Ponies and postcards

Gazing across the racetrack at Yonkers Raceway on a clear Wednesday morning just north of New York City, I thought of my grandmother.
Which would have driven her nuts.
Before you conjure a mental image of an elderly, Polish woman chomping on a cigar and plunking down cash on the ponies, my grandmother hated racing — dogs, horses didn't matter.
Her disdain for the activity was passive. She politely read through Christmas cards from friends such nicknames as Spike and Toots talking about their days at the dog track. She sighed as she found another letter in the mailbox written from her oldest sister on a free postcard from the Florida horse track where my Great Aunt Stella and her husband vacationed. By the time Stella stopped making the seasonal trips, Grandma had a sizable stack in the chest where she kept family photos, newspaper clippings and baby books.
There was hushed talk of massive amounts of money won and lost over the course of an evening or weekend. And, over the years, an unspoken rule evolved that gambling at a track was just not done in our part of the family.
I’ve been to a handful of tracks in my life. I’ve never put a single bet down — first out of fear and now out of ignorance. Tracks are a foreign country with language, rules and etiquette I just can’t grasp.
There’s not a lot of crossover between who comes to play the slots and who puts money down on the dogs and horses that run. And, judging by those who were at each facility for the racing, it’s only a matter of a dozen years or so before the die-hard generation is gone.

Wednesday at Yonkers and a week ago at Twin River in Lincoln, R.I., I found myself gazing out toward the track with curiosity. A pal in Cleveland has offered to teach me a little about betting on horses and I might just take him up on that — mostly because it is a part of my job but also because it will remind me, however tangentially, of a era of cheek-squeezing, hard-fishing Polish great aunts and uncles now passed.