Life goes on

By Bobby Neal Winters

We continue to exist in very real ways after we die. Very real ways.

I have finished digging my shed from the vines, residing it, and painting it.  I’ve even made a new door for it of which I am very proud.  I am now moving to the next phase which is building lean-tos on the sides.

I’ve been helped through the whole project by my father-in-law, Jim.  

This might surprise you. And there are a number of reasons for that.  You might figure that as I am in my (early) sixties my father-in-law must be at least in his eighties.  It is true that my father-in-law was born more than 80 years ago.  

You might be surprised because it is not necessarily typical that a man and his father-in-law would have a good working relationship.

But the primary reason one might be surprised is that Jim has been dead for almost eighteen years now.

That all having been said, how has my father-in-law helped me on this project?

Let me first say that he had a good relationship with his daughter--my wife--on whom he left a good impression.  Every married man (and I should say woman, too, modifying the words appropriately) is at the mercy of the job his in-laws did raising his wife.  In this, I will say I hit the jackpot with my in-laws.

In addition, I inherited some tools from Jim, and, as I progressed as a DIYer (do it yourselfer), I’ve gained a greater appreciation of him.  In finding my way through his tools, I’ve discovered that he had an incredibly ordered mind.  Everything was done with a purpose.

Jim was a farm boy.  He’d grown up on a dairy farm and had then run an orchard. He had that trait I’ve found typical of farmers in being able to do a lot of things.  If you are out on a farm, you can’t just call a repairman from the city every time something needs to be fixed. You have to learn to do it yourself.

He also knew how to get the most out of a dollar. Now I need to explain that phrase because it can be taken in different ways. There are people who are so tight-fisted with a dollar that they will make themselves and everyone in their family miserable.  They put on a hair-shirt and expect everyone else to wear it too.  That is not Jim.  Jim didn’t waste money. He knew how to use it in a way as to get maximal value from it.  When he gave you a gift, it wasn’t cheap junk: It was something that you would like; something you would use; something that would last.

I had been going to buy special siding to redo my shed with.  Then it was pointed out to me that Jim had used pine pickets.  After studying the issue, I determined that was the best choice for me as well.

What you do when you are working alone, you do differently than if you have someone working with you.  Working with 6-foot one-by-sixes is easier than horsing around 4-by-8 sheet goods.  Jim had worked alone just like I am and had figured it all out before me.

When it came to starting on the lean-to, I had the example of Jim’s.  I had gone through the process of looking through YouTube videos to see how to do it.  The problem with a lot of YouTube videos is that they are produced by a vendor who is trying to sell you a product.  They are often more interested in getting you to buy their product than in showing you how to do something in a way a guy (an old guy) can do working largely by himself.

As I was talking to my better-half about building the lean-to, she suggested that I look at Jim’s.  

I did.

What I discovered was that Jim had done it in what I would classify as an elegant way that could be reproduced in an inexpensive way by one person working alone.  I learned more in 30 seconds looking at his completed project than I had in 30 minutes of looking at videos.

This next bit is quite odd, and I recognize that.  I also see that there are psychological explanations for it rather than supernatural explanations for it. So just read on with that in mind.

I’ve written about this before. There has been a phenomenon since Jim’s passing of me needing a tool; thinking about it; then going to his old work space and finding it.  Not digging around and finding it, but looking at a spot out in the open and it being out in plain sight.

It’s happened enough times to both Jean and me that it’s no longer really a joke.

But, as I said, there are other explanations.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 You should’ve seen it in color

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’m into woodturning now as I go ever deeper down the rabbit hole of woodwork.  I’ve learned it from YouTube and the world of hard knocks.  This is not necessarily something I would recommend to everyone. You need to be a responsible adult; have some disposable income; be far enough into your life that if you are severely crippled by an injury your family can go on.

But it is an interesting experience.  

For example, the folks who teach woodturning on YouTube aren’t there because they are articulate.  Some of them are, don’t get me wrong.  My point is that they were woodturners first. Their focus is toward the wood.  They know how to do things with it. They understand what is happening with the wood. Having the language to communicate that to someone else is a different matter entirely.

Some of them are very loquacious. Very.  You’d hate to be caught with them between you and a bathroom. But there is a continuum of folks who talk less and less all the way down to some you just show their hands, their lathes, and the wood turning, either in silence or music in the background.

Sometimes those silent ones work, but having a word now and then would be helpful.

Having the words to communicate is a key thing. Getting meaning into those words is another.  This is hard to do, so let me come into it sideways.

