Shooting Stars

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Every 33 years, Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle makes its closest approach to the sun; it is one of a handful of comets that can be seen more than once in a person’s life. Tempel-Tuttle’s most recent visit to the inner solar system was in March 1998.

As each comet approaches the sun, the energy from our star burns off material from the comet, creating the famous bright appearance and cosmically long tail that we see with every comet (these phenomena are on display this week with the approach of Comet ISON). This material, mostly particles the size of grains of sand, is left behind in space. Every time Comet Tempel-Tuttle starts its disintegration, the process happens at around the distance of earth’s orbit, so a cloud of dust is left behind for us to crash through every year. This is the Leonid meteor shower. Every November 18 or so, we cross through a cloud of what had been the comet’s tail in some previous visit.

From ‘earthsky.org’

Even better, every third visit or so, Comet Tempel-Tuttle intersects our orbit so closely to where the earth actually is at the time that the cloud of debris is thick enough to make the Leonid meteor shower particularly spectacular. The woodcuts at right depict the 1833 Leonid meteor “storm,” which contemporaries reported produced 100,000 meteors per hour. The comet’s last visit, in 1998, was not one of those close-by visits, and we are now just about midway till our next encounter, so this year’s Leonids will produce maybe 10 to 15 shooting stars per hour, which is still 10 to 15 more per hour than one sees most nights.

This year, this weekend, there are other bright nighttime visitors–a full moon and the aforementioned Comet ISON, which is now bright enough to be seen without aid–but the Leonids are always my meteor shower. This is because November 18 is my birthday. If you see a shooting star this weekend, thanks for noticing something that is coming in third on most lists of things to look for in the night sky–my personal shooting stars.

* * * *

We did not own a telescope when I was a child and I do not remember if either my sister or I ever expressed an interest in possessing one, but my parents considered each occasional celestial phenomena the cause of a family outing. I remember this with great fondness now, which I think was something our mother would tell my sister and me when we were swaddled in the back of our station wagon, wondering why we were outside at this horrible hour just to look at the sky.

“You will remember nights like this,” Mom would say with a smile. “You won’t remember whether you got a full night’s sleep tonight years from now, but you’ll remember seeing” the Perseids or the Leonids or a lunar eclipse, sometimes partial, sometimes total. I think I remember the lunar eclipses particularly well because they are action-packed compared to patiently awaiting a shooting star, and because they end. There is no natural point of departing during a meteor shower, other than when the hot chocolate gets cold. (And then we would return home and I would discover while lying in bed that I already missed being outside in the cold, staring at the sky.)

Our parents did not send us to bed expecting to be awakened a few hours later to drive into the country, so each night-sky outing was its own event and seemed to be sprung on us as a new thing. They are not scientifically-inclined, either, so what we were looking at and for was always mysterious, beautiful, an unexpected gift.

My dad would drive the station wagon to whatever local high point away from the lights that he could find (hard to do in suburban Poughkeepsie). One of our local schools had a parking lot that sufficed, especially for the eclipses.

It was in adulthood that I discovered the appeal of wandering out into a field with a beloved and staring at the deep Ulster County country sky and keeping warm together while the hot chocolate went cold. Especially in November, “for my birthday.”

Last night, my current beloved–who I think will be my current beloved for a very long time–and I walked the Walkway Across the Hudson, which is open at night for every full moon. We looked at the sky, kept each other warm, and because I am not scientifically-inclined, everything was mysterious, beautiful, an unexpected gift.

Against Casinos

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I love casinos–the air of excitement heightened by the oft-rumored, never confirmed, super-rich, extra-oxygenated air in them–and I love my memories of random camaraderie generated at the card tables and my many stories of money won and money spent by me and my friends:

  • There was that time John and I found one single quarter on the floor of his car after a night of non-winning gambling, played it, and remained in the casino for hours after on that one quarter’s winnings.
  • Or there was the night two friends and I played “Commie Slots,” a game of our own devising, and won big and shared the winnings, as per the name of the game. (In “Commie Slots,” we pool our resources, split them into equal portions, venture off to our individual machines, play through that portion, reconvene, and collect the winnings. If one player has spent through his part and has little or nothing left but another has hit big, well, we signed a communist deal, and “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”) One night, I was the low man, and my friend, John again, hit for $1000, which we dutifully split three ways.
  • There was that late night at a roulette table with a guy who truly believed in the mathematics behind his roulette bets–there is no math behind roulette, no secret book to study–but whose every bet hit for an extended run, as if his belief in his scheme provided sufficient cosmic energy to make it true. We shared the success in his run by joining him in his bets, building multicolored pillars of chips on certain numbers. We pounded on each other’s backs.

