As the Arrow Flies

By Bobby Neal Winters

There are things you do “for the children” that you are really doing for yourself.  The kids are an excuse.  They are small, but, somehow, that makes them easier to hide behind.

I’ve bought bows for Lydia and myself.

These are youth bows.  They are a step above a toy, but they are not yet a weapon.  I am waiting to see how we progress before I invest any more.  So far I’ve got less than a hundred dollars in it total: the bows were $20 a piece; a couple of extra arrows about $10; shooting gloves $12 a piece; arm protectors a total of $30.  

I also got a bail of hay to use as a target, but I am not counting that as an expense since we can use that for dog bedding next winter.

It is a fun activity and would have been a good activity to take up as a child, but I didn’t.  I wasn’t allowed to.  And I need to be fair here.  I don’t remember ever asking for a bow and arrow set.  I don’t remember it ever coming up.  I don’t remember being denied it or feeling deprived for not having a bow and arrow set.

What I have is a feeling of absolute certainty that it wouldn’t’ve been allowed because Dad would not have allowed it because he feared for the safety of his sons.  And he had reason.

Dad had grown up in what would be considered poverty today.  He went barefoot until the snow flew.  I’ve seen pictures of him in overalls that had the straps extended with cord.  He’d worked in the oil field and had seen accidents.  He’d gone to war and had seen bodies--friend and foe--laying dead and mangled.  He lost a five-year-old nephew to an accident.

His mind was filled with scenarios of disaster of every sort.

My childhood was filled with having pictures of great activities built up, but then shot down because these scenarios of disaster crowded them out of existence.

And I understand.  I’ve never been angry with Dad about this.  But it has had an effect.  As I grow older and gain more understanding of life and of myself--not separate activities by any means--I see the effect this has had on me.  It has caused a lack of self-confidence.  When a boy’s father shows this much trepidation, the boy begins to wonder whether his father is doubting him.  

You take fewer chances and you fail less, but failing, oddly enough, is important to the building of self-confidence.  You must fail before you learn that failure is not deadly, not your enemy.  Batman’s dad said it: You fall so that you may get back up!

So Lydia and I are learning to shoot a bow at the same time.  I am being born-again as it were.  You put lay the arrow on the bow and fit the string into the arrow’s knock. You pull back the string while aiming at the target, and you let the arrow fly.

And you miss the target.

So you shoot again.

And you miss again.

With each arrow flying, you tend to get closer.  

The string on the bow hurts your fingers, so you get a glove to wear.  The string slaps against your forearm, so you get an arm protector.

And you continue shooting.

Soon you hit the hay bail every time and your daughter does too.  There is time to think while you practice.  Will she remember this?  If she does will it be fondly?

The arrow flies again and strikes the target more closely than before.

You wonder if your father would approve.  You get the feeling he’s watching.

Your daughter shoots.  Her arrow is closer to the center of the bail than yours and you smile.  And you think maybe he’s smiling too.

Hush, Listen

By Bobby Neal Winters

In the beginning was the Word.

Nature has a language.

It’s a subtle language uttered in whispers; it is a coarse language uttered in screams.  It comes in not only through the ear, but also through the eye, the nose, the tongue, and the skin.  It is in a baby’s cry, a lover’s body, or a gust of wind.

We are surrounded.

Consider body language.  We use it all the time, but often we don’t take it in on a conscious level.  We walk away we impressions of things left unsaid.

In my job, I talk to a lot of students.  In groups, of course, but also on a one-to-one basis.  I interview students in order to help them to discern whether the major I advise is the correct route for them.  I’ve a lot of young people.  I sometimes think that I’ve learned how to tell someone is lying to me.  When I first took on the advisement job, I would go home at the end of some days exhausted and I didn’t know why because all I’d done all day was listen.

I eventually figured out that I wasn’t just listening with my ears; I was paying attention to a lot of body language.  The extent of this became clear to me when I was sent a student from another department who I was told had “no affect.”  I’ve never studied psychology, so I didn’t know what that meant.  When the student arrived, I learned.

I would say something and look in her face.  There was no response. I made a joke.  There was no response.  At the end of the interview, I was exhausted.  Everything I had tossed out, verbal and nonverbal, had been sucked into the black-hole of no affect.