One of the songs that the Algorithm brings me is “In Color”, written by James Otto, Jamey Johnson, and Lee Thomas Miller, and sung by Jamey Johnson.  For those of you who haven’t heard it, I do suggest that you get out on the old Internet and find it, but a bit of it goes like this:

If it looks like we were scared to death//

Like a couple of kids just tryna save each other//

You should've seen it in color//

A picture's worth a thousand words//

But you can't see what those shades of gray keep covered//

You should've seen it in color

This is only the chorus, but if you have the right experience base, it will tell you more than 1000 philosophers typing on 1000 typewriters for 1000 years.  No offense to philosophers here; they would be the first to say so.

For those of us of a certain age who’ve sat by our elders looking at old black and white photos this takes us back in time. The symbols conveyed in the photograph can connect with the base of common shared experience and help us to remember them with such force as to evoke emotion.

I’ve not made it through the song with dry eyes yet.

The songwriters do some amazing things here.  They convey that these black and white photographs do carry a message.  But, while pointing out that the deficiency of the media, i.e. it’s only black and white, they use this as a metaphor to illustrate that any form of communication will fall short of actual experience. “You should’ve seen it in color,” does not mean that a colored photograph would be better.  It means you need to live through it.

Saint Paul said that “we see through a glass, darkly.”  Some scientists say we don’t see at all, but they are writing philosophical checks they can’t cash.  What they mean is seeing is different than we thought it was.  

Light comes into our eyes and activates receptors.  Some of these are rods: They manifest as seeing black and white. Others are cones: They manifest as seeing in color.  There are three different types of cones, so every color we see is a combination of three basic colors.  What our brain interprets as color is just a combination of the electrochemical signals that the eye sends through the optic nerve.  There would be those who say because of this that there is really no such thing as color.

You can see why not many scientists could make a living writing country songs, but why Saint Paul probably could.

I know a bit of what Saint Paul meant when he wrote that.  Every day that I live and experience the world, I know a little more.  This is not to belittle, not to poo-poo the work of scientists. Far from it.  Nor do I mean to deprecate the value of words.

But we absolutely cannot overvalue experience nor shared experience.

That's the story of my life // Right there in black and white.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Hindsight Smells like Regret

 Hindsight Smells like Regret

By Bobby Neal Winters

I went out to my truck one morning--which was parked parallel facing east as it almost always is when I’m home--and I looked west down the street.  About fifty feet away, there was in the middle of the street an armadillo perfectly balanced on his back facing up.

This was an armadillo in mint condition.  He was perfect, every scale in place.  

The only thing wrong with him was that he was dead.

Standing to his side, getting ready for a meal, was a crow.  The crow had not yet breached the carcass.  He just stood there.

There were many things I could’ve done, should’ve done at that point, most of which I will get into later. What I did do was take a picture and post it to Facebook.  I put up some witty remark about the crow having knocked out the armadillo. 

I thought it was funny.

Then I just drove off.

What happened over the next several weeks could be classified in a number of ways.  The game theoretic way would be “The Tragedy of the Commons”; the religious way would be “Sins of Omission”; the psychological way would be “the Bystander Effect.”

Take your pick.

When an armadillo is killed on a country road, it really doesn’t last too long.  First of all, there would be more than just a crow there to belly-up to the bar.  There would be buzzards, coyotes, and all sorts of other critters, and there would be a lot more of them.

In town--even though we do have a wide variety of fauna wandering around within our city limits--there aren’t quite as many animals hanging around.  In addition, those who are hanging around aren’t here because they like to feed on the road.  Natural selection has taken those out of the system.  

In the country, on a country road, there would be faster traffic that would not take the time to dodge the armadillo and would grind it to bits.  This would allow the bacteria and the rain to dispose of the organic remains in relatively short order.

Neither of these things happened.

What I should’ve done--instead of taking the damned picture and making the witty remark on Facebook--was to stop; turn around; go to my workshop; get a trash bag and a shovel; put the armadillo into the bag; put the bag into the trash bin.

But I didn’t have that plan worked-out in my head.

This armadillo was not on my property.  He was not even directly in front of my house.

I thought that maybe a Policeman would drive by and take care of it.  They often do nice things like that.

I thought that one of my neighbors who was nearer to it would do something. Sometimes that happens.

I thought nature would deal with it in the manner described above.

And, clearly as I am writing this, none of that happened.

What did happen was much slower.

The only living creatures numerous enough and willing enough to deal with the corpse were bacteria.  The bacteria feasted, but slowly.  

You can always count on bacteria.

