Your enemy

THE SUN

PART ONE

HELEN, 52

TRACEY,27

"They're my children. Adults or not, I just can't kick them out of the house. It would be cruel. And besides—they're great cooks."

I S

Back in the late 1970s, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny
I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Bran­
don, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of
the sun. I must have made a strange sight at my young age, being pencil
thin and practically albino, quietly checking into a TraveLodge motel
to spend the night alone, happily watching snowy network television
offerings and drinking glasses of water from glass tumblers that had been
washed and rewrapped in paper sheaths so many

times they looked like they had been sandpap-

ered. But the night soon ended, and come the

morning of the eclipse, I eschewed tour buses and

took civic bus transporta- tion to the edge of town.

There, I walked far down a dirt side road and into

a farmer's field — some sort of cereal that was

chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely—a mood of darkness and inevitability and fascination—a mood that surely must

have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.

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