September Song

September Song

By Bobby Neal Winters

Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December

But the days grow short when you reach September

--Maxwell Anderson

I am a watcher of the sky, a follower of the Sun.  Were I not a Christian, I would no doubt be a follower of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun.  I keep track of when it rises in the morning and sets in the evening.  While the days have been getting shorter since June 21, we’ve only been able to notice it much more recently.

This is only going to get worse.

About the 20th of September the nights will be longer than the days and we will keep losing light until just before Christmas, but by Halloween it will be just about as dark as it's going to get.

But we are now in a period where we know the darkness is coming, but there is still enough light to work.  We can’t put in crops; that has already been done--or better have been.  But if we are going to do anything more, waiting is not going to help.

This reminds me of my stage of life.

I’ve got a birthday coming up in a couple of months, but it’s not a big one with a zero on the end or anything, but most of the people in my life are already beyond 60.  Many of them well beyond.  Even when age comes gracefully things happen.

There is the energy thing.

When I am at my energy peak, I am sharper than I ever was.  This is because I’ve done a lot of stuff and thought about a lot of stuff just because I’ve had longer to do it than I ever have before.  That sort of goes without saying, but I think there are some folks who might need to hear it.

The problem comes when I am off my energy peak.  When the batteries are charged, I can learn Spanish and Russian, Python and C++; I can think about the best examples to talk about algorithms and finite state machines.  When the batteries go down, don’t even ask me to do arithmetic.

The brain is still there along with everything that is stored in it, but sometimes I don’t have the amps to light up the little leds.

I notice that among some of my longtime friends.  Some of them have become good stewards of their energy.  They work and study and think, but are careful not to run the battery all the way out.  They take care of the physical so that the mental will stay as sharp as it can for as long as it can.

My mother had Alzheimer’s.  Her world became smaller and smaller.  She spoke with fewer and fewer people until she only spoke to her ancestors.  I don’t know that she ever could’ve done anything any differently.  That is one of the facts of life: No matter what you do there are no guarantees.

But a little exercise ain’t a-gonna kill ya.  Take a walk to keep your blood flowing to your brain; do Sudoku; learn Spanish. Love your neighbor as yourself.

The days grow short when you reach September.

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. )

  

A Quintessence of Dust

 

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

--Hamlett, Act II, Scene II 

There is a story in the Bible about a mighty General Naaman who was a leper.  He was directed to the Prophet Elisha for a cure.  Elisha directed him to bath himself in the River Jordan seven times to rid himself of the disease.  Naaman was indignant, replying more or less, “Aren’t the rivers around here better than the stinky old Jordan?”  To which his servant replied, “You know, Boss, if he’d asked you to do something hard, you would’ve done it.”

A pair of tightly woven but seemingly contradictory truths emerge from the current crisis.  A paradox, if you will. 

Truth number one: People want to be taken care of by their government, by each other, by Big Brother, or by someone else besides themselves doesn’t matter who.  

Truth number two: People don’t like being told what to do and by and large won’t do it.

One might argue that there are two different groups within the population with one typifying one attitude and one the other, but I’ve been paying pretty close attention.  There are two groups, but the overlap within the two groups is quite high.  I believe it is a majority.

Let’s talk about the mask thing.  Maybe they work, maybe they don’t.  I’ve not seen the numbers; I’ve not read the studies. Since I try to cover my nose and my mouth with a handkerchief when I sneeze or I cough, having what is essentially a handkerchief strapped in place seems like a reasonable solution; it keeps me from being caught unaware.  

I think that I might keep the practice of wearing a mask whenever I have a cold from this point on out; it strikes me as being a considerate thing to do, now that I think about it.

But wearing one makes my glasses fog up.  My glasses are not optional; I’ve got a card in my pocket from the state of Kansas that says so.  So it is annoying to wear the mask. Sometimes I forget and suffer the terror of having a finger wagged at me.  The horror.

But wearing one is not a big deal.  I will put it on top of the stack of all of the other things I do because I am trying to be a good citizen: putting gum wrappers in my pocket; not throwing fast food sacks out the car window; not passing gas in the elevator.

However, I am not shocked that people don’t want to go along with this.  Religion--not only Christianity, any religion that has been good enough to survive for generations--has offered a set of principles about behavior.  They are largely in agreement, shockingly so.

Yet the phrase “You can’t legislate morality” comes quickly to the lips and trippingly on the tongue.  The fact is you can legislate morality; we do it all the time.  Sometimes it’s simply the devil to enforce.

I am about to tell a disturbing story; gentle souls might want to  tune out for a paragraph.  Jeffry Dahmer captured men.  He killed them and had sex with their corpses and then ate them, storing body parts in the refrigerator. He always wore a condom. (As one stand-up comic opined, “Somehow THAT message got through.”)

The point of that story is that people are more keyed-in to taking care of themselves than they are to taking care of others, though this is an extreme case.

In the movie Parenthood with Steve Martin and Jason Robards, Robards’ character had a ne’er do well son (played by Tom Hulce) who had gotten into trouble with the mob.  Robards’ character had put together a plan that would have saved his son’s life, but would’ve required his son to change, to live life in a way other than the way he planned to live it.  The son replied, “That’s a great plan, but let me put a twist on that ...”  

The twist was not to do the plan.

As a species we don’t like being told what to do, but the Nazi’s still managed to convince the soldiers in the camps to six million Jews.  

We are a paradox, I tell you.

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. )

Owning your years

 Owning your years

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve almost finished my 58th year of life.  In English I will say, “I am fifty-eight.”  In Russian, this is said, “To me fifty-eight summers.”  And in Spanish it is, “I have fifty-eight years.”

Anything but your own mother tongue sounds odd, of course, but I like the way it is expressed in Spanish.  Let me explain.

The English way of expressing it makes it a state of being. It’s like “I am a rock; I am a hedgehog.”  This is the way it is and that is all there is to it.  My age is a defining quality.

The Russian makes it sound like the years just happened.  They were a train and I was standing by the tracks, and they just rumbled past me.

Both of these ways of describing it do capture a certain facet of the truth.  They represent different mindsets.

But I like the Spanish way.

My years are things that I own.  Did I take care of my years?  Have my years taken care of me?  DoI treasure them?  Do they provide me comfort?  Do I look at them as if they were a basement that’s filled with rotting refuse?  It depends on the year.

The last week before faculty were set to report back to the university, I took Friday off.  Which is to say, I took it off in whatever way we can take days off after we learned to work from home.

In any case, I took the day off, and I worked on the garage door.  Our new garage is getting close to thirty years old, and even though the opening mechanism has been replaced.  It is the same door.