It’s not just people who have body language.  I think that I could get most people to agree that our pets have body language.  When I take walks, I often come upon dogs who are not on leashes.  This is illegal, but it happens.  Most of the time, I can tell if the dog is going to be friendly.  I can speak a little dog body language.  I can speak enough cat to know when they want out.

At night the dogs speak to the trains who whistle going by and the fire trucks as they scream through the night.  They’re hungry for the conversation of the wild.

I am enough of a country boy to know that this works with cattle, horses, and some wild animals as well.  And why shouldn’t it.  We are a part of nature.  We were created or we evolved (try to explain the difference between those two) as a part of nature’s system.  It works.

As a part of nature, we are equipped to speak nature’s language, though we have insulated ourselves from it so much that we are no longer fluent in our mother tongue.

But it’s still there.  Women produce pheromones.  They’ve been shown to cause the monthly cycles of women in a group to synchronize.  Women’s bodies have secret conversations with each others for reasons long forgotten.

Consider the effect that the curves and nooks and dents and bumps on the bodies of the opposite sex have upon the physiology of our own bodies.  The heart quickens; our breathing changes; our thoughts perturbed from our day jobs.  Nature speaks and it has a task for us.

Some of us who grew up before the days of modern weather forecasting still know nature’s signs for rain and storm.  Nature speaks in a million languages and we’ve forgotten most of them.

An eye to the sky has been replaced by the numbers on a computer screen.  We can read the satellite picture, but it’s getting harder to feel the rain in our noses before it comes.

Charles Wesley penned, “O for a thousand tongues to sing.”  I would plead for us to have our ears back so we can hear what we are being told and for the quietness to hear it.

Naked Chimpanzees

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are naked chimpanzees that use cell phones.  Of course we are messed up.

The author of the second chapter of Genesis expressed the same sentiment, but many who read it from there will either dismiss it or misunderstand it.

Man is not happy.  We are dysfunctional.  We seek relief for our unhappiness in destructive ways: Methamphetamine; alcohol; drugs; promiscuous sex.  Are we having fun yet?  Are we happy?

We have alienated ourselves from our place in Nature.  And everything we try to do to make it better only makes it worse. And there is no going back.  

The Ancient Mind who scratched out Genesis said there was an angel with with a flaming sword there to keep us from going back. And I wonder.  I’ve seen the documentaries; I’ve read the books.  Stories about the primitive peoples in the jungle.  They don’t give them a survey with questions to answer on a one to five Likert scale to see how happy they are, but they don’t look comfortable.  They don’t have beds; they don’t have TVs; they don’t have toilets.  The angel can put away his flaming sword.

Religion spans the gap.  Religion is the holder of our collective memory.  Religion reminds us of where we started and where we’ve been.  Religion gives a look at where we’ve been so we can better tell where we are going.  It reminds us of exactly how far we’ve come from communion with God, from harmony with Nature.

Any good religion will at its roots be pagan.  And when I say pagan I am not talking about a bunch of crystal rubbers or potion makers.  I mean that religion must touch us where we meet with Nature: at the dinner-table; in the bed room.  

Something must die in order that we eat and we should thank God for its life.

The purpose of sex is to create new life, and we should be ever respectful of that.

The Christian Bible in the Book of Revelation predicts that when we reach our New Jerusalem we will again enjoy the direct presence of God.  No temple; no priests.  Does this vision mean we will again come to some sort of harmony?  I won’t say one way or the other because I simply don’t know.  I will say that I fear those who would try to bring it to being here and now out of their own vision.

Is it a vision of some afterlife?  We know very little about the afterlife.  The one certain thing being that there will be a point after which I am no longer alive.

I always upset myself when I try to rule the world.  I must roll back my concerns: love my neighbor as myself; love my God with all my heart.

Loving God entails loving the Truth and seeking it out.  Loving my neighbor also requires effort.  I do them both badly.

But then I am a naked chimpanzee with a cell phone.

Canadian Hockey and American Education

By Bobby Neal Winters

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success contains a marvelous case study on amateur hockey in Canada. The folks in Canada hold the game of hockey at a level of esteem that I find mystifying.  Apparently they put a stick in a kid’s hand by the time he’s big enough to hold it.  They really care.

A study was done in which it was found that virtually all of the players on the elite championship team were born in the few months of the year and players born at the end of the year are virtually missing.  The reason for this is that amateur hockey leagues in Canada have an age cut off date on January 1.  The kids who are born in January are a year more mature than those born in the same year but in December.  They get on the first team; they get more coaching; ultimately they get to play more.

