Who is the person who keeps flinging handfuls of cut-in-two lottery tickets on the streets of Albany's Pine Hills neighborhood? And how does this person think about karma and the arc of the moral universe?

There they were again as I pulled up to the curb, stirred by the breeze like a flock of tiny white birds at the intersection of West Lawrence Street and Park Avenue: another sheaf of lottery tickets, scissored down the middle and apparently tossed into the air just recently by some passing motorist — the same passing motorist, one would have to conclude, who had been doing the same thing at various points around the Pine Hills for the past few months.

The lotto-flinger had struck again. But who was it? And why? And could we be absolutely certain that none of these tickets were winners?

With or without the antics of the lotto-flinger, these have been anxious weeks in the neighborhood I've called home for more than two decades. The CVS on the corner of Madison and South Main closed down last fall, and the Madison Theatre two doors down from it went dark in February. In between those two developments came the far more consequential news that The College of Saint Rose would be closing a few weeks after bidding farewell to the class of 2024; that ceremony takes place next weekend.

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