But bacteria exact a price.

Whenever I mowed--and I mowed several times during this time period--the stench was thick in the air.

Thick.

And while there wasn’t enough traffic driving over the armadillo to grind it away, there was enough to break it apart and spread it.  I purposefully left in the last “it” there. Pronouns are blunt, but I don’t want to make this too sharp.

Some of you might have had the thought that we’ve gotten a lot of rain this spring and that would help.  I thought that.  

No.

There is only a certain amount of sin that rain will wash away, at least quickly.

Everytime I smelled “it” was a reminder. Everytime the stench breached my nostrils and my gorge rose was a reminder that I could’ve fixed this in less than five minutes with hardly any effort. 

I can still smell it.  Maybe only in my head.  But it smells like regret.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Broken Halos

By Bobby Neal Winters

I grew up as a Southern Baptist; I am currently a United Methodist. Once, very, very many years ago. In another decade, in another century, I was having a discussion with a Methodist pastor. I forget the context, I forget the topic being discussed.  That pastor, at that time, made the remark that Southern Baptist theology encouraged co-dependence.

I was a lot younger then.  I passed in on to my Baptist brother who, in turn, passed it on to his pastor.

Among themselves they agreed it was accurate and took it as a complement.

If I were teaching an upper-level class right now, I would assign the students to write an essay, a chapter, or perhaps an encyclopedia on those three paragraphs.  As I am not, let me expand a little.

Lately, I’ve found myself in conversations with people who’d recently made difficult decisions. Even though the decisions were made and were irreversible, they were feeling just a tinge of guilt.

I looked them in the eye and said these words, “You have to take care of yourself first.”

In isolation, without context, that sounds harsh and even Machiavellian. I didn’t mean it that way.  Let me unpack that.

When you are on a commercial jet, and the flight attendants are taking you through their spiel about how to buckle your safety belt and other things that could provide a filter for natural selection, they do say something helpful.

“In the unlikely event the oxygen mask drops down, put on your own first before assisting others.”

It doesn’t take all that long to lose consciousness, but it takes about 3 minutes or so to die. Get your mask on, and then you can help other people.

If you help someone with their mask before you get your own on, even if you are successful, they--a small child for instance--might not be able to help you. You die; they live with the regret of not being able to save that adult who saved them.

Now, there are people to whom the idea to help others first would not have occurred.  There are people who would pull their seatmate’s oxygen mask out of the ceiling and smile at them behind the mask. 

This advice is not for them.

This advice is for the people that Chris Stapelton is singing about in “Broken Halos”:

Seen my share of broken halos //

Folded wings that used to fly //

They've all gone wherever they go //

Broken halos that used to shine.

Stapelton, having seen the world through the dim light of honkey tonks, is aware of a type of person who helps without boundaries, who works without a safety net, who doesn’t necessarily put on their own mask before helping someone else with theirs. 

He imagines them as angels.

And it's beautiful.

One is tempted to imagine the angels as breaking their halos during the course of helping, of folding up their wings out of burnout, and this does happen.

But there is another point of view. 

Another Methodist pastor, on another day in that other decade, that other century, told me about a Roman Catholic Priest by the name of Henri Nouwen.  Nouwen wrote a somewhat famous book with the title “The Wounded Healer.”

If you get on the internet and search for quotes--which I encourage you to do--you may find this one that gels the idea I am trying to get at: “The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”

Maybe the angels can help because their halos are broken.  Maybe they’ve ceased their flying because you can’t help from way up there.

Burnout is a problem.  Helping can devolve into codependency. You can get your halo broken.

You can also decide to try to understand.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Sins of Omission

By Bobby Neal Winters

I have lunch with my best friend on a regular basis.  He was waxing philosophical--which is a state he shares in common with me--and suggested I write about sins of omission.  

“Sins of commission are things we do when we are young and are more able; sins of omission are more common to the old.”

And he is right.  I don’t think I can add to that. When we are young, our bodies might lead easily into actions which aren’t so easy later on. Those of you who are wise are free to put some meat on those bones, as it were.

I do think we can have some sins of omission when we are young though. 

Let me slowly work my way into that subject like a vine into a potting shed...

Summer break has begun. I am not teaching summer school.  Rather, I am working on a list of honey does (doos, dues, dews?). The main honey-do is the residing of our potting shed.

We’ve had our potting shed for nigh on to three decades.  It has served us well during that extended period of benign neglect.  It has kept our mowers dry, and our tools out of the weather.

It was well-designed; it was well built.

It was NOT well-maintained.