This extra play, extra attention, better coaching pays off incrementally and over time it manifests in players from that latter half of the year simply disappearing.

Gladwell, who is Canadian and possibly hockey-crazy himself as a result, argues that if the system was organised differently--say with a second league of players born in the second half of the year--that Canada could half twice as many championship level hockey players.

This case study serves as a guiding example for the thrust of the book: American education could be approached differently to achieve better results.

In education, the dividing line isn’t January 1st; it’s social class.  The middle class have advantages that makes them more educable that the working class.  Children from middle class families are more entitled than those from working class families; they are much better at working within institutional systems.They come into their class by virtue of the good choices their forebears have made.  

Here I want to share some thoughts.  I come from a working class family.  I competed along the way with some of those middle class kids.  Hind sight being twenty-twenty, I can see where they had some know-how about some things that I didn’t.  I also see where I had a lot of help along the way from other people.  Now I find myself in a position where I’ve got some middle class kids of my own and I want them to have every advantage possible, but I also have a desire to give a hand in the way a hand was given me.

It is at this point when I am in danger of getting warm and fuzzy that I’d like to go back to Gladwell’s Canadian Hockey example.  In particular, I want to talk about the idea that you could make twice as many good hockey players if you had a league for the second half of the year.  You run into resource issues right off the bat because either you are going to need twice as many coaches or the coaches you do have are going to have to work twice as hard.  Good coaches are just as scarce as good players.

But this is Canada, so maybe they love chasing a damn a checker around on the ice enough to take out of their hides long enough to double their numbers and bring out a new generation of hockey players twice as numerous as all previous generations.

So what?

Even if you care for the game, this isn’t a guarantee of winning any more Olympic medals.  Quite frankly they may already have more than enough talent to dominate the sport.  There are only so many players that can be at the top.  Doubling that number doesn’t mean that they win more.  It means that more good players will be locked off the championship team.

In the mean time, unless there is care taken to insure high quality coaching, there is no guarantee that two leagues will produce better players.  Indeed, if the level of play is diluted the quality might go down.

Okay, let’s talk about education again.  I do think that it’s important.  It was my ticket to the middle class and I like it here.  The beds are soft; the cars are nice; and I don’t have as big a chance of losing fingers like my Grampa Sam did.

All of that having been said, we have to use our educational resources wisely.

There is a broad range of opinion on how to do this much of it quite heated.  There are people from both ends of the political spectrum who care very deeply.  Malcolm Gladwell tends toward the left, but I discovered that he and Thomas Sowell, who leans a bit toward the right, to be in a surprising amount of agreement.

Sowell addresses the topic of education in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals.  Without going into too deep of analysis, let me summarized by saying that they agree on the need for professionalism on the part of the teachers and hard work on the part of the students.  After that, agreement might be harder to come by.

I’ve don’t have enough insight into the heart of Man to know how to make students work harder in today’s culture, so let’s look at the other end.Good teachers are in just a short supply as good hockey coaches.   We need to take care of the ones we have and work to make new ones.  

It’s something to work on.

Attacking the Soldering Demon

Attacking the Soldering Demon

By Bobby Neal Winters

I may have mentioned in an earlier post that I have demons which have kept me from pursuing the world of electronics: the Demon of Lack-of-Self-Confidence; the Demon of Fear-of-Loss-Money.

Chief among my demons up until now has been the Soldering Demon.  I ran into this demon while trying to put together a kit for an RF-modulator for an ELF computer.  I had never soldered before, but I figured I would try.  The directions which came with the kit were as encouraging as they were racist and sexist: “These parts are usually assembled by teenage Mexican girls.”

I kid you not.

It turns out that the teenage Mexican girls out did me.  Instead of an RF-modulator I created a one-and-a-half by two-inch rectangle of lead or tin or what-the-hell-ever.  Money was tight in those days growing up, so this failure carried a huge load of guilt.

Time rolled forward and a tried to fight the demon by getting electronic kits for my older daughters.  The oldest one was game.  She could handle hot glue like a pro, and I figured it was just a small step from there to soldering.

Wrong.

We tried a telephone kit.  I figured that since she wanted a phone in her room that this would be an incentive.  We got started, but we couldn’t follow through.