Our garage door is connected to the garage by rails.  There are wheels on axles that connect the door to the rails.  The wheels fit within grooves on the rails and the axles are attached to the door through hinges.  The hinges are bolted to the door and the axles fit freely through holes that are parallel to the door itself.

I said all of that to say that a few weeks ago, one of the wheels popped out of its groove in its rail.  This caused the door to be stuck open.  At that time, I went out and fixed it.  It wasn’t too bad.  By this I mean there was no blood.  I used my socket set and while the hinges kept wanting to fall off because I was working arms length over my head, I managed to get them back on.  

When I was done, I noticed two things:  One, if I had used clamps, there would’ve been no trouble with the hinges wanting to fall off; and two--duh duh duuuh--the hinge I put the axle through had *two* holes parallel to the garage door.

When I was done, the door closed; the door opened again. Unit test: Passed!

Time passes.  Then comes the last week I will have any flexibility until Thanksgiving, and a wheel pops out of a groove on my garage door.

This was a different wheel on the opposite side.

This time I was prepared. I used my clamps, took off the hinge, reinserted the wheel in the grove, bolted it all back on. I closed the door, and it went down nicely.  

Then, like you do, I opened it again.

And an entirely different wheel popped out of the groove.

This is where we go back to the “duh duh duuuh.”  If there are two holes you can put your axle through, you will invariably put it through the wrong one. I went back over the job and made sure all of the axles were where they needed to be.

Why did I share all this?  It is because there was a time when there would’ve been blood.  There would’ve been trips to the hardware store and, perhaps, to the emergency room.  But “Tengo casi cincuenta ocho anos,” I have almost fifty-eight years.  My years are my asset, and I have taken care of some of them. I’ve learned a thing or two.

Some may have gone passed like a freight train.  Some of them are just me. But I’ve owned some of them and treated them well. 

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. )

Ruminations on Civilization and Back-to-School

Ruminations on Civilization and Back-to-School

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is not good for Man to be alone.

That’s what God said.

And it was true, but we all got off behind our cell phones, crouching behind our prejudices, huddling behind our opinions, and we forgot.

We  broke our molecular bonds and became atomized.  At first it was by choice.  People can be difficult.  

As this appears in the paper, the university will be starting next week.  

To say that life has been interesting since back in March is to be hilarious by understatement provided you have a broad enough definition of hilarious.  Statements are made and then, in the twinkling of an eye, common sense turns to idiocy.  We have to change; we have to regroup; because we are all trying to do the best we can but we just don’t know.  

A civilization is made from connections.  It is not enough for one person to learn how to make an arrowhead from flint; he must teach other people how to do it.  It is not enough for one person to learn how to weave cloth; she must teach other people to do it.  By sharing our knowledge, by sharing ourselves, we become a part of others.

It is not good for Man to be alone, God said. “I will make an help meet for him.” 

Adam and Eve got busy and made Cain, Abel, and so forth.  You know the story: Just like real life.  So there was a family.

Families are good.  They are the bricks of civilization.  The most basic ways your children learn of how to deal with other people they learn from you in your family.  It is terrifying, I know, but that is just the way it is.

Families are the bricks of civilization, but just as a collection of bricks is not a house, a collection of families is not a civilization.  Just as mortar binds bricks together in buildings, you need something to tie families together in civilization.  There need to be connections between the families.

Something like church provides a good way to do this.  You have regular meetings where you get together and take part in a common activity. There is time before and afterward to meet with other families, with other individuals and catch up.

If I am going to keep pressing my analogy with making a building, the churches we belong to, the churches which determine our values, are where we make our load-bearing walls.

You can live in a house that only has load-bearing walls, I suppose, but the purpose of load-bearing walls is to support other things.  It is all right there in the name.

To be beautiful, we must have ornamentation.  We must put other walls in.  The various practices we have are those walls.  In my analogy, the universities are such walls.  Given my profession, it is very tempting for me to say that the universities form a load-bearing wall, but I cannot support that.  Historically, the universities arose from the Church back in the days when it was singular and capitalized.  That having been said, they still add a lot:  Biology and business; chemistry and construction; music and mathematics; physics and psychology; theater and teaching.  

We impart a lot of knowledge, but we also provide connection.  Each of the students are connected to the university through the faculty, but the university also provides a crucible where they become connected with each other.  Often they find mates at the university, which brings us back to Adam and Eve.

Here we are about to start it all again.  One day a time; one step a time.  Lift your foot; place it down carefully; make sure your footing is solid and only then take another step.

We will also make frequent glances into the blackness in front of us, looking for that pinpoint of light.  We will keep our ears open, listening for the train whistle.

School’s about to start; let’s get back to work.

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. )

The Word

The Word
By Bobby Winters
I get on the computer and do Duolingo every morning: Spanish, Hindi, and Russian.  I also like to learn programming languages: I spent a few years learning Python and now I am learning C++.  The two activities are connected by similar tastes and similar aptitudes.  I also, as those of you who are here reading this know, spend a certain amount of time writing, looking for the right word.  (Digging out that word aptitude above makes me kind of proud.)
Words are important.
Words are important for communication, but words are also important for thinking.
In mathematics, we have demonstrated this better than elsewhere.  We define our terms precisely; we distill our ideas to their sharpest form.  While we cannot capture all truth (and we’ve even proven that!) what we say is true.  That is the quintessence of mathematics.  We can be sure of our propositions because of the care we take with language.
These ideas are not new with me.  I can point to the first verse of the Gospel of John in the New Testament: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”  Here they are translating the Greek “logos” as “word”; logos can also be translated as “holy wisdom” but that just goes to show how important words are.
In communicating, there is an art in exactly how much precision one needs to use.  That verse from John is a good example.  One can fill libraries with what that means, but the reader will have neither the patience nor the lifespan.  Sometimes the best choice is to leave something for the reader to work out for him/herself.
In this, I’ve come to appreciate how the electrical engineers communicate.  Like mathematicians, they have special symbols that they use. I am speaking, in particular, of logic gates.  These are symbols that are denoted by the words and, or, not, nand, xor etc.  These symbols, which are used in electronic diagrams, stand in for hideously complicated configurations of transistors, diodes, resistors, switches, and so on.  They mask out the complication so that the reader may more quickly grasp the point.  Once the diagram is understood at this level, the reader can then proceed to learn at a greater level of detail.
Communicating with clarity requires the proper level of detail.  I’ve a friend and former coworker who likes to joke by stating things in a very precise way. For example, he might ask, “Are you enjoying your caffeine laden particles suspended in a solution of hydrogen dioxide at a temperature of 80 degrees centigrade?” instead of asking, “Do you like your coffee?”  He does this for humor, but it makes an excellent point.  Detail does not mean effective communication.
Communicating is teaching.  Teaching about a subject is like this.  You first draw a big circle and say the thing is in here.  There might be exceptions, but the circle captures the essence.  When the student gets it, you then draw a smaller circle inside the big one and so forth.  Each time you capture the essence of the concept but you get closer than the time before.  Then you must stop at the right time or the forest disappears behind a tree.
When we are teaching our children about the sexes, we talk in cloudy but accurate ways:  That is Jane’s mommy; that is Jane’s daddy.  That is a momma dog; that is a daddy dog. While--to be sure--sex is a lot more complicated than that, this way of speaking captures something that is essential to the workings of human life.  If one pushes too deeply, one can lose the whole world behind a chromosome.
There is something holy about language. Sure we need to be, uh, judicious in our use of profanity, and “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.”  But dare I say, more importantly even than that, we need to take care in speaking both truly and kindly. Sometimes it is best not to speak at all.
Here is an exercise.  Take a period of time, say a day or week, and during that time only say things that are both true and kind.  If you are in politics, you might want to start in five-minute intervals. And all of us will have longer periods of silence while we think about what is true and kind.
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. )

