God’s Imagination

By Bobby Neal Winters

God has a much better imagination than we do. He sees opportunities where we do not.  His grace encompasses everything.

I’ve been doing a scientific sampling of the coffee shops that are within walking distance of where I am staying here in Asuncion.  There are many fine places: Juan Valdez Café; El Café de Acá; El Café de Porfirio. None of them quite as good as Signet or Root, but all much, much better than...well you know. The big chain.

In my explorations, I was directed to one that was located “behind Centro Medico Bautista,”  the Baptist Medical Center.’t 

It’s a hospital. A hospital established by the Baptists.  I would guess Baptist missionaries.  I walked by and read the signs.  In addition to the hospital, they’ve got Sunday School on Sundays; two services, morning and evening; they’ve got Wednesday evening services; and something on Saturday for the youth.

And a biggish hospital. I say “biggish” because I don’t know their numbers.  It ain’t KU-Med, but it is a teaching hospital.

I was born, raised, and baptized as a Southern Baptist.  The week of your birthday, you were supposed to go to the front of the church, put in a penny in a little house for every year old you were, and have the congregation sing happy birthday to you.  That money went to missions.

I stood for a long moment looking at what I believe to be some of the fruit of that collective effort.

As I continued to walk, I looked at the neighborhood.  There were lots of nice service businesses here. Well, of course, they are next to a hospital. There were restaurants--coffee shops!--pharmacies.  There was a “Beef Club”. (I’ve no idea what the hell that is!) All of this was drawn by the hospital.

Then I thought about all the doctors who would have houses and in this culture housekeepers, groundskeepers, etc.  Many incomes are being generated beyond those just in the hospital.

The ripples go throughout the city.

And, in my mind at least, this is connected with all those pennies Baptists are putting in the little red-roofed houses for their birthdays.

I want to hold on to that.

Sometimes when I am scrolling through my Facebook Feed (doom-scrolling they call it), I come upon statements like: “Not a dime of foreign aid while there is a single homeless veteran.”

And I have to agree with the sentiment of helping our veterans.  All gave some, some gave all.  

We owe them.

We owe them, but this is not an either-or thing.

The quote “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can” is often attributed to John Wesley.  This is probably a misattribution, but we don’t know that he didn’t say it, and it makes Methodists happy to think he did.

Doing good has a way of spreading in unexpected ways.  God’s imagination is better than our imagination.  Helping in foreign lands might unwittingly help ours.  Some of the businesses moving in around Centro Medico Bautista were North American-owned chains.  The little pennies put in the red-topped houses are coming back as dollars to North American corporations.

There’s nothing wrong with that.  The sick are still being healed, but the big McDonald’s across the street is making some money.

I can hear the traffic out my window.  Asuncion is beginning to wake up on this Saturday morning.  I think I will make a circle to get a cup of coffee from that little place behind Centro Medico Bautista.

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

Baptized into the Church of Asuncion

Baptized into the Church of Asuncion

By Bobby Neal Winters

Yesterday, I went to the movies .  I saw the Joker, Part 2 with Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga. It was playing in the Paseo La Galeria mall in Asuncion. This is the ritzy-est mall I’ve ever been in, for what that worth.

I went totally unprepared. I’d not read anything about it, though I had seen the movie that it follows. Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best American actors of his time so I thought it would be worth it.  

For me it was. I, however, sometimes have a rather strange taste in movies.  I’d not expected Joker II to be a musical.  But it is: a good one.  I’ve not followed the work of Lady Gaga, nor do I plan to, but she has a good voice which can shape emotion.

I’d not expected it to have a compelling love story.  But it does: a strange, twisted one. 

I’d not expected so much Jungian imagery.  But I got it: from the very first.

It is the story of broken people in a corrupt society. The corrupt society breaks people.  The corrupt society distorts any means by which those people can be healed.  The refuse of that society believes they have found someone who embodies their brokenness and who can extract vengeance for them.  When that fails, well, you won’t be surprised.  Or maybe you will: I was.

It is one of those I don’t want to take responsibility for advising you to see, but it did give me a lot to think about. 

Today, I went to church. Saint Andrew’s Chapel, an Anglican Church, on the north side of Avenida Espana just to the west of where it crosses Avenida Maximo Santos.  I’d made a failed attempt last week. This week I regrouped.  I knew exactly where it was; I got on google maps to mark my path out.

Then I woke up to the sound of thunder this morning.

They have been needing rain here.  There have been fires in the Chaco, and the smoke from them has been coming into the city.  While there have been cool days with clouds, there’s been no rain.