The problem is that there is actually something to be learned.  There is a certain amount of patience, a certain amount of hand-eye coordination, and a certain amount of skill that only practice can bring.

Roll time forward again.

As a part of my continuing Zombie Apocalypse Crystal Radio quest, I came upon directions for a Three-Penny Radio. This takes the crystal radio one or two steps further by introducing amplification. The problem is that it required a bit of soldering, but this was turned into a virtue by making the soldering simple.

We did this late yesterday afternoon.  We’d put together a solar cell kit earlier and this had gone well.  I thought we could start on the Three-Penny Radio by just doing part of it, but Lydia wanted to push on.  This was a mistake because I hadn’t had a chance to look over the directions.  [The directions on the site are complete, but they’ve not been idiot-proofed as we shall see.]

We soldered it all together, stuck the earpiece in our ears, and nada. Nothing. Simon and Garfunkle’s Sound of Silence done for real.  It was then that Lydia exercised an amount of discretion that I didn’t have until just a few years ago.

“Let’s fix this later, Dad.”

So we put it away.

Went to bed last night, church this morning, ate lunch, and took a nap.

When I woke up, Lydia was gone.

I went to the table and compared what we’d done to the picture in the instructions.  The two were different.  

I then did what you do when you solder something incorrectly.  I un-soldered it and re-soldered it.  I put the battery in it, put the earpiece in my ear, and heard the beautiful sound of static.  With a little tuning, this was replaced by music.

I rock.

I am now waiting for Lydia to get back to receive her assessment.

The Invisible World

By Bobby Winters

While ignorance is not something we should be thankful for as a good in itself, I am glad there are so many things that have been saved for me to learn in adulthood so that I may better appreciate them.  Crystal radio now comes into that list.

I am even more fortunate in that I have a child learning with me so that I may have my pleasure amplified by feeling along with her.

I found plans for a crystal radio at this site. You may look up the details there.  My understanding of the construction of the device itself was increased when I realize it could be visualized in the following way.  The main part is a circle. (I suppose this could be what they refer to as a circuit, but I don’t want to use that technical term in a way that is nonstandard.)  The circle consists of the coil, the diode, and the earpiece.

I chose to use a crystal radio earpiece instead of modifying an old telephone hand set.  I might come to regret this in the case of a zombie apocalypse, but it’s a risk I am willing to take for the sake of simplicity.  Messing with the tiny wires in the phone cord was too much for my old eyes and my aging hands.  I might work it in at the next step.

I made my coil out of wire I had left-over from the radio fence I’d installed to keep Charlie in.  I had been uncertain about it.  So uncertain was I, that I made a second one out of magnet wire.  When I tried it out this afternoon, it wouldn’t work, so I had Lydia bring out the first one, and it worked!

The diode is the the final part of the circle.  It cost about a dollar to buy and about $5 to have shipped. Oi!

But you put these three pieces in a circle for the main part of the radio.

The you hook the coil to an antenna and another part of the circle to the ground wire.

Then you listen.

The sound was almost ghostly.  You might wonder whether it was there or not, but it is.

Then you realize you’ve made something that captures that invisible world around us, and your heart soars with joy.  You don’t have to be an engineer; you don’t have to be a scientist.  It’s just a little wire, an earpiece, and your diode...a rock on a wire.

I would like to remove the “store-bought” elements from this, in particular the diode and the earpiece.  I suppose thinking in terms of the zombie apocalypse is my standard.  Things that are re-purposed are okay.  Things that you could get by tearing up something else are okay.

Crystal Radios and the Zombie Apocalypse

By Bobby Winters

For those who’ve been following this space for a while, this is another adventure in the tradition of the Potato Cannon and the One-Piece-at-a-Time Computer. A notion came into my mind that I wanted to make a crystal radio.  Their is one important difference.  I remember the moment I decided to make the potato cannon: I saw rednecks on TV creating explosions and generally having fun, and I wanted to reclaim my heritage.  I remember the moment I decided to build a computer: I had extrapolated from how to make a potato cannon to how to make an IED and decided I didn’t want to wind up on some FBI watch list.

But I have no memory of the moment I decided to make a crystal radio.

I suppose, like all things, pieces of the desire to do this have been floating around in me waiting for a key ingredient, but that key ingredient came in so slowly that I didn’t recognize it as happening.  One day I simply knew I wanted to do it.