July, Josey Wales, Frito Pies, and Parables

July, Josey Wales, Frito Pies, and Parables
By Bobby Neal Winters
It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life... or death. It shall be life.
--Ten Bears in “The Outlaw Josey Wales”
Here we are in late July.  
For the last couple of years, we’ve had wet summers with rain on a sometimes shockingly regular basis. It had looked early on that might happen this year as well, but in June someone turned the faucet off and here we are.
I mowed my lawn last week out of boredom rather than any sense it needed it. When I was done I felt secure that I wouldn’t need to mow it again until late August or may September, after the start of school.
This time of year is traditionally very quiet in our sleepy college town, but the quiet is different this year.  It has been this quiet since mid-March.  Sure there have been some times during the past four month when it was more deeply quiet than others.  There were times when you could hear the crickets at noon, as it were.
The quiet you hear now is different from the quiet of any other late July.  
Late July most years is when many folks would take their last chance for a vacation.  I know that last year my family went to Colorado.  We rented an Airbnb up the mountains and revelled in the lack of electronic connection to anyone.  We lived on hotdogs and s’mores.  It was a good time.
Not this year.  While I’ve not canvased my fellow faculty, the impression I get is that this year is very different.
Do you remember that movie The Outlaw Josey Wales?  Near the end of the movie Josey and his ragtag group were holed up in a cabin believing the Comanches would be coming at them.  They were fortifying the cabin and loading their weapons and planning contingencies.   Then Josey went and talked with Ten Bears and everything was settled.
Well, it is like that at the university.  We are in our cabins getting ready for the Fall Semester.  The good news is that we have our equivalent of Josey Wales.  The bad news is there no equivalent to Ten Bears in COVID 19.
We have to be prepared for anything.
It has become clear to me over the course of my 32-year career at Pittsburg State that we have to make a place for more online courses.  It has also become clear that, while online courses have a place, in many cases there is just no substitute for being face-to-face.
Let me be like Jesus for a minute and explain it in a parable.  A comprehensive university is like unto the Coney Island on the Washington Street Strip in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Every Thursday, I would go with a group of companions to Coney Island.  They served hot dogs, of course, but they also sold Frito pies.  They had chili, onions, cheese, and mustard for the hot dogs, so all they needed for the Frito pies were Fritos.  And they probably had Fritos as a healthy side-dish anyway. Ye who have ears to hear, let them hear that online courses are like unto Frito pies: they can be made from things we have on hand and some people will buy them.  They are one of my favorite foods.
But we didn’t go to Coney Island for the food even though it was...filling. Coney Island had a pinball machine.  We took turns at the pinball machine and enjoyed each other’s company.  We could’ve gone to places with cheaper food; we could’ve gone to places with more nutritious food; we chose to go to Coney Island because we could play pinball with other young people of similar interests and start working on a life-long case of acid reflux.
But I digress.  
We are preparing a metaphorical meal for our students this Fall.  It has to be like a four-course banquet that is being held in the out-of-doors when there is a threat of rain.  There must be nutritious food of every type.  But we need to be able to disassemble it quickly so it can be eaten under the shelter of the trees should the storm come.  Maybe hot dogs or Frito pies would be a good choice.
In any case, I’ve never been prouder to be connected with any group of people ever.  They truly amaze me.
We are ready, Josey Wales.
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. )

The God of this Place, revisited

The God of this Place, revisited
By Bobby Neal Winters
Twenty years ago I spent the month of June on a Rotary Group Study Exchange in Siberia. It changed my life. 
People say that a lot, maybe it is true when they say it.  I know it is true when I say it.  There is a before and an after.  It was one of those experiences that if I knew what it was going to be like before I went, I never would’ve gone, but now I wouldn’t take for it.
It was bought at a price.
When I got back, it took me a while to recover.  There is a 12-hour time difference between here and there, and I was jetlagged beyond jetlagged when I got home.  I would be sitting in my chair in the middle of the evening apparently fine and would suddenly just tip forward asleep in my chair.  I call that being 58 now, but it was jet lag then.
But it was more than that.  This was all before I started writing my column, but at some point it came upon me to start writing this up.  I wrote my experiences in different articles.  I showed them to the then editor of the Morning Sun Cindy Allen.  She liked them and published them.  Printers ink has been in my veins ever since.
One of the articles was called “The God of this Place.”  It has been years since I looked at it.  I will try to bring it up on my blog for those who are interested. 
As we were driven through the countryside, we kept seeing places where there were strips of cloth tied in the limbs of trees.  We asked what they were, and we were told they were prayers.  They were usually in trees that were at the crest of a hill.
Trees are a bridge to God.  Their roots are in the ground, but their limbs reach toward heaven. The crest of a hill is a place where the earth itself is reaching toward heaven, and it is also a boundary between one side of the hill and the other.  Boundaries are magical places. 
What better place to put a prayer?
Once we visited a Buddhist Temple.  We walked around the grounds.  There were shrines to various gods.  People would come in to pray to one or the other and leave a few coins as an offering.  We noticed there was a little dirty-faced girl who came after the coins were left and took them.
We were told by the priest that she was getting them to buy ice cream.  At that point, those of us from the group--composed of Baptists and Methodists--began leaving coins at the altars of pagan gods.
This girl would’ve been about seven, I think.  She is now in her late twenties.  I hope she’s still alive.  The world is a hard place for children that have to get their ice cream money from the mouths of the gods.
Excuse me, I had to pause a little.  I was back there for a moment looking into the eyes of that little girl, wondering about the woman she has become.
While my trips to Paraguay have scratched the itch somewhat, I’ve never attained that level of adventure again.  It changed me.
All human beings, all over the world are connected.  We leave our pitiful offerings for the gods, for God, and it doesn’t seem like much, but if they can be brought together to put ice cream in the stomach of a little girl, that makes it better. 
Maybe this is what the gods want?  Maybe we turn from the gods to God by realizing that we all have the same God.
The God of that place is the God of this place.
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. )

