‘This is once in a lifetime’: A Lebanon grade-schooler remembers the total solar eclipse, 5 years later

Five years ago, Middle Tennesseans were able to witness one of the most miraculous kinds of celestial events: a total solar eclipse.

I had spent the day with a first-grade class at Carroll-Oakland School in Lebanon, where kids wore glow-in-the-dark T-shirts and had special lessons for eclipse day. They learned about the positions of the sun and the moon (and how they intersected at times) and had eclipse-themed activities.

It was all part of making the day both accessible and momentous, teacher Tammy Boothe had told me: “I wanted to find the experiments that we could do easily with 6- and 7-year-olds … to where they would really have a meaningful day that they would remember for a long time.”

Emily Siner WPLN News

Kids in Tammy Boothe’s first grade class had eclipse-themed activities on Aug. 21, 2017.

For Wyatt Erwin, one of the most enthusiastic first-graders I talked to on that day, it seemed to work. His memories of this otherwise random day in August are remarkably clear and abundant.

He remembers coming outside and seeing his parents, sister and grandmother. He remembers that his sister was too little to know what was going on; she got distracted by her iPad. He remembers the glow-in-the-dark shirts and the repeated warnings about wearing protective sunglasses.

“Another thing I remember is after it happened, everybody started freaking out because, like, this giant flock of buzzards or whatever they were came flying over,” he told me during a Zoom call last week.

At one point in our call, he even recited part of the story I produced that day back to me. “I actually do remember you pulling me out in the hallway, and we sat at that little lunch table where we would put our lunch boxes on, and then, we did an interview there,” he said.

At the time, Boothe told me this might be the first world event her students would remember. I’ve been thinking about this ever since. I love asking people about their earliest memory of a world event, and the answers are often a jarring tragedy: Kennedy’s assassination, the Challenger explosion, 9/11. For this next generation, it might be the pandemic.

But this event was so joyful. That seems really special for the kids in Wyatt’s class, I told him.

“Yeah, that’s the thing,” he mused. “For every 10 bad events in the world, there’s, like, one good one. And I’m guessing that was just one of the good ones.”

Wondering about solar eclipses? Another total eclipse will be visible in the U.S. on April 8, 2024. It goes through parts of Arkansas and Kentucky, but Middle Tennessee won’t be in the path of totality — nor will it be for any total eclipses this century. See a total list of eclipses here.