It had begun to rain what I called an “8-inch” rain in that the drops were hitting on the sidewalk 8 inches apart.  I thought about walking, then I thought about going into a church sopping wet, so I decided to take an Uber.

The rain remained more speculative than real as we drove along.  I could have walked it.  I vowed that I would walk back.

I was the first one there.  I minister--Donald--was setting up the altar.  He saw me and came back to greet me. We chatted.

The congregants began to trickle in.  There were so few even trickle is too generous a word. More than 20, fewer than 25.  All sizes; all shapes; all economic conditions.  Three Americans; three South Africans.

Broken people from a corrupt society. Just like anywhere.

Music consisted of one man with a guitar who led us in hymns. A sincere voice that kept the focus where it should be. There was a sermon that the Apostle Paul could’ve given, in the sense there was nothing novel in it: Repent and God will forgive you because He loves you.

The usual prayers; communion; going forth; then lemonade and cookies. 

My heart felt light and was strangely warmed.  I began my walk home.

There were drops of rain here and there.

I stopped at a grocery store and bought some oranges so I could have a little plastic bag to put my phone in.  Just in case.  The store didn’t sell umbrellas just to let you know.

While I was in the store the rumor of rain had become the real thing.  

I pressed on.

While storm sewers are not unknown in Asuncion, their system is not, shall we say, fully developed.  As a consequence of this, the streets were beginning to run like rivers. Little rivers, but rivers nonetheless.

I pressed on.

I came to an intersection with a very busy street.  Direct across from me, I saw a graffito scrawled on a wall: “Sonria, Cristo te ama.” Smile, Christ loves you.  Above this heartfelt scrawl was a video billboard that was 30 feet wide and 40 feet tall. In flashy, dynamic fashion it was offering all of the joys of a commercial society.  All of this can be yours if you bow down to worship me.

I was standing there, waiting for the light to change with this running through my head when a city bus came by and hit one of the rivers flowing down the street dead-on, and I was baptized in the church of the city of Asuncion.

They believe in full-immersion.

The rain never got any lighter.  I made it home and changed into dry clothes.

It’s been a good day.

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

 Family, neighbors, friends, and Watermelon

By Bobby Neal Winters

On many days during my stay in Paraguay, I walk to the Superseis that is on Avenida Argentina, just south of the intersection with De Las Palmeras.  At the intersection, there is a fruit stand.  They will bring fruit to drivers in their cars as they wait for the light to change.

I see that they have watermelons.

They call a watermelon by the name sandia in Paraguay.  I pay attention because I love watermelon.  I love watermelon on many levels.  It is sweet, it is filling, and it has few calories per unit volume.

I also love them because of memory.  They open a door back to a world that is almost forgotten to me.   They remind me of my Grampa Sam.

Summer days were long in the cross-timbers of Oklahoma, not just in the measure of hours of daylight, but in the measure of perceived time.  A summer day would sometimes last an entire year in the mind of a 5-year-old.

The sun was bright: it bleached my hair; it tanned my skin.  My bare feet were made hard by walking through grass and gravel.

On some days, when the season for watermelons came, my Grandpa Sam would mysteriously obtain one or our neighbor Buck Crabtree would bring one by.  Neither mentioned ever buying one.  Sam and Buck were men who had friends, and often the friends would give them things.  Those were the way things were in that time and place; at least that is the way I remember them.

There was a ritual. One would obtain a watermelon, but more needed to be done.  Watermelon is a dish best served cold, as they say.  The watermelon would be immersed in cold water or--even better--water that had a big block of ice floating in it. It would be chilled in this manner for as much of the day as possible.

Then, after a few months of the day had passed, as the sun sank low in the west, we would gather around with family and neighbors and eat the watermelon.  And it was always the whole family and neighbors, because all of the watermelon had to be consumed at one sitting.  The idea of cutting up a melon and putting it into the refrigerator for later consumption had not yet entered our culture.

No, we gathered around this offering and shared with our neighbors.  We shared melon; we shared news; we shared triumph and tragedy.  

We shared ourselves.

But now individuality has crept so into our society it even affects our consumption of watermelon. I can buy a watermelon now; cut it up; put it in the fridge; and breakfast on it for a week.  That is, I can get a week’s worth of breakfast out if others who come through my household--they know who they are--don’t steal it from me.

That last sentence is a measure of how deeply the disease of individuality has taken root.  I seek to gather to myself what was once an occasion of sharing.  Indeed, I resent sharing.  But in my defense, I might not resent sharing my melon as much if I got to share lives at the same time.

I talk to my students in Paraguay.  What are their plans for the weekend?