There were other nights and days, though, too. Unhappy memories:

  • There was a hungover summer afternoon when I was unemployed in Iowa and hanging out with a middle-aged barfly named Harry who claimed to have been screwed over for song royalties by every major rock songwriter–and he had somewhat believable … okay, plausible … stories about how he got screwed … um, okay, scenarios plausible to drunken ears hanging out late at night in a wood-paneled bar with desk lamps on it for illumination. We drove to Meskwaki Casino in Tama, Iowa, an hour-long drive, to try to turn our fortunes around and left after perhaps two hours, our fortunes unmoved by our joint efforts. There were only slot machines there, and Harry was no Commie.
  • And there were nights when my stake was exhausted far earlier than anyone else’s, and any handouts from my “comrades” did not reverse the night’s seeming intention for me to learn a lesson while I waited for the others to finish.

* * * *

My enjoyment of gambling is mostly limited to casinos (I did play a lot of Quick Draw for a while, long in the past), and those trips to casinos have always been special to me: long drives with my close friends to an exciting, foreign atmosphere, encounters with fellow travelers at the tables, and an understanding that since I am not a wealthy man, my enjoyment of the games would be enhanced by understanding what I could afford. At times, I have traveled to a casino with fifty dollars in my pockets and had a great fun run with that. At other times, when I have forgotten my simple rule, I have burned through several hundred dollars rather quickly, and I remember the desperate shame and hope placed with those final bets, desperate that a big win will restore order in my universe, either at a table or in a slot machine, only to see the gamble turn up empty.

That was my mindset in the not-so-epic drive to Tama–when I was unemployed, living in a part of the country where I knew no one even after four-plus years there–that I was traveling there to make some needed money. To earn some money. The cosmos wouldn’t punish me further, would it? Empty, desperate, shame and hope. It wasn’t a punishment, not from the cosmos, anyway. 

Gambling is not a way to make money; it is a sometimes exceedingly fun way to spend money. But a lot of money is there, and money sometimes comes when you need it most, which is when you least expect it, as the saying goes.

That is why I have always been opposed to casinos being located in an urban area, or near a residential area, unless that urban area is, well, Las Vegas or Atlantic City. When it is a fun trip, made with a budget that includes gas money and food, I truly love the experience. Right now, I am a man on a limited, fixed income. There are no casino trips in my future. Fifty dollars is food money for a week.

In my current mood of needing money, needing quick money, the thought of buying a scratch-off has crossed my mind. I will admit that. The scratch-off, the cardboard version of a slot machine. If there was a slot machine in New Paltz, or one a cheap local bus fare away, mightn’t I try to make the opportunity to give the universe a chance to shine some luck on me? Why mightn’t I? I’ve been living the right kind of life lately, haven’t I? Luck be a pally, tonight.

For many people, my current experience of poverty feels empty and desperate; life’s a gamble, anyway. For many people, scratch-offs and slot machines love taking hope one quarter at a time.

* * * *

In the mid-1990s, I wrote for a newspaper in Sullivan County, NY, and one of the larger issues the population of that rural county faced at the time was casino gambling. The St. Regis Mohawk tribe, not a tribe indigenous to Sullivan County–in fact its home is based closer to Montreal than Albany–had developed an interest in operating a casino as a way of raising revenues for itself. Through many convoluted real estate negotiations that took place over many years, the tribe attempted to open a casino at Monticello Raceway, taking advantage of the fact that there was legal gambling there already. I was a part of the coverage of some of those convoluted negotiations and I hated every part of it.

Sullivan County is a mostly rural region of great natural beauty and a history that includes many, many vacation resorts (the “Borscht Belt”), which have all closed. It is an impoverished part of the state and its residents have seen casino salesmen pass through like Harold Hill for almost 40 years, salesmen who see closed hotels already in place for new hotels to occupy. 

(Ultimately, a “racino” was opened at the Raceway, long after I had moved out of the county. The St. Regis tribe still does not own or operate a casino in the county; the company that owns the Monticello Raceway and Casino only owns that one casino, in which the only games are slot machines.)

Our letters to the editor section was often occupied by tit-for-tat missives between Lee Karr (an anti-casino activist) and the late Noel Van Swol (a pro-casino activist, and, later, a pro-fracking activist).

I learned back then that pro-casino advocates always come armed with “facts about the future,” numbers and very specific dollar amounts (the current Proposition 1, on the November 5 ballot, will bring “$51.0 million per year to the Catskill Region”) reflecting the good the casino will create in the local community. But the numbers about the future, solid-sounding numbers with respectable decimal points and the whiff of reality, are never accompanied by financial figures from cities and communities that actually have casinos. I have yet to see what the real numbers look like in those communities to compare them to what was promised as real future numbers once upon a time.