Why make a radio?

Radios are cool.  They are Einstein’s spooky action at a distance embodied.  Some guy--maybe far around the world--talks into a microphone it goes out into the air and you can hear it thousands of miles away.

You say, yes, that is cool.  Why do you want to build one?  You can buy them cheaply.  Heck, you own several already.  

Okay, there is something about being able to do it yourself.  It’s the difference between winning the affections of a real, live woman in all her complexity and buying them. One requires some virtue on your part, and the other only requires that you have cash.

Then there is the Zombie Apocalypse thing.

There are certain skills we should cultivate in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse.  

Please be aware that I am only speaking of the Zombie Apocalypse metaphorically.  In less colorful terms, we creatures of modernity are so far removed from nature and are so reliant on the tools of high civilization for our very survival that we begin to feel rather exposed.

If there were a Zombie Apocalypse how would we be informed of the coming Zombie Hoards.  There would be no news from cable-tv; those folks are almost zombies already.  There would be no power from the electric grid.  There would only be lone, isolated Ham radio operators transmitting reports using batteries charged by wind power.  Those who know how to make crystal radios will be able to hear their transmissions and be ready when the zombies arrive, waiting for them with their potato cannons.  (After the potatoes run out, zombie body parts will be used.)

I’ve been doing research on the Internet and have found a wealth of information.  At this point I am one 1N34A diode away from having the parts I need to make the radio set.  I went to Radio Shack and all I could find was a 1N40A diode.  Although, I have to say that on YouTube I found the plans for a so-called Foxhole radio that uses a razor blade and the stub of a number two pencil in place of the diode.  I’ve got to think that if you can get a razor blade and a number two pencil to work then going from 1N34A to 1N40A isn’t going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference.

In the mean time, I have enlisted the help of Lydia.

Back when daughters one and two were younger, I’d bought an AM radio kit, but couldn’t get them interested.  The kit had lain untouched for years.  Saturday afternoon, Lydia and I put it together. We can get exactly one station: KKOW.  We listened to a little of a basketball game.  She was hooked.

As she took her long, thin fingers and maneuvered the resistors, capacitors, and transistors into place, I saw something else begin to happen, something exciting.

Next Saturday the crystal radio.  Then I replace the diode with a razor blade and a number two pencil.  Then we figure out something about tuners and amplification.

We will be ready for the zombies when they come.

The Tin Can Telephone Part II

By Bobby Neal Winters
            This is a continuation from The Tin Can Telephone on my other blog.

It is tempting to say that teaching is all about communication.  There might be some validity to that, but the plain statement itself would be easy to misinterpret. Teaching is not about getting information from the head of the teacher to the head of the student.  Something like that will no doubt happen along the way, but it is a part of a much more subtle process.  It is a process whose subtlety I appreciate more with each passing year.

One can model the teacher in front of the classroom with the tin can telephone as I did earlier.  The teacher speaks, puts slides up, hands out activities, i.e. is a transmitter.  The students listen (or not!); they take notes (or not!).  That is, they are receivers.

I wrote earlier of the transmitter and the receiver each having code books.  This is true in the classroom as well.  The thing is this: everyone has a different code book.  As students, part of the education process is learning the teacher’s code book.  As a teacher, part of the education process is to facilitate this happening.

The difference in code books has been recognized more widely than just me. Each year a particular liberal arts university sends out a list of catch phrases and historical events that have over the life time of typical professor.  Many of these are drawn from popular culture and would be used by academics who are trying to bridge the gap with their students.  Along with the phrases and events is the assurance that the students were not yet alive when these phrases and events were current.

While others no doubt interpret this differently than I do, this list serves as a reminder to me of the futility of trying to be the “cool teacher.”

When I was a first year graduate student, teaching for the first time, I, along with the rest of the teaching assistants, met in a group for an hour each week with one of the math professors to talk about teaching.  As part of this, the professor said something I will never forget: “If you are a great teacher, your students might learn 90 percent of what you know.  When they teach, they will teacher their students 90 percent of what they know, and so forth.  We know the direction this sequence goes.  Before long, the student isn’t learning anything.”

I don’t recall the point he was making with it.  I remember much less than 90 percent of what he said.  But I have mediated on it over the years and have had some thoughts.  

