The best outfit of the day was worn by a man in an astronaut’s jumpsuit done up in Cleveland Browns orange, with the word “Brownstronaut” across the back.
The best animal of the day was the perfect bald eagle at Cleveland’s Museum of Natural History, roosting high in his enclosure, taking in the morning sunlight and warmth, heedless of the fact that the source of that light would, before the afternoon was out, be obscured.
The best quote of the day came from my 21-year-old, Paloma, as we gathered with thousands of others on the lawn of the Great Lakes Science Center, when she turned to me and said, simply, “Thank you.” (She also said, “This was so worth missing class for,” though that one moved me less.)
Paloma and I were just two of an estimated one million people who flocked to northeastern Ohio for the Women’s Final Four games of the NCAA basketball tournament, opening day for Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Guardians, and—much more transcendently—the total eclipse of the sun, which began at 1:59 PM EDT and reached totality at 3:13 PM EDT.
Read More: Why Your Head and Eyes Hurt After Viewing the Eclipse
“Look at ‘er go,” called out one woman in the crowd as the moon took steadily bigger bites out of the sun.
“I literally have a tear,” said someone else.
A DJ outside of Nuevo Modern Mexican & Tequila Bar was playing thumping hip-hop music up until the moment of totality, when he switched to a gentle cover of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” Cleveland Browns Stadium, hard up against the Science Center lawn, was plunged into darkness. Titan, a four-year-old miniature poodle, yapped in the quiet and the gloaming.
“He does this when he wants people in a crowd to notice him,” said Ashwani Sharma, 31, a software engineer for Chipotle, as he pulled Titan close.
Sharma and his friend, Simran Pripsingh, 31, a software engineer for JPMorgan Chase & Co., were working remotely in a coffee shop in Columbus, Ohio this morning, which…