For many the answer is that they go to their grandparents--their abuelos--for asado--barbecue. Large families, sharing food, sharing lives.  One would imagine them gathering after having shared the eucharist.

I bought half a watermelon from the fruit stand on the weekend.  They are aggressive; they wanted to sell me a whole one.  I protested that I would have to carry it very far.  The young lady rubbed my shoulder with her hand and told me that I was strong.

Oh, please.  Give me a break.

But I did buy half a melon and only worried later about the perils of buying melon cut by people who were so ruthless in their sales technique.

I am alone; I am in journalist mode, whether I’ve a right to that state or not.  I am an atomic human observing a sea of molecular humanity.  I’ve not seen the likes of this since I was a boy.

A boy in Oklahoma on an infinite summer day having watermelon with my family, my neighbors, and my friends.

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

 Sunday Morning Coming Down

By Bobby Neal Winters

Word has come to me here in Asuncion that Kris Kristofferson has passed away.  I was thinking of him just yesterday morning.

I am in Paraguay for 3 weeks.  I’ve made a point to try to find an English language church service here. Sometimes we pray for help; I googled. I did a search for “English language church service.”  I got the website for St. Andrew’s Anglican church.  Services were at 10am.  There was a location.  

The site had last been updated in 2016.  Churches are notorious for not keeping their webpages up to date, but it was all I had.

Google maps assured me that it was a 34-minute walk, but I gave myself an hour, starting at 9.

It was a beautiful morning.  Traffic was light, mostly people who were clearing going to church.  I walked past two or three churches where services were being held in Spanish.

The sounds of liturgy came out from the sanctuaries, which were open to the outside.  Outside men stood in white shirts.  I don’t know if they were waiting for the next service, waiting as their wives worshiped without them, or just having a smoke.

I walked past kindergartens and grocery stores; past restaurants and bars; past car dealerships and ice cream parlors. 

Google maps took me up a street called Avenida Senador Huey P. Long.  Yes, that Huey P. Long.  It was a very nice neighborhood with inviting restaurants, bars, and pubs.  Senator Long would have approved.

I crossed Avenida Espana.  Google told me I was getting close.

“Destination on your left,” it said.

No. Not there. Neither a church nor anything that could plausibly serve as a church. Ever.

I still had half an hour, so I searched again.  This time from my phone instead of my computer.  I don’t know, maybe it would make a difference.

There it popped up: Saint Andrew’s Chapel.  This time there was a picture.  There was a sign in the picture in front of the church that confirmed that services started at 10AM.  Google maps confirmed that the chapel was on Avenida Espana...50 minutes by foot from where I stood.

Maybe I am stubborn. (Surely not.) Maybe I just didn’t have anything better to do. (Probably.) I began the trek.  Google told me I would get there by 10:24 am.  

So I would be a little late.

I began.

I set a good pace.  I was enjoying the morning, practicing my Spanish by reading signs.  Being philosophical about how they used English in some of their advertisements compared how we use Spanish. 

Then it got surreal.

I was walking under a palm tree and a bird dive-bombed my head.  It was kind of scary, but no harm done.

I walked two blocks further and it happened again.

I began to think about Joseph in pharaoh's prison and the baker who had had the dream about the loaves of bread being picked at by birds.

Nevertheless, I pressed on.  See the remark concerning stubbornness above.

Google assured me my destination was ahead on the right. I looked and saw the chapel.  I also noted there weren’t many vehicles there.  Not many as in not any.

The gate to the driveway was closed. 

Hmmm.

I talked to the gate to the sidewalk and checked the handle. It opened; I entered.

In the twinkling of an eye, there was a guard there.

Okay, the guard was somewhere between 16 and 20 years old; he wasn’t wearing a uniform; he didn’t have a gun; but I am still going to call him a guard.

I’ve reached a level in my Spanish where I can make myself understood a lot of the time, and I can kind of guess what they are saying to me.

This was the Sunday the priest went to preach to the Guarani, the local  indigenous people. There would be church at this location next Sunday.  

I walked back to a supermarket I’d passed and got a bottle of pop. Paraguay’s version of Fresca.  I drank my pop and thought it over.  Then I got a taxi to head back to the room.

Today I learned that Kris Kristofferson passed away yesterday. I think he would’ve kind of liked my story.

There’s nothing short of dying/ half as lonely as the sound/ of a sleeping city sidewalk/ Sunday Morning coming down.

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

 Breakfast in (South) America

By Bobby Neal Winters

A remix of Breakfast in America was coming over the sound system. I was feeling good about myself for knowing what a re-mix was, kinda.  And I am old enough to remember when Breakfast in America was new.  I knew about Supertramp because my friend from high school (I was going to say old friend, but she will always be 17 to me) Robyn Phillips listened to them.

