Venus, the morning star

Man, Venus owned the western sky this morning, looking as bright as it gets. And Orion owned the southern sky, reminding me of my poem about same.

In high school, I was one of a handful of teenagers accepted as a member of Harvard Observatory's AAVSO, the American Association of Variable Star Observers. I was assigned three variable stars to observe throughout the year, estimating their brightness and sending my results to the observatory. I did this religiously, frequently having to arise between midnight and four in the morning to make my observations. Other guys were chasing girls and swilling beer. I was at my telescope at 3 a.m., estimating a star's brightness.

In retrospect, this solitary experience shaped my comfort with solitude throughout my life. In fact, it was booze, discovered in the Army, more than anything else that made me highly social and when I quit drinking, I recaptured my earlier appreciation of solitude, so that today were it not for teaching, which gets me out of the house, I'd be damn near an urban hermit. This is an observation, not a complaint.

At the end of the year the AAVSO distributed a ranking of its members by number of observations. One year I was in the top three in California. The number one observer, during my membership, was always someone from Africa. I really liked doing this. I felt I was "making a contribution" to science, which in fact I was in my small way. It was enough. And the nice thing about it, unlike contributions to literary culture, the contribution was clear, quantifiable, unambiguously appreciated. Writers never get this kind of security.

I always expected to become an astronomer through high school. Then I learned that professional astronomers spend very little time actually looking through telescopes. End of that dream. I decided to become a "pure mathematician." I even published in Mathematics Magazine as a sophomore at Cal Tech, my first publication, about a new solution to an obscure number theory problem. But math is nothing if not clear and at Cal Tech I learned that, despite publishing so early, I really didn't have what it took to become a significant mathematician. I would've made a great math teacher, I think, but I also was living at home at the time, Cal Tech being in my home town of Pasadena, and it was time to break away and live on my own and discover myself. With a B average at Cal Tech, I transferred to Berkeley, broke my mother's heart, quickly went nuts at Berkeley and became a street person instead of a student, spent all my money, lived in a tree house, finally joined the Army and broke my mother's heart again (we were a Navy family), and in the Army my future life finally found early definition. It was quite a ride.

Hell, it still is quite a ride.