Here’s the story.

While our yard doesn’t not produce vegetables well--anything that we grow on purpose is in a raised bed with dirt we buy at the store--it is amazingly capable at producing weeds.  Among these weeds are numerous plants that will produce vines if given half a chance.

Over the course of three decades, vines have gradually encroached on the potting shed.  They’ve snaked their sneaky little--and sometimes not so little--tendrils through imperceptible gaps between boards into the shed.  They have attached themselves to the siding of the shed, rooting their way into the wood, digesting it.

Vines have been eating my shed, consuming it, trying to remove it from the face of the earth, trying to reduce it to its constituent atoms.

Bad vines! Bad!

Being off this summer, without a paid assignment, I’ve been assigned the duties of 1) Reclaiming our shed from nature; 2) Repairing the damage that has occurred; 3) Putting in modifications to keep this from happening again...at least during the course of our lives. 

This has been, shall we say, educational to me.  

As I do the repair work, I am doing carpentry. Those of you who frequent this space may be aware of the fact that I am an avocational woodworker. Your minds may have blurred the distinction between carpentry and woodworking. 

Let me repair that.

Woodworking, as I practice it avocationally, is using mostly traditional tools to learn traditional practices to make small, sometimes useful, sometimes pretty, objects out of wood.

By way of contrast carpentry is actual hard work.

A few hours of carpentry--two or three--can make me ready to take an old man’s nap.  

This is not hyperbole. 

While carpentry is hard work, it allows for periods of light philosophical contemplation in the same way woodwork does.

For example, the following thoughts occurred to me. 

If I had done a better job of keeping the vines away, I wouldn’t have to be cutting them from the siding right now.  

If I had put gravel around the base of this shed when I had a young man’s body, I wouldn’t have to be horsing those bags of gravel around with my old man’s body.

If I had painted the shed, say, every ten years, I would’ve been ahead of the game, and I wouldn’t have to be putting new siding on now.

Building is creative; creation is enjoyable. 

Maintenance is hard.

My major sins of omission in my youth are failures in maintenance. 

I confess them and try to excuse them, because they were done out of ignorance.  I didn’t know any better.  I didn’t think about how relentless vines are.  I didn’t think about them eating my potting shed.

But now I know.

And now I have to fix it because failure to do so would be less forgivable than actions not taken because of the ignorance of youth.

Just thinking about it, and I already need a nap.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

The Love Song of B. N. Winters

 The Love Song of B. N. Winters

By Bobby Neal Winters

As we get older, living in the world, seeing the way of things, learning some uncomfortable truths, our eyes begin to open.

When the big picture, the capital “T” Truth clicks into place, there is a desire to explain it to someone else.  To explain it to someone so that they don’t have to learn it the same hard way that you did.  You want to tell your children and your grandchildren.

But there is a catch. 

A big one.

They won’t understand.  They don’t have the language.  And I don’t mean they don’t have the words.  The words are there, but the words are not connected to the same experiences.  It’s like in the old movie “Crocodile Dundee.”  

“That’s not a knife.  This is a knife.”

There has to be a moment of experiential enlightenment, a gestalt.

As I go walking through life, I can find myself understanding more of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”  (I think T. S. Eliot would appreciate that.  Maybe that is what he intended.)

Do I dare//

Disturb the universe?//

In a minute there is time//

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

I know what that means now.

Poetry sometimes serves as a map to the world, but unless you go out into that world its symbols will remain meaningless to you.  Even if the map has a helpful key down in the corner, you will never know what a river is until you’ve seen one.

Elliot’s poem is about aging at the very least.  I know this because I and all of my friends are aging. The scenes from the poem I can first see in my older friends and later in myself. One way to put this is that I find myself inhabiting the poem.

Literature, poetry, and history can provide a map for us.  But contact with reality provides meaning.  We find meaning in the text to the extent we can inhabit it.

Consider Jesus and His Disciples.

Jesus and His Disciples studied the scriptures. Indeed they were immersed in it. They didn’t have a Bible the way we understand it.  They didn’t have many books at all.  They had scrolls.  Or, more precisely, they had access to scrolls.

Some of these scrolls were similar to what we would call history; some were collections of rules; some were stories; some were poetry.  

Some were collections of prophecy.

This last part is interesting. Jesus and his Disciples seem to have been steeped in the books of prophecy. Peter quoted from Joel in the book of Acts, for example, but he and Jesus' other Disciples were also into Daniel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. 

