Skip the eclipse. Or don’t.

“Turkey in the Straw” is a terrible song. Grating, plodding, particularly when plinked out on a toy piano. It’s also an old minstrel tune, to add an extra layer of offensiveness.

And yet it moves me. In summertime, as I hear the sound, or, even worse, “Pop Goes the Weasel,” dopplering toward me, and some powerful primal urge makes me want to grab money — well, really run to my mother and beg her to give me 50 cents, but that isn’t a possibility — then rush outside to buy a Blue Ribbon Chocolate Eclair bar from the ice cream truck. You have to hurry, or you’re going to miss it. By the time you hear the music, your chance is already passing by. I don’t even like Chocolate Eclair bars, not being eight anymore. No matter. Now is the moment to act.

I call that reaction — the urge to grab something you don’t even want because your window of opportunity is limited —”The Ice Cream Truck Reflex,” and it’s a useful term to remember when confronting any rare, fleeting event, such as this damn solar eclipse Monday afternoon, which I am hoping to muster the strength to avoid, and I am giving you permission to miss, too.

First, been there, done that. In August 2017 I drove down to Carbondale — with my entire family in tow — and occupied a spartan dorm room at Schneider Hall, which Southern Illinois University charged us $800 to occupy in classic soak-the-strangers fashion. (A bargain, actually. The Carbondale Holiday Inn charged $550 a night). For the big moment, we jammed into Saluki Stadium — along with 14,000 other dupes — and kudos for SIU contriving to charge visitors $25 for the privilege of watching what they could see just as well for free by standing in the parking lot and looking up.

Or not see. The day was cloudy. Though that, too, built up the tension, released during the 10 seconds or so when the clouds parted and we actually eyeballed the eclipse. What was it like? “Hot, sweaty, exciting to see bite out of r. side of sun,” I noted in my journal. “V. dramatic.”

Was it worth three days? Plus that $800 dorm room, and the other expenses (paid for by the paper, true, but I was still offended, on its behalf).

Almost anything you do with your family is by definition worthwhile. A lot changes in seven years — I’d drive back to Carbondale right now for three days if, through some magic, the boys could be unchained from their respective legal oars and lured back home. The fact that something noteworthy might occur in the sky would just be icing on the cake.

So why not look now? Being safety conscious, I’m worried about blinding myself. A partial eclipse, such as that seen in the Chicago area, even for a few seconds can permanently damage your eyesight. If your eclipse glasses are a cheap knock-off, you can burn your retinas. Is a momentary marvel worth the risk of harming your eyesight forever?

A marvel that really isn’t that marvelous when you think about it. Just as a Blue Bonnet Chocolate Eclair doesn’t come close to a bowl of real ice cream that can be bought any time at the Graeter’s two blocks away, so a solar eclipse isn’t nearly as spectacular as a good sunset. It’s just rare.

Rare can be good. Fifty years ago, I made a point to step outside my house to see Comet Kohoutek, a big deal in 1973. The thing itself was almost nothing — a faint streak of light. But I saw it, or thought I saw it, and to this day remember standing there, by the sliding glass door in the rec room my father built with his own hands at the back of our suburban ranch house, gazing up at the night sky.

Does an eclipse matter? It does if we say it does. The boys are gone. My wife will be downtown Monday, at work. Maybe that’s the trouble: There is something sad about witnessing a marvel alone. So I won’t. Unless I do. Grab a cereal box at 2 p.m. — totality in Chicago is at 2:07 p.m. — quickly construct a pinhole viewer and rush into the front yard to see the crescent shadow wax and wane, secondary and solitary and threadbare though the experience might be. Pretend it matters. Maybe there will be a neighbor or two in the street, and we can jawbone while waiting for the celestial spheres to align. You never know unless you go find out.