Look Up!

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” ask Mrs. Glowicz, our first grade teacher.

Several answers spring up from the boys. Policeman! Cowboy! Fireman! The girls nearly said all the same thing, “a Mom!” Don't forget this is 1969, the women's movement hadn't really taken off yet. By sixth grade in five years time, most of those girls wanted something else.

I said, “Astronaut!” Mrs. Glowicz looked at me oddly. Of course being the kid I was, I wasn't going to go along with the crowd. I swear I had the gene for that and not from some conscious effort to be “different.” Again, it's 1969 and NASA were landing men on the moon and Apollo was always in the news. At six, you can't really understand Walter Cronkite but you see the blurry black and white film of men bouncing like balls on the moon, I thought that was magical. I'd go out in the yard at night with my brother and we'd stare at the moon and I'd wonder “how the hell did they do it?”

My brother had received a cheapy telescope for Christmas that may have had a 10x power setting. We finally used it in the summer when the weather was warm enough. He aimed it at a crescent moon and he finally let me take a look. It was then I saw something that stunned me, the surface was textured in detail. The slanting sun rays showed off the craters, mountains and plains. This was a place.

Pointing it at Vega, one of those bright stars in summer, nearly directly overhead now, it shone like a white/blue diamond. It looked beautiful, pristine and pure. He also found Herschel's Garnet Star which is red as a ruby. That shocked me at most stars in the sky around light polluted Pawtucket had a slight green cast to them. Again, more detail and these hidden facts were uncovered for me. There had to be more to know.

It's that red. 

I went from wanting to be an astronaut to being an astronomer. That brought shitloads of ridicule from some of the parents around this neighborhood. The life of blue collar men around here was spent on finding money and newer ways of getting it. Anything that wasn't focused on that was deemed foolish.

The closer you are to the “street,” the more practical your decisions become because of the very real threat of not making the mortgage or rent that month. You aren't rich enough to be wasting time on silly things like art, music...astronomy. I didn't get it at six but I understand that now. No matter, I found out there were things far more interesting things than the usual goings on in Pawtucket and I remained interested in space. To avoid the rolling eyes and derision, I kept my thoughts to myself.

The problem with astronomy is that it's ALL mathematical. The problem with mathematics in the Pawtucket school system was that it was taught by math teachers. I have a theory about them now. I found many math teachers to be short tempered, impatient and incapable at translating their knowledge with any flair. I wondered about the general personality of people who go into math. It has to be right-brained enigneer-get-it-excatly-right-or-the-world-comes-to-an-end mindset. I found them to be ugly people. Granted, you have to have that kind of mind in order to pull off mathematical and engineering feats but as teachers...not so good. The one math teacher I had who was talented at it was Earl Simpson, his real name and the guy deserves credit. He could explain fractal geometry to kindergarten kids. I will speak in his defense should we show up at Heaven's Gates. I won't speak so kindly of Richard Pascucci, real name also. Him? I'll demand he be sent to the 9^th circle of Hell. I probably won't be the only one voting this way.

A typical scene in a Pawtucket math class as some kid is called to the blackboard to figure out a problem drawn on it by your usual math teacher...

“You got it WRONG! How MANY times do I HAVE to explain it to YOU people! It stands to REASON that the AB angle is 70 degrees and NOT 200!!”

We knew these guys hated us and teaching. This ill-treatment did not help us to learn math any better nor to love it. I came to hate most of my math classes. I managed to squeak by with most of them in order to pass. I once wrote down all my math teachers in a list. Besides that I wrote down the grade I probably got and whether I liked the teacher or not? I found out that the more I liked the teacher (and hence probably the more patient they were and better at teaching) my grades shot up to an A-

Gee..I guess my skills at math were dependent on the psychological stability of the teacher.

So, armed with my “just getting by” mathematical skills, I get a higher degree in college, which wasn't astronomy. I knew that kid's dream wasn't coming true so why aim for that when you need to hit the ground running with any intro course in physics. It would be entering Olympic Field and Sport of Astronomy and if you weren't ready, eat dirt kiddo! Add to that I found out the need for astronomers in the US was paltry. There were only a few slots available to begin with and a Master's degree was needed. Today? You really need more of a computer processing skill to be an astronomer and when you're not doing that you can be relegated as an astronomy professor earning less than $40,000 a year. Oh joy! I think there are just a tiny smattering of astronomers who made any cash from their field, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan come to mind. The rest of them work out of tiny offices at your universities and subsist on the same overcooked food their students eat in the same cafeteria

That doesn't mean I gave up my interest. I'm still fascinated by the absolutely weird stuff they keep discovering out there. It's more interesting than being stuck on 95 or cutting the lawn. To me, it's still entertainment. And the other day, they discovered a planet that's at the right distance from it's sun where liquid water can exist. Hello neighbors!

Today, if I wanted too, I could purchase one of those retail telescopes they have now vs. the shitty ones we had in 1969. Today's ones are giant CCD Cassegrain cameras that are connected to your desktop with all sorts of fun software. You can put the telescope in the backyard on a viciously cold January night, return to the warmth of your home and bring it all up on the computer...and scan the winter sky at your leisure, sipping Irish coffee. I'd probably be as stunned as that six year old I once was then too.