Astronomy and the Stuff You Find in the Street

Last  night I was at a township meeting, listening to some Wal-Mart dudes and some township supervisors wrangle over what hours might be acceptable for the Wal-Mart to get deliveries in. This was important for all concerned and to others as well for a variety of perfectly good reasons, and that's why I was there, but then the meeting was over and I went out, and saw Orion in the cold night sky, and my eye went up his foot, to his belt, to his upraised fist, and then my eye traveled up farther, and through the thin overcast I could just see a faint patch of light that I knew was the Pleiades.

It's like that all the time—you have the mundane and money-making, and the magical and mysterious, and how to balance them, well, I'm still working that out. Ignore one, starve the body, ignore the other, starve the soul. But all I know is, I care about the big picture—I noticed with approval recently that the Kepler spacecraft has found five definite planets outside the solar system in just a few months. I don't see how that will put a dime in my pocket or yours, but I like it.

But still, we live here on earth, that's what we've got the best access to, and frankly, I like checking out the street-level stuff. You often see shoes on the street and other places, if you're looking. And to me, that's kind of trippy. Who is losing all these shoes? Don't they notice when they've lost one? Most perplexing. I've also noticed that people are dropping little plastic dental floss holders all over the place. Are people flossing in public? A lot? I'm scratching my head over that. And then there was the witch's hat I found along the side of the road one day. Another puzzler.

But today I was walking home after dropping my car off to be serviced, and I was just looking around, and something caught my eye, so I stopped. It was a billiard ball, of all things. Why was it in the street, lodged by the curb? I suppose it's like asking why the planets and stars and galaxies are up there in the sky—they just are, and the reasons are beyond our ken. And that's all right with me. Curbstone or cosmos, pool balls or pulsars, I'm content just to scratch my head and wonder, and figure I'll never know the answer.