The God of this Place (from 2000)

The God of this Place
By Bobby Winters

The Buryats are a people who are native to Siberia.  They are not ethnically Russian, and they are not Mongolian.  However, I grew up in Oklahoma surrounded by Chickasaws, and they would pass for Chickasaws in my book.
We met religion among the Buryats a number of times on our trip.  Our first day in Ulan-Ude we made a trip to the Buddhist Temple just out of town.  Since this was my first visit to such a temple, everything was new, and I did not take in very much.  One thing that I did notice, however, were strips of cloth tied on the branches of the trees just outside of the monastery grounds.  We were told that these were prayers.
We were led through the temple by a guide.  We went around the grounds clockwise.  We were invited to turn the prayer wheels, but I did not.  I was uncomfortable with the idea of praying to any deity other than my own.
While this guided tour did help lay a foundation for learning about the local beliefs, it is not the best way to learn about the religion of people.  The best way is out in the natural habitat.
We got another dose during our stay in Ulan-Ude on an excursion to Lake Baikal.  We started out in the morning and proceeded for a while down a beautiful mountain road.  The driver of the car that I was in liked speed, and soon we were well out ahead of everyone.
When we stopped on a mountain summit and got out to let the rest catch up,  I noticed that there were strips of cloth tied in the branched of trees by the side of the road.  Prayers like we had seen in the temple.
Then the rest of the group caught up with us, and our driver called us over to form a circle.  He got a silver goblet out of the van along with a bottle of vodka and filled the goblet.  Then he wet his fingers with the vodka, flicked it out in a spray, and he took a small drink.  It was more than a sip but less than a shot.  He then poured a similar amount out on the ground and said something in Russian.  The translator said, "For the god of this place.” After this he passed the cup to the next person in line. 
This reminded me of the baptism ceremony, and as the cup was passed from person to person my mind whirled, as I began to see a connection between this religion and my own.  In the days of Noah, God cleansed the world by water. And using Moses at the Red Sea, God had saved the children Israel by water.
All through the Bible there is all of this wonderful symbolism with water in the stories of Noah, Moses, Joshua, Jonah and others in the Hebrew Bible.  In the New Testament this is played out in the stories of John the Baptist baptizing in the Jordan, Jesus walking on the water, and Paul shipwrecked at sea. 
Add to this the fact that the Russian word for water is "voda" which differs only from "vodka" by a single letter.   All this was too much for my melodramatic nature.
My turn came.  I sprinkle the vodka and said, "Remember your baptism."  I drank a small portion, and I poured a libation saying, "For the God of this place."
After the ceremony, we continued on our way.  We crossed a river by a ferry and made our way to Lake Baikal where we took a very nice Banya, a Russian steam bath, showered in western style showers, and took a boat ride on the Lake.
We met the religion of the Buryats a last time on a trip while we were in Chita.  We went from Chita down to Aginskoye which is in a predominantly Buryat sub-region of Chita Oblast.  A few miles before we got to Aginskoye, our van broke down.  We got out while the driver looked over the engine and walked back about a quarter of a mile to a roadside shrine like the one we had drunk our libation at on our Baikal trip.  Then we turned and walked back. 
The driver had found the problem.  The radiator was leaking water.  He took a five-gallon jug that he kept in the back of the van and walked a half a mile ahead to a creek, filled the jug, and walked a half a mile back.  He filled the radiator, and we continued on to Aginskoye.
While we were in Aginskoye, we visited another Buddhist temple.  As we entered the grounds by a gate, I noticed a pair of ethic Russian children with dirty blond hair climb over the back wall.  We proceeded around the grounds of temple in a clockwise fashion. 
I turned the prayer wheels this time.  As I did this, I noticed that our guide was putting coins as offerings to the god of Wisdom among others.  The children followed us. When we had almost completed our circle, I finally realized that these children were taking the coins that our guide was leaving and that our guide was unconcerned.
I walked over and nonchalantly laid a one-rouble coin on one of the altars.  I hope the altar of the God of Wisdom.  I nonchalantly walked away.  The coin disappeared into the hand of a dirty-faced little girl.  Another member of the group, who had looked at me strangely when I did this, had a light dawn in his face.  He walked over and put two roubles in the same place.
After supper we began back to Chita.  Our van ran out of water every fifteen minutes.  Our long-suffering driver stopped and refilled it and stopped at every river that we crossed and refilled the jug.
And we returned safely to Chita.

For What It’s Worth

For What It’s Worth
By Bobby Neal Winters

I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down--Buffalo Springfield

I am writing this on the Fourth of July.
A few months ago I remember thinking--I and think I even said it out loud--that this would all be over by the Fourth of July.  I’d grill up some small filets from Beck and Hill, Jean would cook some corn on the cob, and then we’d sit on the driveway and shoot off some fireworks to celebrate “it all” being over.  
Well as the lady said, “God made the world round so we couldn’t see too far ahead.”
Little did we know.
Little did we know that COVID 19 was just like the drum beat in Fleetwood Mac’s song The Chain.  It laid down a rhythm that other elements would be worked into.  Slowly racial unrest began to build. Then the statues etc.  
And all through it the COVID 19 keeps beating like the drum.
And the long, hot summer lay ahead.
I’ve spent a good deal of time cleaning, putting things in order so that I know where to find them.  Throwing other things away.
For many years, I’ve thought about the cleaning of the Temple during the time of Josiah whenever I do a deep cleaning.  When Josiah cleaned the Temple, they discovered that they lost the Bible.
Cleaning and putting things in order is an act of creation.  It involves finding things that have been neglected and putting them in a place where they won’t fall out of our attention.  It involves finding things that are dirty, torn, broken, and useless and throwing them away.
And if you are married or doing this in partnership with others, it involves a lot of conversation about which of these is which.  Which of these piles of paper is the Holy Bible and which is a file of cancelled checks from a bank account you haven’t had for 30 years?
Sometimes we have saved things that are very meaningful for us but are very upsetting to others.  Those we save, but we put away quietly. We give them the special honor of mothballs and a cedar chest.  Either there will be a day where they can be appreciated by others or they will be forgotten about entirely.  Time decides which and it has the final say.
Right now I am looking at a porcelain statue of a donkey that I had on my desk as a graduate student at Oklahoma State.  I am not sure where I got it from, but I seem to remember my Aunt Anne who died last year gave it to me.  She passed away a couple (a few?) years back.  It pleases me to think of it that way, but if someone were to tell me differently and had a convincing argument, I would have to believe them and change my thinking.
This is because above all sentiment and feeling we should seek the truth, even if it is among the debris of our memory.  We’ve been told we shall know the truth and the truth shall set us free. 
Because this is the Fourth of July and our freedom is what we are celebrating.
But the drum is still beating.  It’s hot.  And I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
But I think it will get better.
For what it’s worth.
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. )

