There was a total solar eclipse in North America on Monday, February 26, 1979.

Somehow, before the Internet was an everyday household thing that consumed the lives of everyone, everywhere, people (including five-year-olds) learned information about things, including solar eclipses. For my five-year-old self, at the time, I am assuming that I learned about the eclipse from television because the television was on almost all the time at my house. I do not think that Miss White, my kindergarten teacher, said anything to us about the solar eclipse.

As I have mentioned before, I am from Schenectady, which was not in the path of totality but which had a partial eclipse. I remember very serious and important warnings about the dangers of the eclipse. Do not look at the eclipse! The eclipse can ruin your eyes forever! There were instructions for building magical eclipse-watching boxes. I did not understand at all how these boxes might work. (I was five. It would not be until six years later at SAAC camp that Mr. Williams would turn his classroom into a pinhole camera that I would understand the concept. Ten more years later, I turned the bunkroom at Panarchy into a pinhole camera for one of our daytime open-house parties.) Keep in mind that 1979 was before you could buy eclipse glasses on the internet. It was hard to buy weird things.

I don’t remember any people who I actually knew talking to me about this important but dangerous and vision-destroying eclipse. My construction of this event must have come entirely from watching television and listening to the radio. Maybe I read something in the newspaper? Do five-year-olds read the newspaper? I also don’t remember anyone mentioning the eclipse on the day that it happened. It likely would have started when I was at school and finished up after I came home. If you’ve ever lived in upstate NY during the winter, you know why no one cared much about this partial eclipse. It was completely and totally overcast that day. I don’t even need to look up the weather archives to tell you that.

Several days or weeks after the eclipse of February 26, 1979, I saw a weird crescent-shaped feature in the lower part of my field of vision, just left of center. It was a color that I call greenpurple. I immediately decided that I had destroyed my vision in the eclipse. I knew that I couldn’t tell anyone, as they would be furious. The spot went away fairly soon after it appeared. It would come back from time to time over the years. I still think of it as the eclipse-spot.

It was not until over thirty years later that it finally dawned on me that I experience migraine with aura.