Anyway, I was in the La Vienesa on Civil Legionnaires de Extranjero next to where it crosses De Las Palmeras and this remix of Breakfast in America was playing.  This was my first morning in Asuncion.  I’d slept like the dead after a long day of travel the day before.  

I’d woke up refreshed, took a shower, and headed to breakfast.  After examining the menu, I ordered the cheapest breakfast item they had: Vienesa.  I figured they’d named it after themselves, so they were probably proud of it.  It consisted of coffee, orange juice, two slices of toast from thin bread, a slice of ham lunchmeat, and a sandwich slice of swiss cheese.

That was it.

From many years of traveling to Paraguay, I know this to be a typical breakfast.  You will see eggs in other places, unexpected places, but not at breakfast, normally. Eggs are for frying and putting on top of a steak.  Cold cuts are for breakfast.

And that was fine.  I wanted only a light meal, and cold cuts did it.  

I then went out on my mission: Shopping.  My shopping trip was two-fold: get some groceries and buy a pill calendar.

The groceries were easy: fruit, potatoes, yogurt, meat, and beans.  I sort of looked for the pill calendar at the Superseis, but experience has taught me that in Paraguay groceries and groceries and medicine is medicine.  You can’t get so much as a bandaid at a grocery store, you need a pharmacy.

I went to a pharmacy in one of the malls near this particular Superseis.  The sales girl--and it was a girl as the population pyramid is properly shaped here--was very attentive.

At that point it occurred to me that I didn’t know the Spanish phrase for “pill calendar.”

This kind of thing has happened to me before, so I have a strategy.  Step one: try a naive direct translation.

“Quisiera un calendario de medicinas,” which is “I would like a medicine calendar.

She became very excited at the challenge and began to look through her files.  She then produced a pill-splitter.

I then took my other method.  Recreate my world for her.

“Todas las semanas yo pongo mis medicinas en domingo, lunes, martes, miércoles,...”  

That is to say, “Every week I put my medicines in Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...”

I saw the light of understanding go on in her eyes.

“No tenemos.”  We don’t have it.

Of course not.  In Paraguay everyone is young.  If you are old enough to take so many medicines that they have to be laid out, you can find some other solution.

That’s what I am going to do.

I think I will make some black beans and rice for supper tonight and have some left over.  I might fry up my meat for lunch tomorrow.

But I may very well head back over to La Vienesa for breakfast on Sunday morning.  Nothing quite like ham lunchmeat and cheese for breakfast.

Take a jumbo, across the water//

Like to see America.

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

PIttsburg is on the map

 Pittsburg is on the map

By Bobby Neal Winters

I have a friend in Philadelphia who sends me news stories he thinks I might be interested in.  Most are about mathematics and mathematicians, but a recent one that he sent me was about Pittsburg, Kansas, my home, and for my Pittsburg readers, our home.  It was from the Associated Press and was concerning the new abortion clinic in town.

One of the themes of the article was that this is a small town, you know everybody, and you are going to see the people you disagree with. In reading the article I noted that I knew people on both sides of the controversy. I don’t need to mention their names because they know me too. This is a small town.

That there would be an abortion clinic in our town was not a surprise.  Indeed, from a particular point of view, its arrival was almost certain. This is because of the juxtaposition of two events.  The first was the reversal of Roe v. Wade which sent abortion laws back to the states.  This decision, I believe, was part of the impetus for the attempt to pass the “Value Them Both” amendment to the Kansas Constitution.

The second event was the subsequent defeat of the “Value Them Both” amendment. Its defeat solidified, in a political sense, Kansas’s very permissive abortion laws for the foreseeable future. It was defeated so decisively that it will take a while for its proponents to regroup. The current legal situation in our state is stable and possibly set in concrete.

Given those two events, human nature, economics, and geography, the establishment of an abortion clinic in this part of Kansas became something that was going to happen, a fait accompli. 

Full disclosure: I am pro-life, so I take no pleasure in the new clinic in town. 

Am I angry?

I’ve reached the age where events like this simply make me sad. The 1st verse of the 9th Chapter of the Book of Jeremiah hits tragically on the mark: “Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!”

But, regardless, the clinic is here. In our town. In my town.

What’s going to happen?

Yes, that is the question.

As the AP article pointed out, there have been times in Kansas where this state of affairs has not been handled very well.

I don’t want that for my town. For our town.

For those of us who are against abortion, what do we do?