The Lord is My Shepherd

The Lord is My Shepherd
By Bobby Neal Winters
Charlie, our rescue springer spaniel has passed away.
I did not love Charlie.
I’ve given up loving pets.  It hurts too much.  We get them for the children.  And we can’t have just one because they need company. We’d had Buttercup, and Buttercup was alone, so we got Obadiah--aka Obie--to be a companion for Buttercup.
Then Buttercup died on a hot Labor Day weekend.  The ground was like a brick, but I dug a grave along the fence in the backyard to Buttercup in the baked ground.  It was a hard thing.  I used tools for digging that one ordinarily uses for mining. But I got Buttercup buried.
I had only one request when it was done: Anymore animals we get should fit in a boot box, and preferably a shoe box.
Then they brought back Charlie from the Humane Society.  While he wasn’t a huge dog, he definitely didn’t fit in a boot box.
We hadn’t had him too long before we learned he was a jumper and a climber.  He loved to jump out of our backyard fence.  He didn’t have any place he particularly wanted to go when he jumped out and he never went far, but this was the beginning of a time of “growth” for us.  We had to grow in our thinking of how to keep him in our backyard.
We’d kept Buttercup chained up before we built the fence for our backyard, and I’d decided that I would never do that again.  The fence was enough for Buttercup, but not for Charlie.
So we put in a radio fence.  You may recall that with a radio fence you bury copper wire in the ground to enclose the area where you want your dog to stay.  You then put a shock-collar on the dog so he receives a jolt of electricity whenever he crosses the line.  This was enough to keep him in the yard.
That is, it was enough to keep him in the yard until it was a thunderstorm or the Fourth of July or a home football game.  The football games were in some sense the worst.  As you may know, we shoot off a cannon whenever we score.  Charlie hated that.  Eventually, he came to associate the sounds of tail-gating and the crowd with it, so a game was enough to throw him into a panic.  We didn’t even have to score for him to endure the pain of the shock collar.
But he began to get older and fatter, and I think calmer too. He settled down and was happy with his life in the backyard.
He had his favorite spots around to rest.
He loved people.
And he loved squirrels, though in ways that weren’t always so fortunate for the squirrels.
And he and Obadiah were good companions.  He had the calm disposition of an Irishman in a pub, and Obadiah the more regimented personality of a German prison guard, the schnauzer that he is.  Obie is getting blind and senile and barks at things that aren’t there, and Charlie took that in his stride.
But Charlie’s bark began to change.  He sounded like someone was trying to start a broken chainsaw.
Jean took him to the vet and he had congestive heart trouble and tumors on his lungs, probably cancer.  She was given some medicine for him, but we knew it wasn’t long.
He had good days and bad days for a while, but it was getting worse.  Yesterday, before I went home from work, I told my boss that I would be taking the morning off today because I would probably be taking Charlie to the vet to be put to sleep.
Last evening he died.  He was here; then he wasn’t here.
It hasn’t rained in a few weeks so we let the water run on a spot along the fence for about an hour.  Then this morning Jean I I dug the grave together.
We put him in a bag and lowered the bag in the ground.  Then as we tossed shovels of dirt on top of him, I began to say, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...”
I will not love another animal again.
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. )

Going around in a circle on our journey to God

Going around in a circle on our journey to God
By Bobby Neal Winters
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, Lord, by and by
There's a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky
--Charles Gabriel
There are some people who say that the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament are different Gods, but it just ain’t so.  Having said that, I will say that I’ve never seen anyone who believed they are different change their minds, so I am not going to try.  Go on believing whatever you want to.
Man is on a journey.  From the Biblical account it starts in the Garden of Eden, and if you go all the way to the Revelation of St. John, it ends in a city, the New Jerusalem. 
I say the Garden of Eden and the New Jerusalem are the same place when looked at from the correct perspective: The Presence of God.
Adam and Eve were very childlike in the Garden.  They enjoyed an easy intimacy with God.  Have you noticed that little children aren’t respecters of persons?  They will throw up on the King of Spain with as much ease as they throw up on old Aunt Alice. 
This is the sort of relationship Man had with God in the Garden. And God, the supposedly mean, vicious, hateful God of the Old Testament dealt with them as one does with small children.  He threatened their very lives to keep them from breaking a rule.  When Adam and Eve broke the rules and were ashamed of their nakedness, he didn’t kill them.  He made them better clothes.  It was a teachable moment and He took advantage of it.
And he gave them a start on their journey.
Yes, there are places on the journey where God seems to be cruel, but we need to remember that the Bible was written by Man.  It documents this journey, this struggle with God from Man’s side.  The cruelty was Man looking in a mirror seeing himself and not window onto God.
If you read it, struggle with it, persist with it, you will see Man’s understanding of God sharpen, come into focus.  It is much like how we increase our understanding of our parents as we grow up ourselves.
There is this poem, this meme, whatever called “Footprints in the sand.”  There were two sets of footprints, one belonging to the poet and the other to God.  The poet remarks that during one period of his life there was only one set, so where were you God.  The poet has God reply, “I was carrying you.”  Okay, God might very well have replied, “I was letting you learn to walk by yourself.” (Yes, I have read Butt-prints in the Sand.  Google it.)
So when Man was young in his journey with God, he understood him as a child, so presumably when we close the circle we will understand God more like we understand our parents when we grow up. We will put away childish things.
We absolutely cannot separate the New Testament God from that of the Old.  When the writers of the New Testament referred to the scriptures, they were referring to the Old Testament:  The Books of the Law, the Books of the Prophets, and the Books of the Writings.  Those writings draw a map which the authors of the New Testament believed to be completed in Jesus.  They present Jesus as a New Adam, a new beginning for Man.
It is a journey, a circular journey.  At the end we find the God we left behind, but by virtue of the journey, we will understand his perfect love because we will have learned it ourselves.
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. )