The first is that my students have to be learning from people besides me.  And they do.  I only get them for a very short time.  They learn from people before me; they learn from people after me; and they are learning from other people at the same time.

The second is that students can draw inferences from partial information.  Knowledge does not consist of isolated data items; it has structure.  A contemplative mind grows knowledge.

The third is that we pass more than information.  If we do our job we pass a spirit that I would call a love of learning.  We can also sharpen a general love of learning into a love of our subject.

This third part is--to me--most important.  It is also the most difficult thing to do.  I am not sure that I’ve ever passed the love of learning to anyone, but I may have nurtured it in some or helped to focus a student’s love of learning on a particular topic.

It is in this part where the mysterious way that humans deal with other humans come into play.  The Duke of Wellington supposedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was one on the playing fields of Eton.  Our early lives do shape us far out of measure to the amount of time we spent living them.  For most of us, it wasn’t Eton which shaped us but our families.  We deal with other people in the modes we learned in dealing with our families.

When I as a teacher stand in front of my students, only in very rare cases do they know me as a person.  They will not know how to deal with  me as me.  They will deal with me as they would someone they already know that I remind them of.

When I was a graduate student, they dealt with me as a peer.  As I aged, they related to me like a cousin or a young uncle.  These days as I approach 50, having children in college myself, they relate to me like a father or--because of the gray in my hair--a grandfather.  I am not expected to be cool.  Indeed, it’s creepy when I try; not that I try.

This is the image, the persona I come to them with.  I don’t fight it.  Instead, I build on it.   They will take my being just a tiny bit grumpy in their stride.  Indeed, they expect it.  As I am aware of how they perceive me, I can use it to shape our interactions and to make aspects of myself--such as my love for the subject--be attractive enough for them to want to take it up themselves.  You can learn a lot from a teacher you hate, but a love of learning is not part of that.

To conclude, I will return to the tin can telephone model for one more round.  The last stage of the learning process is the student teaching himself, i.e. studying.  We who teach at the university often have the expectation that the student will already have this mastered by the time we see him.  I use “expectation” in that sentence not in the sense we really expect it, but in the sense we believe it is a standard the student should meet.

The reality is that many of them frequently don’t meet that standard.  They haven’t mastered the art of studying. Many professors would deny its their job to teach them.  I would say that it is often part of the job, and whether and how to do it is part of the art of teaching.

What You Are Prepared to See

By Bobby Neal Winters

When I first started writing about ten years back, I had a exercise I did.  I found stories in the Bible and wrote them up in modern style.  The one rule I had was that I would be absolutely faithful to what was written in that I would not subtract anything.  I kept the plot-line; I kept the dialog;  I would add flesh to the bone that was there, but I wouldn’t change the bones.

It was a remarkable educational experience.

The first thing I learned was that there is a lot that is open to interpretation.  An example of this would be in the story of Deborah and Barack. We know simply that Deborah was married, she was a prophetess, and she was a judge of Israel.  She lived under a tree known as the Palm of Deborah.

That’s it.

I chose to make her an old woman.  This, I thought, who work better with her character.  As she was living in a male dominated environment, I thought that making her a wise elder would work better.  As this was an age without modern dentistry, I chose to make her toothless.  As a part of this, I gave her the habit of sucking the pulp from pomegranate pieces and spitting out the seeds in a rather disgusting manner.

Because of this, I learned something else: when you mess with other people’s mental images, you get push-back.  I showed this to some of my friends who’d imagined Deborah as a princess between the ages of 30 and 40, with a mouth full of teach and a diadem on her head.  Apparently there is an old painting that depicts Deborah as such.

The artist had been doing his own interpretation.  There is nothing wrong with that.  He had his own reasons just like I had mine.  My point is that my reader had seen that interpretation first and had taken it up as her own and had imposed it over the story.

I eventually carried this exercise out with several Bible stories.  At the end, I decided I would try to put them together as a collection, but they were just shy of what I considered to be book-length, so I decided to fatten them up a little bit.  What I did was to write a short story about a preacher who had been transferred to a church that had once had beautiful stain glass windows. The windows had been painted over by individuals--members of the church, pastors, etc--who found particular stories to be objectionable for one reason or the other.

In the story, the preacher cleaned the paint from the various windows, revealing the story beneath.  Each one of these cleanings served as an occasion to insert a story. ( I admit the conceit of thinking of myself as someone who was similarly revealing a previously concealed story to the reader.)