Oh, but the anti-casino advocates don’t bring numbers about community economic impacts, they write like I did in my personal anecdotes above: about real real-life, present-day anecdotes and true, individual economic impacts.

Thus, one side looks like it is armed with hard facts and the other with mushy feelings and stories about individual people; one speaks of the community as a whole and its future plans with math and actuarial tables about a casino’s economic impact, both if it is built and if it is not, while the other, well, how can you reduce an entire community’s mathematical future to one poor schlub’s bad gambling addiction? We’ll make sure there are plenty of signs up in the casino with 800 numbers offering help.

The pro-casino advocates often remind me of the guy I met long ago at the roulette wheel, the fellow who believed he had a system for a game that is truly system-less. The anti-casino advocates only have the facts of our stories. 

I will happily vote no on Proposition 1 tomorrow.

 

Red Sox Nation in My Living Room

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I am a life-long New York Yankees fan, and I am okay with this. (The first step is admitting powerlessness and that life has become unmanageable.) The eternal American desire to root for an underdog or even a lovable loser–the Cubs, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Red Sox until 2004–did not pass me by, even as a fan of the Yankees; this is because when I was growing up in the 1970s, the Yankees gave fans two of the team’s extended stretches of losing: in the early 1970s, when the team was owned by CBS, and then again in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the team’s owner repeatedly fired managers, signed second-rate free agents to two-year contracts only to see them under-perform in both seasons, or traded young talent for older “talent.” 

My team, which I admit had also shown me some success before I was a teenager–three World Series in a row in the ’70s–was not a “lovable loser,” it was a laughingstock by the early ’90s, and I took a perverse pride in this. “Now I know,” I said to no one ever, “What it is like to root for heartbreak.” Of course, seeing multiple World Series trophies held aloft by various pinstriped “heroes” before and after that dark Stump Merrill-Bucky Dent-Dallas Green era puts my rooting for a laughingstock of a team in perspective: the trophies that starting arriving after 1996 were readily, happily seen as a deserved reward for living through those few tough years. But when Don Mattingly is one’s favorite player and he is the one major Yankee in history to have to buy a ticket to see a World Series game, well, let’s just say I was defensively proud of having stood by those sickeningly bad teams. I like knowing what it is like to root for a heartbreaking team (or thinking that I do) and having sympathy for the “lovable loser” teams; it turns out I like rooting for a juggernaut team even more, though.


My dad in a recent photo.

My father is a New Englander, a Vermonter who now lives on Cape Cod, where New England gazes longingly towards old England. He comes by his rooting for the Boston Red Sox (argh and double-argh!) as honestly as he can, and I do not love him the less for it, nor do I think he ever resented me, his only son, for being a Yankee fan. (Maybe all that family role-play therapy that we never really participated in was worth it, after all.)

He is one of those Red Sox fans for whom 2004 was created: born in 1935, he probably listened to the 1946 team’s World Series loss on the radio, and saw the 1967 and 1975 losses on television. All of them legendary, seven-game World Series, but all losses followed by decade-long postseason droughts.

In 1986, I was almost 18, a college freshman living at home, and another legendary Red Sox World Series was unfolding, this time against the other New York team, the Mets. My sole memory of Game 6 and Mookie Wilson’s slow game-ending dribbler through Bill Buckner’s legs is that I was standing behind my dad, who was sitting in his favorite armchair. When the play unfolded, I saw my dad’s shoulders react. A stoic man by nature, my dad simply silently shuddered, like an evil thought had passed through his mind and he had urgently worked to dismiss it; I am glad to this day that I did not see his face. He stood and said something about one more game in a way that exhibited no confidence and then went to bed.

Eighteen years later, in the fall of 2004, my life had taken a dip in fortune and I was once again living at home with my parents, now residing on Cape Cod. The Red Sox had already done the unthinkable and unforgivable in the postseason and defeated my team in the Championship Series. But when the Red Sox won it all that memorable season, I can say that I was proud to be the son who was with his dad when his beloved lovable loser team finally broke through and he was able to enjoy a championship for the first time in his life.

He has now enjoyed two more to my team’s one more, earned in 2009, and I think this is quite enough.

The article I link to here, from The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/), considers the existential irony that recent Red Sox history presents the world: that young Red Sox fans have known a very successful team, winner or three World Series in a decade, while fans of my father’s generation still carry the spiritual wound (at first, I wrote that as a minor joke, but I realize it’s only half tongue-in-cheek) … still carry the wary style of love learned from rooting for a lovable loser team for 86 years.

A Tale of Two Red Sox Nations