In Daniel, there is a section wherein is featured a series of terrifying beasts. These beasts are described in symbolic dream-language.  These can be and have been interpreted as a series of empires that had ruled over that part of the world, extracting income from it and oppressing the people there.  

There is value in using the image of “beasts” rather than simply saying “empires” because this image transcends time. We are now in a time where there are forces, where there are industries, where there are entities that transcend mere nations or empires: Drug cartels; human traffickers; HMOs.  Those who view human beings as a means of profit and nothing else.

Yep, “beasts” works fine.

The passage about beasts is followed by a vision: “one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”

Jesus identified himself with this “Son of Man” and referred to himself in that way. He was a son of man, a human being whose kingdom treated people in a humanly (humanely, kindly), not a beastly, way. Jesus inhabited the prophecy: He gave it life; he gave it meaning.

Jesus created an organization which exists in opposition to the worldly kingdoms that seek to oppress the people.  He called it the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven.  His early disciples called it “The Way.” 

We call it the Church.

It exists; it is real; we can see it; we can feel it.  There may be one near you.

I am inhabiting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It’s against my will but gives me meaning. You are inhabiting your own story. Make it a happy one.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Abraham and Ramanajan

By Bobby Neal Winters

About a year ago, I taught a Bible Study on the book of Genesis. I did a survey of some of my favorite stories from that book--from any book. One night after our meeting one of the participants asked a question.  It was so honest, so simple, and I had never thought to ask.

What was Abraham’s religion?

This is not an exact restating of the question, so I will ask for forgiveness, but I think in answering it fully I will answer the original question and probably more.

The short answer: He didn’t have one.

This might be a surprise.  You might expect Judaism as an answer.  If a Rabbi or a Jew who cares disagrees with me, I would yield.  Saying who is or is not a Jew is not my business.

But until that happens, let me continue. For most of what I have to say, it won’t matter.

Abraham didn’t have a place of worship.  He didn’t have a priest he could go to.  He didn’t have a holy book.  Heck, he was going to be a central character in the Bible, the holy book of Judaism and Christianity.

It was just him and God.  God would stop by and have a talk with him every once in a while.

That sounds great, right? Just you and God.

It sounds like a lot of people I’ve met: “It’s just me and God” or, alternately, “Just me and Jesus.”

I’m open-minded enough to give these people a listen.  The power of the Holy Spirit is strong.  God will deal with each person not on my terms but on His terms.

That having been said, to claim a one on one relationship with God is not something to be done lightly.

To say what I want to say now, let me put on my hat as math teacher. There was a time when there were no math teachers.  There was a time when there were just people and the numbers. Well, the numbers and the geometric diagrams.  People just wrestled with the math and figured it out for themselves.  After a while, people wrote things down so that it could be shared at a distance and through the passage of time.  If you have to figure out that XXV times XXV is DCXXV a few times, you write it down and pass it on.

People save this sort of stuff; they recopy it when it gets a bit ragged; then they pass it on when they die.  Not that they have much choice.  You don’t get to take anything with you, not even math books. Darn it.

As time passes, the practice of mathematics arises. You don’t have to figure it out all by yourself. You don’t even have to figure it out yourself with the aid of books.  You have people who’ve struggled through it before to help you learn it yourself.

You have God’s Gift of math teachers.

Do you want to learn math yourself, with just you and the numbers?

Well, you can.  It’s been done.  There was this gentleman from India by the name of Ramanajan who taught himself math on his own.

Well, sort of.

He had some teaching from others.  He had some books.  But, by and large, he taught himself to be a mathematician from nothing.  Like so many before him, he died at an early age. Like so many before him, he died from tuberculosis. (What is it with tuberculosis and geniuses?)  

Mathematicians are still going through his notebooks more than a century after his death and getting discoveries from them.

So, yeah, you can do it on your own.

But--and I want you to pay attention to this part--you know what Ramanajan did?  Even after having done it all on his own, this transcendental genius reached out to the mathematical community.

This was much to the benefit of the mathematical community to be sure, but--the other side of the coin--had he not he would have died in obscurity without anyone ever having heard of him.

One might consider the notion that our relationship with God and God’s Creation is like our struggle with numbers and geometry. You can struggle with it on your own; you can reach out and use the ancient collected writings as your guide; you can go to the bookstore (or the library--let’s not forget the library) for help in your struggle.

Or you can seek out the help of others who’ve been through the struggle themselves, those who are part of a practice that goes back thousands of years.

There you will meet people who--I hope--teach you that two plus two is four. It’s not three, and it’s darn sure not five. It’s four.

Good luck on your journey.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.