With me There is Tea

With me There is Tea

By Bobby Neal Winters
I am still studying my Spanish every day on Duolingo.  I’d studied Latin for a while, but it didn’t go very far.  I also took up Hindi because I think the way the writing looks is pretty.
Hindi has been rewarding for me.  Not because I can speak it because no, no, no I can’t.  I tried some of it on some faculty from India I work with.  They couldn’t understand a word.  I know because they are very polite and respectful to old people and if they could’ve possibly understood me they would have.  But I said, “Raj lurka heh,” which means “Raj is a boy,” and they looked like springer spaniels who’d been told Maxwell’s equations. Utter incomprehension. 
On one hand, Hindi is an Indo-European language.  This means it is part of the same family of languages that Spanish, French, Latin, Greek, and English belong to. As a consequence there are some grammatical similarities you can hold on to.  On the other hand, there is virtually no vocabulary in common.  Nada, null, zilch.
The word order is different.  In English we typically will use subject-verb-object (SVO) order: Raj eats bananas.  In Hindi, it is typically subject-object-verb (SOV): Raj bananas eats.
Hindi has been rewarding for me because I’ve been able to move from utter incomprehension to knowing a little. It’s like trying to climb a wall that seems to be made out of glass.  At first my fingernails slide off, but then my nails finally dig in.
The way having something is handled differently.  In English we say, “I have tea.” In Spanish it is, “Tengo tea.”  “Tengo” is “I have.”  We handle ownership with a verb dedicated to it.  In Hindi, this is different.  You are taught to say, “Meyrey pas chai heh.”  This more or less literally comes out as “Near me tea is.”
This made a bell go off in my brain. It reminded me of something from years ago.  
Twenty years ago this month, I was on a Rotary group study exchange in Russia.  For four months before going, my group mates and I studied Russian.  Russian, like Hindi, has a different writing system.  It’s not as alien as Hindi, but it was alien enough for us GSE team members. 
In Russian, when you have tea you say, “oo menya yist chai,” which comes over literally as “With me there is tea.”  This is to say, Russian doesn’t do ownership with a verb either.  It makes prepositions do the work. (In Hindi, it is post positions, which are prepositions on the other side.)  I want you also to notice that they use “chai” for tea in both Russian and Hindi.
Anyway, this made me want to take up Russian again. So I have.
It has been a real trip down memory lane.  I’ve been surprised at the things I remember, the things I’ve forgotten, and the things I’ve forgotten that have come back so easily that I mustn’t have really forgotten.
I’ve remembered Russia.  I’ve remembered my GSE Team. I’ve remembered road trips across the vast Siberian plains and steam baths with folks who were darned near naked.
It’s been work, but it’s been worth it.
See you around. Adios. Namaste. Do svidanya.
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. )

Raise an Ebenezer

Raise an Ebenezer

By Bobby Neal Winters

Here I raise my Ebenezer

Here there by Thy great help I've come

And I hope, by Thy good pleasure

Safely to arrive at home

--Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

This is a column about racism.  We’ll get there eventually, but bear with me.

One of the first sermons I remember hearing in a Methodist Church (given by a man named David Weible for those who know him) was about conversion as a continuing process.

This was a revelation to me.  I was still relatively young at the time (I was 26 years old--a baby!) and the only experience I had seen of conversion was that in the Baptist Church I’d grown up in.  It was modeled after Paul’s conversion on the Road to Damascus: He was blinded by a great light and everything changed.

He is some irony for folks that are looking for it.  At the moment I learned about conversion as a continuing process, everything suddenly changed for me.  It gave me a framework to put things in.  This has slowly grown over time and this way of looking at things has gotten into every part of my life.  Small changes, persisted in, build up over a period of time to make large changes.

Here is where we come to race.

My mother had an uncle named Frank, so he was my Uncle Frank too.  Uncle Frank was from Alabama, but he was the first man I remember talking eloquently about race in anything like an enlightened way. While any talking head today would dismiss Uncle Frank as a racist, Uncle Frank liked black people.  He didn’t tolerate them; he liked them.  He spoke with them.  He listened to them.  He repeated their words back to us: “Look at the palms of my hands, they are as white as yours.  Look at my tongue and the inside of my mouth; it is the same color as yours. Why am I treated differently?”  

There were other stories involving the horrible way his own father had treated blacks that I won’t repeat here as it would lead us too far afield. Suffice it to say, he was ashamed of it. He recognized the wrong of it and he improved his behavior over that of his father’s.  And his sons’ behavior and attitudes improved with respect to Uncle Frank.  

This was part of the slow conversion as a continuing process that I first learned about in that Methodist sermon 30 years ago.  This involves converting Man as opposed to converting men.  And it is good.

But.

But there are some things the Baptists got right.  There are times when you have to throw away the whiskey bottles, burn the address book that has your pusher’s number in it, break ties with all your old partying buddies, and march up to the front of the church to make a declaration that it is all going to change.  And then do it!

There are times when you have to march your troops across the river and burn the bridges behind them.  You have to unload your troops from the boats and set the boats afire. You have to cross the Rubicon and yell, “Alea iacta est!”

There are times when the Son of God has to call out, “My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Or when a black man dies gasping for breath, calling for air.

We are like people who have hardened our hearts, but sometimes pain and injustice is so severe it can break our hearts of stone so that they may feel as the heart of a human ought to feel.

We don’t have to wait for another verse of “Just as I am.” The time has come as a country to walk to the front and declare that today everything changes.  We will turn away from our national sin.  We will raise our Ebenezer and make a sign that we will change.

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. )

