Disjointed thoughts on aging and words

By Bobby Neal Winters

After a certain age, old men start learning anatomy. This is not the crude anatomy of their youths when they referred to family anatomy in Anglo-Saxon words, but a more refined anatomy using Latin words and acronyms for Latin phrases like meniscus and ACL.  Those who are interested in sports might learn these earlier, but these words come to all of us eventually.

We have conversations with our friends and when we talk about the nerve bundle that is being pinched around L5 and S1, our friends either nod knowingly or listen intently, trying to prepare themselves for the days to come.  There are some that even talk with authority about surgeries, having pins put in their C4 or C5.

Jesus said that the very hairs of our head were numbered, so that is surely so, but our vertebrae most assuredly are. 

We learn about what interests us, and we talk about it, and to talk about it we have to have the language.  That last clause is worth repeating even though it's obvious:  We have to have words if we are going to talk about something.This goes for anatomy, science in general, mathematics, music, and so on.  Anything you talk about you’ve got to have the words.

God has his words for things, but God’s words are the things themselves.  We as humans make our words to talk about his thing.  We want to talk about vertebrae, so we separate them into categories depending upon where they are in the body: cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral.  Then we number those. Our ability to name things is something we have in common with God.

Numbering is a very scientific thing to do.  When we number something, it just sounds more scientific.  The numbering on the vertebrae is all about order rather than quantity.  The C1 vertebrae is at the top and the C7 is at the bottom; they could’ve named them C-Sunday through C-Saturday and it would have accomplished the same purpose, but then they would’ve had to come up with 12 things in order for the thoracic, so forth.  So numbers.

Having named a thing makes us feel like we’ve got a handle on it.  We can talk about it; we can use our words to make plans: “We are going to go in and trim that bone spur you got down around L5 and S1.”  But with humans the words are not the thing itself.  I cannot just fix my back by talking.  Someone with knowledge--and probably a big boat moored a short distance from his lake house--has to go in and fiddle with the actual thing itself. 

Some folks are so good with manipulating language--have such “verbal virtuosity” in the words of Thomas Sowell--they forget there is reality. Reality is a place that has consequences.  You can say that you can fly, but if you jump off the top of a skyscraper in only your street clothes you will make the headlines but not like Superman.  You can say you are a bird, but that doesn’t mean you can fly.

Human language has its limits, but those limits are blessings because they forced us as a species to create art. There are movies that can portray what words cannot convey. Music can transmit feelings over distance and time.  Poetry can capture reality in ways that straight-forward prose cannot.  These are all forms of language, but we struggle within them. 

They can be powerful, however. Metaphor--to a prepared mind--can convey in a short phrase what would take reams of paper to tell otherwise, e.g. “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching , covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”  We have there in a few lines a full portrait of the man.

Sometimes we talk around the things that we cannot say out loud because we think life is too short to spend it arguing.  We speak out little truth and leave it to the wisdom of the listener--or the reader--to figure it out. 

Well, it is time to get on with the rest of the 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. )

 The Final Frontier

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been excited watching SpaceX, exploding rockets and all.  It is capitalism being directed toward space.  Yes, I am a geek/nerd/whatever label you want to affix to me.  I watched Star Trek in the early 1970s; I watched Star Wars when there was still just the one movie.  So you can dismiss me if you want to.

But there is money to be made.  If history teaches us anything, it is this: If money can be made it will be.  You could even sing it: “Ain’t no mountain high enough, and no valley low enough..” to keep entrepreneurs away from profit.

Where, where is this money in space you ask?  Are there banks filled with it out there?  Are there little green men with checkbooks? That I will answer by saying who knows.

The money is in mining:  Mining the moon; mining asteroids.

Mining is a nasty business.  There is the aesthetic aspect; open pit mines are ugly.  Here in southeast Kansas we know that strip pits will fill with water and make a nice little lake for the doctors and the lawyers to build houses on, but that is not the image they have in many places. Then there is the chemical aspect where heavy metals are released into the environment.

All the above lead to regulation, and regulation puts pressure on entrepreneurs to find another way to make money.  It is at this point, the entrepreneur puts his finger to the wind and finds it pointing to space, the Final Frontier.

For those who don’t like regulations, frontiers are very attractive places.  Frontiers tend not to have very many regulations to begin with, and those few regulations they do have don’t have very many people around to enforce them.  Maybe Marshal Dillon and Festus, but that’s it.  They didn’t manage to enforce the regulations on Miss Kitty, did they?

They are already studying asteroids.  Some of this is being done in the name of making us safe from planet killers like the one that got the dinosaurs, but don’t fool yourself.  It’s all about the Benjamins, Baby.

This will take a long time.  I will not live long enough to see anybody make a dime from asteroid mining directly.  Elon Musk will make a lot of money on the ramp up because there is a lot of money to be made in satellite communication.  He’s building a network of satellites that has the potential to make every person in the world potentially connected to every other.  

This being said, I don’t think he will live long enough to make a dime out of asteroid mining because it is going to take a long time to get the infrastructure ramped up.  This is the thing that all science fiction misses: Infrastructure takes time.

But given the need for things that are mined, there will be added pressure to do this.  

Right now, we are worried about climate change and we are looking for alternatives to oil. That puts pressure on renewable/low carbon sources of energy, and  consequently, there is pressure to produce more batteries.  Batteries require ingredients that have to be mined.  As has been pointed out, mining can be nasty, so this encourages mining in space.