This not only served as a framework for placing these stories together and working in a bit of didactic explanation as well, but it serves as a metaphor for how controlling information controls understanding.

There is the old story about the three blind men who feel different parts of an elephant and come to different conclusions as to what sort of an animal it is according to whether they feel its leg, ear, or trunk.

One might assume for the sake of the story that these men had been blind from birth and had never seen and elephant and that they had never fully experienced an elephant before even in a tactile way.  If they had, then they might have been able to have an insight from even a partial input.

I gained a greater insight into this during my trip to South America.  Those of you who grew up during the same era as I will, perhaps, remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Wild Kingdom was hosted by a fellow named Marlin Perkins.  It featured trips to the African Savanna and the jungles of South America.  I also received a steady diet of other nature programs featuring floats down the Amazon.  Then, of course, there is the by now classic movie Romancing the Stone with the drug dealers and treasure hunters.

Given this sort of input, it’s a wonder I had the courage to go.  My courage was bolstered by those who had been there before me and told me that I could do it.  Indeed, I not only did it, but I took my family with me, and we wouldn’t trade for it.

The thing is that South America is not a fishing village on the Amazon or an alligator farm owned by a crazy drug-lord.  We are prepared to see it that way by what gets through on our TV and movies. The truth is rather more complex.  In Asuncion, Paraguay you can stand in a neighborhood and see a horse-drawn cart collecting trash and a pickup truck with boys in the back texting on cell phones.  There are three centuries going on at once.

Quite frankly, there were times when I thought that, if I knew more Spanish, I could easily go native because I had more in common with the folks there than I did with the folks either in the Northeastern US or on the West Coast.

When only minor excursions out, I’ve lived my life in Kansas and Oklahoma. This is still the frontier. We have a strong, agrarian strain.  On one strip out of Asuncion while I was there, I saw a huge billboard with a couple of cattle on it.  It read “Mas Pasto, Mas Carne.”  This translates as “More Grass, More Meat.”  Having grown up on the farm report, I knew I was among my own kind.

It would be easy for me to go all paranoid here and say there is a conspiracy to make us think of South America and the rest of the world as being backward.  This conclusion awaits a more careful argument.  It is much easier to believe that most Americans live in cities and have a certain filter they put on the rest of the world.  They view South America as backward and so concentrate on what fits that image, filtering out evidence to the contrary.  

The hard truth is that these same people view most of the United States outside of the city limits of certain selected cities as being backward too.

When we go to the movies and watch television, we know that we are viewing fiction, but even fiction is set within a certain realistic context, so it is easy to be led astray.  I have two examples where my personal experience has been illuminating.

In the movie Fletch, starring Chevy Chase, the main character takes a trip to Provo, Utah.  Provo, in that movie, is portrayed as a very small town.  Indeed, it is purported little more than a pig farm.  I took sabbatical there in the academic year 1995-96 and one of the reasons I chose it was my impression that it was a small town.  While I knew it was more than a pig farm, the expectation I had for it was quasi-rural.  Imagine my surprise when I arrived and discovered that Provo, a town of 90 thousand, is located in the Utah County metro area with a population of a quarter million people.  In fact, as most of the population in Utah is concentrated in a corridor around Interstate 15 that is about ten miles wide and a hundred miles long, you could say that it is part of a city of a million.  

An error in the other direction comes from one of my favorite episodes of the X-Files.  It was set in Connerville, Oklahoma and featured Lightening Boy. This was very interesting to me because I grew up twelve miles north of Connerville.  I’ve friends buried in Connerville.  Connerville consists of a couple of churches, a few houses, a cemetery, and the Blue River Bar.  That’s it.

In the X-Files, it had a hospital with rather impressive scientific resources.  There were things pictured as being in Connerville that are not available for a hundred miles in any direction.

And, of course, in each case the picture painted was done that way because of the needs of the story.  There is no harm intended.

But unless you’ve been to Provo or unless you’ve been to Connerville, you don’t know.

The House You Live in

By Bobby Neal Winters

I like watching other people work with concrete.  This may be because my father was a truck driver who hauled bulk cement to road jobs and ready-mix concrete outfits. In the summer, of 2007, we did an addition to our house and I enjoyed watching the masonry crew pour the footings and then lay the cinder block foundation.

