When will I learn?

By Bobby Neal Winters

We have moments of clarity, moments of epiphany, moments where God just drops knowledge into our heads and mental dominos that had been in the process of being set up for years just fall into place.  

Sometimes you can go years between instances of this happening.  Last week it happened to me twice within three days.

I will tell you about these in reverse order.

The morning of Friday, July 4, I took my brother out for an outing.  He’d been visiting me in Kansas for 36 years and he’d never visited Girard before.  I told him he was in for a treat.

We drove to Girard and made an orbit of the courthouse.  I looked my brother over and he didn’t seem to be too worse for wear. The excitement of Girard had not been too much.  So I decided to press our luck and drove over to Greenbush.

The destination I had in mind wasn’t the Educational Service Center at Greenbush.  My brother has just retired as a teacher, and I did believe he would appreciate it, as it is a fine resource, but I had another destination in mind: The Old Church next door to Greenbush.

I’ve been driving past that old church for the better part of four decades.  It looked interesting from the road; it looked well-kept; but I’d never stopped.

I’d never even noted its name. In my mind it was the old church next to the Greenbush Educational Service Center.

We drove the few minutes from Girard and pulled into the drive.  I looked up and read it’s name Saint A******s Catholic Church.  I put the *** in there, because I’ve seen the name in other places, and that is how my brain has always dealt with it.  I often do this with words I don’t think I am going to use again. I get the beginning; I get the end; the rest is fuzzed out; and the whole thing becomes a hieroglyph. Sometimes I don’t learn how to pronounce the word, how to own it, until I force myself--or am forced--to break it all down.

My brother and I got out of the car and started looking around.  The site is very nicely kept up. I read the legend of how the church was founded: A priest was caught in a storm and vowed to build a church on the site if he lived.  He lived and kept his vow.  He built the church and it was subsequently destroyed by weather related incidents twice.

I wondered whether horrible weather is perhaps not the best sign that a church should be built.

Anyway, I decided this was an interesting enough place that I ought to learn its name:  Saint Aloysius.  “Saint Aloy-see-us?”  That didn’t seem right.  “Saint Alo-y-sius?”

Then the penny dropped: Saint Al-oh-WISH-us!

I’d heard the name all my life.  I’d seen it and buzzed through it for years.  I’d never taken the time to walk through the name a letter at a time.

It now works for me.

Let us now go back to Wednesday, July 2.  Jean and I were at the funeral of our neighbor Dan, who we’ve lived next to for the better part of four decades. We knew him to be a good man, a good neighbor. 

The funeral was at Our Lady of Lourdes.  We sat in the back.  This has become my main strategy when I go to Catholic Churches.  You watch the people in front of you: Stand when they stand; sit when they sit. You discover that either there are a lot of Protestants who sit too near the front or there are a lot of Catholics who don’t know when to stand and sit either.

The priest preached on the text: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

I’d never understood what was meant by “poor in spirit.” The phrase had never conjured up the image of an individual that our Lord would call blessed.  It was a mystery to me.  It was like the name Aloysius. I looked at the beginning; I looked at the end; but it had never come together for me.

Then the priest, Father Mike, I think, related poor in spirit to my neighbor Dan. I’d never thought about him in that light before.

And it was then, for the first time ever, I understood “poor in spirit.” 

Dan served as a lens to better understand the Gospel.

Here we come to the hard part. While I could spend some time describing Dan, trying to convey him to you. Those would just be words. You would’ve had to know him. You probably know someone like him, but the words just haven’t slid into place.

I wish I had known him better.

I find I am always saying that to myself, especially after a funeral.

When will I learn?

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.

 A tiff with my table saw

By Bobby Neal Winters

I lost a chunk of my left thumb in a fight with my table saw.  I am not calling the cops because it was a fair fight.  

Lest any of you worry, I only lost a bit of the fat at the end of the thumb and a tiny moon shaped portion of the nail.  When I tell women about the injury they arrange their faces in a rictus of horror; when I tell men, they say, “Dude!”

When it happened, I turned off the table saw (that’ll show it who’s boss), took off my noise cancelling headphones, took off my dust mask, and then wrapped my thumb in a paper towel.

Then I drove myself to the ER at Mercy.

After having received their tender ministrations, I asked if they had anything that would make me feel less stupid, and the response seemed to indicate they would be wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice if they had such a medication.

I have continued with my woodworking but having a sore thumb has slowed me down a bit.  

I’ve completed the lean-to on my potting shed.  I’ve purchased and assembled a new bandsaw. (It’s a Grizzly!) I’ve gotten some chunks of walnut and oak from a couple of different friends of mine and have proceeded with turning projects with them.

But I hadn’t turned on my table saw until just a couple of days ago.

Whenever you fall off a horse, you are supposed to get right back on again.  That is good advice.  I believe it.  Indeed, I was planning to do just that.

But it was almost as if an invisible barrier had erected itself around the table saw.  Any time that I moved toward it, I saw something else I needed to do.  Usually that something else had to do with cleaning up my shop and putting it into better order.  

I threw things away.

I built shelves and put tools on them.

I swept the floor.

I took one of my handy little brushes, swept off the table tops.

I swept the floor again.

My shop looked better than it had in months.

Finally, I got to a point where I needed to use my table saw.  Nothing else would do the job. 

And I used it.

Now, we are cool with each other.

This is important.

It was learning to use my father-in-law’s table saw that got me into woodworking, so it is the founding part of my experience.  But, additionally, table saws are the centerpiece of the modern woodworker’s shop.

You need them to rip (cut lengthwise) your wood; you need them as an aid to milling (squaring up) your wood; you need them to make repeated cross cuts.

Yes, you can do all of these things some other way.  Indeed, it can all be done much more safely with hand tools.

But here’s the kicker.

The folks who did all of their work with hand tools invented power tools.

While I do enjoy learning their techniques in order to preserve that tradition, using hand tools at every stage of the process adds a lot of time and effort.

That is fine.  

Some of the time.

But a lot of the time you just want to get the job done.

You want to take your construction lumber, slice off the round sides with your table saw; run it through your planer to smooth it up, and then proceed with your detailed hand tool work.

And if you want to get it all done within the disjointed fractions of time that modern life allows us, you will need to use power tools and, most especially, the table saw.

So me achieving a rapprochement with my table saw it critical.

But, while I always respected my table saw, I think I’d gotten a little too comfortable with it.

That has been corrected, and I now have a reminder on the tip of my thumb that will be around for a while.

But I still have the thumb.

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.

 

 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.