So we have a place where those who are concerned about the environment have a natural alliance with those who wish to become as rich as Croesus.  This kind of makes me want to reach for my tinfoil hat, but let’s push on.

This sort of synergy argues for mining in space.

In addition to mining, you could move dirty industries to space.  No regulations for them either.  A lot of the work would be done by robots, but there would be people too.  And they would have to move there because the jobs they used to do on earth would be gone.  There are people to whom the nasty work of mining looks like opportunity, my father and his father and brothers to name a few. 

Instead of going to the east Texas oil fields or off shore or Alaska, they would go to space.  Eventually, they will build space habitats complete with company stores, mark my words.  And you think Las Vegas is wild or that Old Dodge City was.  You haven’t seen anything yet.

It’s not going to be as utopian as Star Trek.  Think Firefly or the Expanse.

I don’t see it, but maybe my grandchildren’s grandchildren.

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. )

Testing

 Testing

By Bobby Neal Winters

When Jesus came into Peter’s house, he saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. He touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up and began to wait on him.

Matthew  8:14-15

My online Bible Study Group has been going though the book of Matthew. We did the Lord’s Prayer as a part of that; it took us three weeks and we could’ve done more but the teacher told us we had to go on.  

Those of you who know the Lord’s Prayer know the line “lead us not into temptation.”  This always causes discussion.  How could God lead us into temptation?  

One answer is this: The word translated as “temptation” can also be translated as “testing.”

My wife’s mother is very sick and has been so since the day after Christmas. I’ve not written about it until now because she’s a private person and never seeks to call attention to herself.  She always very quietly does what needs to be done.  

Our lives have changed.  Jean, my wife, is living with her mom now and has been since she got out of the hospital.  We are lucky that Jean’s mother only lives two blocks from us.  She moved to town two months after my second daughter was born almost thirty years ago.

She has been a godsend to us. She helped when our second daughter was a baby and our third one. She’s helped with the grandsons.  At the same time, she helped in her church, she helped with the Red Cross, she helped in random ways. No one asked her to do anything; she just did it.

Then she got sick.

The members of her church have sent her cards. Her neighbor girl has reached out and helped in numerous ways.

Jean is there with her, doing for her mother the things her mother has done for us.

The order of the family has changed.  She who used to take care of all of us must now be cared-for herself, and Jean, my wife, her daughter, is doing that.  My daughters and I must care for Jean.

Nobody asked anybody to do anything. It just happened.

There has been a reordering.  We reordered my mother-in-law’s living room into a hospital room. We reordered my kitchen and pantry from something only my wife could understand to something the rest of us could understand.

We are raised by our parents and we raise our children. We always wonder if we’ve done a good job. Did we raise our children to be adults?  Will they be good people?  

My dad never got to know; my mom did a little.  

My mother-in-law knows for sure, and my wife and I do too. 

Would we have wanted this to happen? No.  We pray that it doesn't everytime we pray the Lord’s Prayer, just as Jesus taught us to pray.  The time of testing comes regardless.  The time of testing is built-in to the fabric of life itself.

We ready ourselves for it the best we can.  Sometimes we have a good example to follow.

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. )

Gone

 Gone

By Bobby Neal Winters

A little over a week ago as I write this, I lost my wedding ring.  I was sitting in my office having a Teams meeting with two colleagues; I felt my ring finger like I do out of habit; and it was gone.

I may have exclaimed something at that point, but I will leave it to either of my two colleagues to say what.  Those who know me best might make a quick guess.

I’ve gotten a lot of advice about how to look for it.  I’ve alerted the custodian and campus police to be on the lookout for it in Lost and Found.  I’ve checked my pockets, retraced my steps, dumped out my various pencil holders.

Nothing.

If you find a rose gold, nugget shaped ring somewhere around the circle of Pittsburg I frequent, please let me know.

This is not a ring of great material worth.  I think it cost several hundred dollars 30 years ago in that jewelry store on Main Street in Stillwater, Oklahoma where we got it.  There is a great deal of sentimental value that goes along with it, of course, but that’s not the reason I am missing it.

I miss it because I feel naked without it.  When I say that, I am not speaking figuratively.  I mean that I feel like I’ve stepped out of the shower to discover I am at the corner of 4th and Broadway.

I tried to explain this to one of my daughters and she said, “Oh yeah, Dad, you’re such a chick magnet.”

Even though she’s brilliant, had great ACT scores, and is highly educated, she doesn’t quite get it.

Such was my discomfort, that within 12 hours of losing my ring, I’d gotten on Amazon and bought a new one.

While doing that, I made a discovery, maybe several.  First: you can buy a wedding ring on Amazon.com.  Second: They don’t cost that much. Third: You can order one on Friday evening and have it on your finger before that time on Monday.  Fourth: You can do that for about $20.

So as I type this, I do so with a $20 ring on my finger that is made of tungsten carbide.

It’s not as attractive as the one my wife got me.  It doesn’t have the sentimental value.  It doesn’t have the monetary value.

But I don’t feel naked anymore.

I squeeze my left pinkie and middle fingers against it, and I think about my wife.  I feel it, and I know my wife is about in the world, and that I am not alone. 

And my heart is at ease.

Again, if you find a ring of the description above, contact me through Facebook.  There’s no reward other than the good it will do your soul, but I will appreciate it.

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. )