Death by the Numbers

Death by the Numbers
By Bobby Neal Winters
My education is in math.  I like to program computers. I’ve been learning how to use software that allows me to tabulate data.  And I have access to the internet.
This is a deadly combination especially these days.
You can access the COVID 19 data the New York Times tabulates with ease.  They keep the data on a county by county basis and this allows me to put it together in ways that are interesting to me rather than to the folks at the New York Times.  
For example, they’ve been keeping a cumulative account of cases and deaths.  I am interested in the new cases and the new deaths.  This is easy to get: You subtract yesterday’s totals from today’s.  
I do this and I graph it, and when I am in the mood, I share the graph with my Facebook friends.  It is an interesting exercise because real data is ‘spikey.’  The people who get the disease react as individuals and some get tested sooner, some get tested later.  This means that people who get exposed at the same time might get tested sooner or later than the rest of the group.  This means there might be fewer people tested on one day and more on another.  As a consequence there is either an increase or a decrease in the numbers.
As a cure to this, there is a standard technique for smoothing the data called a running average or a rolling average.  I calculate a running average for the previous seven days.  It brings the high numbers low and the low numbers high, smoothing things out.  The result of this is that you can spot trends.  
It doesn’t make for good headlines, though, because you can’t point to a single data point to say either “The number of cases is dramatically up” or “The number of cases has fallen drastically” for a single day.
I can also look at the data for Kansas City as a whole, rather than just the Kansas or the Missouri parts.  In addition, I can look at our area as a whole.  I do this two ways: A nine-county region and a 22-county region, both centered at Pittsburg.  In both cases, the numbers are relatively small.  In the 22-county region, there was one day with 3 deaths.  Yes, even one death is too many, but there is no comparison with the 1500 some deaths they had in one day in New York City.
To those who say, yes, but New York City has a higher population, proportionally they have had 1500 deaths per million population while the 22-county region surrounding us has had 28 deaths per million population.  They have had it much, much, much worse than us.
The next is a sensitive topic. COVID 19 has affected the elderly much worse than the young.  I came upon some CDC data that breaks it down by age.  Using data from the last week in May, one-third of the deaths have been people over the age of 85; almost 60 percent of the deaths are people over 75; 80 percent, people over 65; 92 percent, people over 55; 97.5 percent, people over 45.  
The flip side of this is that only about 2.5 percent of the people who have died are under the age of 45. (While this is a small percentage, over 2000 people in this age group have died in the US.)
Here is where I need to be very careful, and you do too because there are a lot of numbers here. If you are in your 20s, you consider anyone over 45 to be old.  I live with twentysomethings, so I know.  If you as a twentysomething know anyone who has died, that person--in your mind--has lived a good long life of at least 45 years.
This is what is called conditional data.  These are percentages of people who have died. For New York, which is the easiest to calculate, if you got the disease, there was about an 8 percent chance you died.  For people under 45, this would work out, roughly,  to about 2 in a thousand. That sounds small, but if you were going to a football game that 10,000 people were attending and you knew a gunman was going to kill 20 of those, would you go to the game?
But here’s the thing.  They aren’t planning to “go to the game,” i.e. get sick.  The disease itself is invisible and, because the people who get it are quarantined, we don’t see the effects. Young people especially.
So the previous four paragraphs are there to help you understand why there are people partying out on Lake of the Ozarks while the rest of us are scandalized by it.
After all these numbers, what do I mean to say?  Out here in the middle of the country we’ve been spared so far. Those of us who are older are relatively more at risk.  Beyond that my basis for saying anything becomes shaky. 
Be safe.
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. )

A report on the NALM Battery-Powered Mowing initiative

By Bobby Neal Winters
I have in this space before alluded to the fact that I have purchased a battery-powered lawnmower. It is a Ryobi 20-inch, 40-volt mower.  At the time I first told you about it, I was just getting started with it.  For the last 5 or 6 weeks, I’ve been mowing with it as part of a NALM-funded initiative to determine the efficacy of battery-powered lawn mowing.  (For the uninitiated, NALM is the National Association of Lawn Mowers.)
I was chosen for this initiative because NALM recognized in me a dedication to traditional lawn mowing as a practice.  NALM is dedicated to the personal mower, those mowers who wish to have a better lawn and to do it themselves rather than to hire professionals who can do it more regularly, effectively, aesthetically, and probably at a lower overall cost.  I have never hired a professional to mow my lawn: When forced to let someone else do it because of injury or travel, I’ve always hired a neighbor boy or a daughter’s boyfriend to do it.
I now mow my lawn in two parts: Front yard on one day a backyard on day two.  The front yard ordinarily takes about 30 minutes  and the backyard ordinarily takes 45.  The word ‘ordinarily’ is there to account for those occasions where ‘events’, usually rain, keep me from mowing on my spring schedule of once a week.  When that happens, the backyard can take an hour or more to mow.  This is germane to my report on my part of the initiative which follows.
My battery-powered Ryobi is lighter than my gas-powered mower.  This is because it’s frame is made of hard plastic.  It is plastic, but don’t think of the plastic your grandchild’s toy car is made out of.  This is more like a lighter bakelite;  it is rigid and not soft, but like I said, not as heavy as metal would be.
This brings up a point that will be an issue for many of you. When I got my Ryobi and discovered that you start it with the touch of a single button, I was thrilled. As you know, there are those days when you have to jerk multiple times on a mower with an ICE (internal combustion engine) to get it started.  For those who are getting older or of a smaller frame, this can be an issue.  The touch of a button to start the mower removes that problem with...uh...the touch of a button.  
I had hopes that my wife and mother-in-law would make use of the new mower because of this feature.  Sadly, that was not to be.  The plastic construction has put it into the category of one of my new toys, and they are terrified to touch it.  A  likely story.
I don’t know much about the specs on the motor.  One might be tempted to say that it is of a new, modern design, but I don’t believe that is necessarily the case. The bottleneck to increased use of electric motors in such application has been the relative low energy density of batteries to that of gasoline.  While there are electric motors and electric motors,  it is the higher energy density of lithium batteries that is enabling the increase in battery-powered mowers--and cars for that matter.
I paid $300 for my Ryobi.  It came with one 6ah battery. (The ‘ah’ stands for amp-hour.) Such a battery you can run at one amp for six hours or six amps for 1 hour.  It will run my mower for about 45 minutes, so the motor as I use it is drawing about eight amps.  For comparison, your washing machine draws 10 amps.  I wasn’t content with having just one battery, so I bought a spare 6ah battery for about $150.  From this, information we can derive the following. The electric motor is the cheap part of the mower.  Ryobi is not going to make it money from the mowers, but from the batteries. (The Japanese have learned a lot from us, haven’t they?) 
I have only had to use my second battery two times.  The first time I mowed the backyard, it was very tall.  It was so tall I had to readjust so as to not mow so close. (This is a very easy thing to do with the Ryobi, by the way.)  Nevertheless, the grass was so thick and tall it sucked one battery dry.  There was one other time I was forced to do the same thing because there had been an extended period between mowings because of the rain.  Neither of the two times did I use the second battery for more than 15 minutes. Lesson: I could have used a 5ah battery for my second battery.  They are much, much less expensive.
Because the mower is lighter, I am not as fatigued after mowing. Because it’s not run by an ICE, it is quieter.  It is not perfectly quiet, but it makes the noise of a very loud electric fan whose blades are hitting grass.
There is no oil to change.  This isn’t really a big thing to me. I’ve never changed oil in a mower: I’ve only added more.  But this is over in any case.  Because there is no oil or gas or any fluid of any kind, you can fold it up and store it vertically.  You’ve just got back 4 square feet of floor space in your potting shed.
For now it is working out well, I will share more as time progresses.
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. )