Once you have the foundation, you attach a floor to it and then you put up the two-by-fours that frame the walls. Then you put the roof on.  Once the roof is on, you can hang the drywall.  That’s how we do it here.  My house is an old house, so there are parts of it that have lathe and plaster walls instead of the gypsum drywall.

I imagine one can follow a line of historical continuity all the way back to the way things were done in England.

My family and I spent July of 2009 in Asuncion, Paraguay where I was teaching Introduction to Analytic Processes at Universidad Catolica.  We stayed at a bed and breakfast called El Rinconcito while we were there.  During that time, another house was being constructed across the street.  This house was made from brick, and it was interesting for me to see how they did it.  

Instead of just pouring a foundation, they had poured a frame.  They must have had forms in place to hold the concrete in place while it was being poured, but they were gone by they time we arrived.  Within the concrete, they had put four-inch PVC pipe as conduit for plumbing and electrical connections.  

The roof was framed by four-by-sixes and constructed out of ceramic tile.

When we first arrived, they were in the process of laying the brick. Each of the bricks was six inches by six inches square and two inches thick.  They would’ve stopped about any bullet you could’ve shot at them. Before we left, they had the exterior walls up and were putting stucco over the brick.

I feel safe in guessing that the PVC pipes within the concrete framing is a fairly recent innovation.

One weekend while we were in Paraguay, we took at tour of eastern Paraguay where the old towns have such names as Jesus, Trinidad, and Encarnacion.  There are old missions in this area which were abandoned in the 1700s.  In looking at them, I saw a continuity in the architecture with the house across from El Rinconcito.  I imagine there is a continuity in construction techniques as well.  

These old missions, with the churches, the monk’s quarters, and the walls surround them, were built by people who’d come over from Spain and brought their techniques with them.  Those had come from the old Roman/Mediterranean tradition.  

It sort of reminded me of a book entitled The Shape of the Liturgy by Gregory Dix who follows the shape of churches as they evolved from the Mediterranean-style homes used as church-houses in the early Christian era to the sorts of churches I saw in Paraguay in the old missions.

Every generation learns by watching the generation before it.  We hope to keep the good stuff and to add to it what is needed for the present age.  The PVC pipe as conduit in the concrete framing struck me as a clever solution to marrying the solid construction of the ancient era to the modern amenities of indoor plumbing, electricity, and even computer network cables.

When I visited Siberia, during June of the year 2000, the group I was with was taken on an excursion to to the village of Balshoye Galoustnoye.  While there, we visited an American ex-patriot who was building his own traditional Siberian home.  It was made of huge logs from the larch tree.

There was no foundation as we understand it and the larch logs sat on the ground to allow for the expansion and contraction due to the extreme winters.  The logs in the wall were made to fit together tightly and the cracks were sealed with mortar to keep the Siberian wind from whistling through.

In the middle of the house was a huge oven.  It was designed so that the grandmother and the baby could sleep on top of it.

Each of the houses I’ve described has a particular appearance on the outside.  They represent particular styles that are recognizable to folks who’ve been around the block a time or two.  What you see on the outside builds particular expectations for structure on the inside.  You see the stucco and the tile roof, and you expect the connections going back to the Caesars.  

This sort of architecture manifests a depth of knowledge that has been tested by time.

The Siberian home embodies wisdom as well.  It doesn’t have the grandeur the brick house picked up through the various empires on the northern rim of the Mediterranean, but it embodies the simple wisdom of survival.

In my mind, these the houses in Asuncion and in Balshoye Galoustnoye are represent a deep, durable sort of reality that I hold dear.  When we juxtapose the typical American house against these two we see that it is something different.  There is more emphasis on the surface in the American house than in the depth.  This is not necessarily meant as a criticism; it is simply an observation that might be a window to another aspect of the real world.

The sheet rock and two-by-fours that form my walls are descendants of the lathe and plaster.  The lathe and plaster hearken back to the chinking between the logs in an house not too different from the larch house in Siberia.  When sheet rock is hung, there are gaps between the pieces.  These gaps are first taped and then mudded over in the same spirit that stucco is put over the bricks in the brick house in Paraguay.  Pipes and electrical wire and run within the walls between the sheets of drywall, and you can put insulation in between as well.

But what is on the outside doesn’t necessarily tell you much about what’s on the inside.  There are thousands of different types of siding each designed to give a different impression.