In a small town, just ignoring it is not an option, not even if that option was acceptable to your conscience.  For my part, my personal physician and the pharmacy that I use are just a stone’s throw from the clinic.  I will be reminded of the clinic and what is going on there every time I have a checkup, everytime I get a prescription refilled, both of which happen with alarming regularity because I am old.

I can’t tell you what to do. You might be pro-choice and just be happy with this. You might be pro-life and getting guidance from your church on what to do.  

What I am going to do is pray.  

Prayer seems to have become more a theme of these columns recently.  I don’t know whether it’s because I am getting old and wise or simply old and irrelevant.

I think we need to pray for the women who are going through this. Please give me a moment to make my point.

Men are traditionally supposed to be brave, but women are the brave ones. Historically, childbirth was probably the number one cause of the death of women. Yet consider the story of Rachel from the Book of Genesis who was absolutely desperate to have a child. She eventually did have two and died while having the second one. 

In that world, the women knew the risk; they had all seen other women die in childbirth; had been there as it happened; and yet they continued.

That is bravery.

I know that there are those who will disagree with me, but I believe nature has planted a desire in women to become mothers. For a woman to come to a point where she believes that killing her baby is a way out is in tension against that nature. 

It’s tragic.

But right now at this point in time, I believe prayer is just about all I can do.  Pray for the women; pray for their children. Pray that the men who fathered these children would step up and be men. Pray that these women will be able to find another way out.

God help us.

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

Learning Arithmetic

 Learning Arithmetic

By Bobby Neal Winters

Arithmetic was never my favorite subject. (Can I have an AMEN?) Indeed, I hated it. I used to get my mother to do my long division homework for me.

What an irony then that I am now a Professor of Mathematics at a respected state university.  They probably won’t want to include that in their press release.

Actually, the take away from that is mathematics is quite a bit more than arithmetic.

But here I am now, turning 62 next month, relearning arithmetic. 

Having stepped out of administration, I’ve been having a sabbatical of sorts before going back to the classroom, and I am using it to equip myself to step into my university’s growing Computer Science program.

As a part of that, I’ve been learning the architecture (that’s the term they use) of a particular integrated circuit and learning how to program it in assembly language.

I will be getting a little technical but will try not to fly off into full geek mode. You will need to tell me how I do.

Computers store numbers in binary form.  The number 0 is still zero, and the number 1 is still one. Okay, hang on, here we go: The number 10 is two; the number 11 is three; the number 100 is four; and the number 110 is five. I could go on, but it’s not important that you understand the particulars, but that there is a different way numbers are stored in a computer.

The numbers are stored in “bytes.”  This is a pun on the word byte. (Geeks have always been geeks.) Historically bytes have had different sizes.  It’s now been pretty well settled that a byte is 8 bits, i.e. 8 binary digits.  So 11001010 would be a byte.

The unit of memory that a processor works with is called a “word.” The size of the word varies from one type of processor to another.  In most computers these days, you can figure that the word is 32 or 64 bits long.

To bring me back to my topic, the longer the word size the more arithmetic you can do.

The chip I am working with uses the 8-bit byte for its most basic operations and you have to build up from there. You have to know some arithmetic. Let me show you what I mean.

An 8-bit byte can represent a number between 0 and 255 (between 00000000 and 11111111). If you want to add say 17 (00010001) to 20 (00010100), you can do that easily enough to get 37 (00100101). But if you want to add 250 (11111010) to 10 (00001010), you’ve got a problem. The answer is 260 (00100000100). I’ll save you the counting; it requires more than 8 bits to represent.

On this chip, you have to write your coding to extend the addition process.  It’s not hard. The designers of the chip knew this limitation was there and prepared for it.

They did this with multiplication as well. By its very nature, multiplication gives you bigger numbers quickly. The chip I am working with anticipates this by assuming that multiplying two 8-bit numbers will require 16-bits of storage. So right off the bat you can have a product that is as big as 65535 (1111111111111111).

As nice as that is, it will only get you so far, but you can get around this limitation by doing a little math and a little more programming.

Subtraction is handled in a way more similar to addition than it is to multiplication, though there are some complications in the way negative numbers are handled. (Buy me a coffee and a cookie at Signet, and I will tell you about it. You might want a whiskey. Signet can’t help you there.) 

We can even do the equivalent of decimal multiplication using this chip, but I am still getting my head wrapped around it.

Here we come to my favorite subject: division.  This chip doesn’t have 

If I am going to deal with division, there is not going to be any help from the chip. It’s all going to have to be done by programming.

I wish my momma was around to help, but I think she’d just tell me I was on my own.

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