapping up the sidewalk with his red-and-white-striped cane. So we just naturally started talking about why I was out there.

A song my elder son once enjoyed was on earworm repeat-play in my right year: "Total Eclipse of the Heart:" sung by Bonnie Tyler with Rick Derringer on the guitar and Roy Bittan on the piano.

We unlimbered the binoculars to compensate for Steve's functional blindness.

I let him know when there was a hole in the clouds through which we could see the processing eclipse and, as the eclipse dimmed the moon, helped him reacquire the image.

We were standing in a downtown parking lot at the intersection of two busy, four-lane streets, pointing at the sky through the glare of streetlights and marveling together about the progressively revealed wonders of the eclipse as it danced amid the silver filigree of framing clouds.

For unspoken reasons, others paused to join us in marveling at the nighttime sky, although I was barely aware of most of them as they came and went. They were almost as silent as passing ghosts, but I did answer questions for a red-haired neighbor and her boyfriend.

"My father told me about this," she said, among other things.

"My friend Johnny Horn tells me there won't be another lunar eclipse visible here until 2010," I responded, my mind on how thoughtful her father was. (Maybe I should have said the next total eclipse will be at 3 a.m. , December 21, 2010.)

Someone in a grey Buick pulled into the parking lot, car lights off, careful of their engine noise. Steve lent them his field glasses for a moment and we chatted briefly about his food delivery business.

Just two old men, staring at the sky and talking perhaps a little too loud together, accidentally attracting passersby to join them in marveling at the astronomical event which played hide-and-seek overhead.