Only I will remain

Only I will remain
By Bobby Neal Winters
I rewatched the movie Inside Out last night.  For those of you who haven’t seen it, it is a Pixar production.  The story is centered around the personified emotions of a pre-teen girl who has moved with her family from Minnesota to San Francisco. The emotions are Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear.   They are set into a crisis by the move because Joy is the girl’s dominant emotion and Joy attempts to repress Sadness.
I watched--for the second time--and I was moved.
“Moved” might not be strong enough a word.  At one point one of my daughters asked whether I might not need some Gatorade. The implication being that I was in danger of becoming dehydrated by my tears.
I confess it.  I can be sensitive.  When I was growing up, my dad said I was “tender-hearted,” but my big brother, using the honesty for which big brothers can be relied, called me a “bawl bag.”  
Those who know me well, know that I am not a sad person.  It is just that, with me, most strong emotion--Joy, Anger, Sadness--is expressed in tears.  That is the mechanism that my body uses for it.  I don’t have a choice.  That is to say, I don’t have a choice other than to try to repress any strong emotion.
I relax that repression when I watch the movies with my family. So my daughters think I’m something of a bawl bag too.   I need the release.
I’ve been repressing my emotions during the COVID Pause as well.
I don’t think that is a bad thing.  In the novel Dune, George Herbert has a character whose mantra is this:  “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
This quote isn’t about repressing fear, exactly.  It recognizes that the fear is there, but fear is not allowed to be the master.  The emotion of fear if not controlled does impair clear thought.  Yet the energy that is imparted by fear cannot be denied. Controlled, it can sharpen focus.  Repressing fear is not the answer.  Disciplining oneself so that one can properly harness the resources released by fear is.
I think a lot of people have trouble doing that by themselves.  In my opinion, that is why we have traditionally had strong leaders in battle.
In the book “Empire of the Summer Moon” by S.C. Gwynne, it is recounted how incredibly fierce the Comanche were in battle.  They were fearless.  That is, they were fearless until their chief was killed, then they ran.  They fought with the strength of his “medicine.”
I cast no aspersions on the Comanche here. This is a real thing for all people.  We need a leader we can draw strength from.  Someone who recognizes danger, but can control his (or her) fear. Someone who will not fall victim to the “little death” but will use the energy to act rationally with great focus.
We are programmed to work this way.
We need all of our emotions.  They are God’s good gift to us.  But He gave us rational minds to discipline our emotions.  May we be able to find the leaders He has sent us to help us control our fear.
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. )

In the Twinkling of an Eye

By Bobby Neal Winters
On the day this is set to appear in the paper, I have an appointment to get a haircut.  As I write this, it is still not legal to get a haircut in our state, at least not from someone you are not living with.
I reread that paragraph and it makes me wonder.  What would I have thought if I’d been shown this one year ago. No, what if I’d been shown this three months ago.  Klara Blixen, the Danish author, said that God made the world round so that we never be able to see too far down the road.  Thank you, God.
I was going through emails yesterday because I need to have my facts lined-up nice and straight.  It took me back to the beginning of the semester and through mid-March.  The rapidity of the change reminded me of one time when I was coming back from Kansas City with almost all my family in the car.  It was late and it was dark.  The car in front of me hit a deer and had to stop, so I had to stop.  Looking at the emails reminded me of that.  
I’ve been having scripture running through my head: “Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that the last trumpet has blown. (For poetic purposes, I almost used trump in that sentence, but too many people would’ve read it as Trump.  It opens a whole can of worms.) But doesn’t this metaphorically describe what has happened? In the twinkling of an eye, we’ve all been changed.
I have a broad range of friends on Facebook from the Rabid Right to the Looney Left.  Not everyone can be perfect like me and you.  Some people are very eager to get out of isolation. There are some who honestly don’t believe this has ever been a threat.  There are others who I believe would be happy to live in isolation forever and would want to keep others in isolation too.  This pandemic has changed them; they are more who they were than ever before.
I’ve read somewhere, and maybe I’ve mangled it, that some believe that the fires of hell are just the light of God’s Eternal Truth.  The Truth burns away what is false within us and leaves our real selves behind. 
The Truth is not what we hear in the media, neither Fox nor MSNBC. The Truth is spoken in God’s language: In Nature, in our actions, in reality.  This Fire of Truth begins now and goes on long after we are dead. Do we let us consume us or do live in such a way to be in harmony with it?
That is a long way from getting a haircut.  But our lives are constructed from such things as getting haircuts like the drops of water in a river.  Right now a haircut would be to me like a drop of water on the tongue of a man in hell.
Well, maybe that is over-stating it a little bit, but you get the idea.  I’ve got an appointment.  Keep your fingers crossed.

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. )

Time Out

Time Out

By Bobby Neal Winters

A vision has been slowly forming in my head.

I get up every morning without the aid of the alarm, just as the light of the sun makes it possible to walk easily across the floor. Exercise;shower;breakfast.

Then I sit at my computer with the spring breeze cooly blowing across my head, neck, and shoulders.  I look out the north window to the oak tree I planted myself.  Its leaves have been getting bigger as the season progresses.

Most years I’ve had snap shots of this. Most years this has been my saturday.  This year, or should I say, THIS year, it has been everyday.

Usually when I arrive at work at the university, I turn to the east and get a picture of the sun rising over the library. Since mid-March, I’ve walked to the street in front of my house and have taken a picture of the sun rising over the Lady Violist’s house.  Rest her soul; we have lost her.

The street is quiet.  It is quiet even in normal times, but these days I don’t even look.  I trust my hearing.  I step into the middle of the street and take my picture.

We have so many trees in my part of town.  This is part of my vision.  It’s like we are not an ordinary town where we’ve banished trees, where we force them to live in columns like soldiers.   We treat them as children, or better, as brothers as sisters.  They are siblings of ours, having the same Mother--the Earth--and the same Father--God.

We were the last born of their children.  The last born is favored over the first born in Biblical tradition to be the organizer.  Our trees, our plants are organized in my part of town, our part of town. Not regimented: Organized.  They are trimmed and cleaned (this is the word the King James uses). 

And there are animals.

We have at my house--I believe--a family of racoons.  I’ve never seen them; I’ve only ever heard them.  But I’ve seen their tracks. There is also a family of foxes that lives just across the way.

So my vision is that we are not in a town.  We are in a tamed forest, a garden.

We live among the raccoons, the foxes, the snakes, the squirrels, the birds, and the bees.  We live among the Oaks, the Sweetgums, the lilacs, the azaleas, and the forsythia.   In the quiet of the morning there is the sound of the breeze through the soft spring leaves harmonizing with bird song.  Later the sound of the lawn mowers join the symphony modulated by distance and direction with the occasional freight train to bring in dissonance in a minor key.

We’re in a good town, my friends. We are in harmony.

Yes, the world will be shifting to a faster gear soon.  Yes, we all need to start making money again.

But do we have to be in such a hurry?

“Be still and know that I am God.”

As much as parents love their children, sometimes they need to discipline them.  Putting them in time out is usually the most gentle step.  If the children don’t listen, there are steps beyond this.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

Turn off the TV; take the earbuds out of your ears; listen.

Do you hear it?

“Be still and know that I am God.”

We do have our work to do, but do we have to go at it so fast?  Do we have to make so much noise that we can’t hear the whispers of Mother Earth?  Do we have to drown out the still small voice of God?

It’s there as the breeze stir the leaves.

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. )