Handshake with the Cosmos
A story of two universities...LSU and Tulane. Their football teams played each other in Louisiana’s very first intercollegiate football game in November of 1893, when Tulane’s Green Wave beat the LSU Tigers 34-0. So began one of the biggest sports rivalries in state history. From that year on these two teams played each other every year on Thanksgiving Saturday. After some time LSU became the perennial winner. In fact, the LSU lopsided dominance was so guaranteed and taken-for-granted that Tulane became a joke in football. It became so bad and humiliating that there was even talk of disbanding Tulane’s sports department.
Fast forward to 1981, a time of historically valid assumptions--primarily the foregone conclusion that Tulane would again, as it always had, lose in disgrace to LSU. History, however, recorded a decidedly embarrassing and different outcome that day for LSU. To everyone’s surprise, Tulane took an early lead and never looked back, beating the over-confident LSU soundly.
The sky fell. The sports enthusiasts were stunned. Athletics convulsed. The LSU student body died a symbolic death. There were demands for heads to roll.
Tulane, on the other hand, celebrated like a Moon landing, New Year’s Eve, Fourth of July, Mardi Gras, and VE day all rolled into one. Uptown New Orleans spilled onto Bourbon St. later into the evening. About nine months later, it turned out, there was a demonstrable uptick in the number of births in the New Orleans area. Phil Johnston, news director for WWL-TV, predicted this surge in births to come. He concluded his editorial the evening of the rout—and I don’t recall the exact words—but, ever-so-eloquent as he was, he said something like, “…and when your life is done and you are received into the cosmos, are called upon to report on the relevance of your life to all of creation, and are asked why you existed—to what significance, you can simply answer, ‘Because Tulane beat LSU, 48-7.’”
On August 21, 2017, I was lucky enough to witness the total solar eclipse—my first one. It was at the beautiful site of Crestview Funeral Gardens in Gallatin, Tennessee. Being as seeing an eclipse was on my bucket list, I thought the graveyard site appropriate. Now that I've checked it off, I can say with authority that that a partial eclipse is nothing compared to one that’s total. The Sun's corona was beautiful, the dusk around 360 degrees of horizon was a warm embrace. The dark of the moon was the blackest black I've ever seen--like looking into an infinite tunnel of forever.
It was surreal, and the best I can say in describing how I felt during those 2 minutes and 39 seconds is that I felt a perspective of myself within the universe. No, my life didn’t change, and I didn’t necessarily wax theological, but I did feel the handshake between my mortal self and Creation, my camaraderie with the cosmos. And during totality, even though I sensed how speck-like I am, I also felt the welcoming warmth of belonging to everything there is. So is that considered life-changing? I don’t think so, but I do carry on my life as part of the universe. How long will that feeling last? Until the re-clipse in 2024? Stay tuned. I’ll report back.
The relevance to where I fit in, however, cannot be separated from what I am, a brief visitor on the timeline between birth and death, connected to past generations by only an umbilical cord, and rolling out others to follow with the same cords, into the future. While it is touted that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, the simple fact is that everyone is from Earth, a planet with just the right-sized moon, orbiting at just the right distance, as part of a star system whose star is just the right distance away, to perfectly allow for just the right blocking of sunlight onto us from time to time.
It is a wink and a nod from the cosmos that we are noticed.
A simple shadow makes our births seem worthwhile and our lives important—certainly more significant than a 41-point spread that I’m sure changed some bookies’ lives.