The Eclipse

My wife gets up very early in the morning for work (around 4:45am) when it is still quite dark. One morning, she stirs me from slumber and gets me out of bed to see the lunar eclipse. In what would be mistaken as a drunken stupor, I stumble with half-glazed eyes to the bedroom window.

"There it is!" she exclaims in a high-pitched voice of excitement. She is trying to have me look out into space. Heck, I can't even make out the clock face 5" away without my contacts in.

"Isn't it magical!" she coos. "Breath-taking," I respond.

"W-A-Y-Y-N-N-E!!! You're not even looking in the right direction! It over there!"

I look out the window and see but a sliver of lighted fuzz. With 20/400+ vision, there's not much to see. "Wow!" I say. "You can hardly see the moon." (in my case, that was true).

"That's not the moon, that's the streetlight!" she says. "It's over there!" as she points in the opposite direction.

I decided to be honest. "I can't see a thing without my contacts on."

"Well get them on and hurry!" she responds.

Have you ever tried putting contacts in sleepy eyes that are nearly 'glued' shut. Not a pretty site. "Hurry!" she commands.

Finally, I manage to get those crater-size discs into my eyes, to which I squint and react negatively. "Owwww!" I cry out. My eyes well up with tears. "Hurry!" she reiterates.

Finally, in pain and only half-blind by now, stumbling over every obstacle in the darkened room, I manage to make it to the window.

"Ahhhhhhhhh," she laments. "Clouds have completely covered the moon."

She continues as she walks out of the room, "Oh well, maybe you can catch the next lunar eclipse in 2014."

The door closes behind her as she whisks away down the hall. I'm left standing, in the dark, tears dripping from blood-shot eyes, dressed modestly in my robe….all alone….

"Magical," I mutter as I climb back into the bed. "Just magical."