From Time to Time

 From Time to Time

By Bobby Neal Winters

From time to time, it is good to think of some of the good things that were done for us by those who came before us.  Some of them saw problems and came up with simple, long-term solutions to those problems.  Consider the calendar.

The year--and by year I mean Solar year--is 365.24217 days long.  The Solar year is the length of time it takes to pass from the first day of spring in one year to the next. (It is to be compared to the Sidereal year, but just let it go.)  We lay out our calendar to try to fit the calendar year, but we’ve got a problem, that fraction.  

We have to divide the calendar into an integral number of years and that fraction gets in the way.  We like to have the first day of spring to hit around March 20, but if we set the calendar year as having 365 days, the first day of spring starts moving away from that.  In about four years, it’ll be March 21.  In forty years it will be March 30.  In 80 years, it will be April 10.  

Do you begin to see the problem?  You’d have to start tracking spring in a way separate from the calendar, and it’s quite reasonable to think that knowing when the first day of spring is was the original purpose of the calendar.

This problem was fiddled with for a while, but someone, and I will say Julius Caesar--and I know people who will correct me--decided to add a “leap day” to the calendar every four years and call those years leap years.  If you do the math--or even if you don’t--that works out to having a calendar year that is 365.25 days long.  This is closer to 365.24217, but it’s not dead on.  You are off by 0.00783 of a day in the other direction.

That difference is a lot smaller.  That should solve the problem, but--as the Steve Miller Band said, “Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future....” After 15 hundred years, you are off by 11 days. Spring is starting much earlier in the year.

This time the powers that be fiddled with more sophistication.  They noticed that if you skipped adding a leap year every 100 year you would get a calendar year that was 365.24 years long on the average.  This is a little better but not all that much.  After 1500 years, you will still be 3 days off. This particular reform was being promoted by Pope Gregory of the Roman Catholic Church, and they believe in eternity.  Someone figured out that if you skipped adding a leap year in years divisible by 100 unless that year was divisible by 400 then you got a year that was 365.2425 days long.  This differs from the true value by 0.00033.

In 1500 years, you will be off by less than 12 hours. In 10,000 years you will be off by 3 days.  This is what we like to call someone else’s problem.

And all we have to do is follow a rule that says add a year to the calendar in years divisible by 4. However, when the century turns, you can skip adding the day. Unless the year is divisible by 400 hundred, then add it anyway. Most of us remember the “divisible by 4” part.  The fact that we have a presidential election that year helps.

We only have to remember not to add the day every 100 years.  Although I’ve never had to deal with that because, the only turn of the century I’ve experienced was the year 2000 which was divisible by 400, so it was a leap year as usual. 

One of the beautiful things about this solution is that it requires only a tiny amount of effort and even that small amount of effort is spread across years, centuries, or nearly a half a millennium. Very few of you reading this will have to remember that we get to skip a leap year in 2100, and we’re clear on remembering not to skip it until 2400.

Actually, “we” don’t have to remember.  The people who make the calendars do.  If we had to do anything, there would be people against it just as there are people against the time change. 

Maybe I shouldn’t’ve said anything. 

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. )

No Good Deed

 No Good Deed

By Bobby Neal Winters

Oscar Wilde said, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

This is an axiom of administrative work.  

I would like to explore it a little, but I will need to go back more than forty years to do it.

My first car was a 1965 Chevy II Nova.  I’ve mentioned it before.  In Spanish its name was more honest: No va.  It translates as “it doesn’t go.”  And mine didn’t go.  It had a maximum speed of about 60.  My dad had bought it for me for $75 and had his friend get it running for $300 more.  It had four doors and it’s windows rolled up and down. 

I drove it to school. 

My school was two miles from my house.  Between my school and my house was the town of Harden City.  Let me describe Harden City to you.  A gravel road crossed a blacktop road and there were a handful of buildings there.

In one of those buildings, there lived a poor family.  I am going to call them the Cunninghams because it suits me.  There are levels of poor and ways of being poor.  The Cunninghams were poor in money, but not poor in spirit. 

I say they weren’t poor in spirit because they asked me for rides to and from school.  They were in grade school and I was in high school. I could’ve said no and made it stick, but I didn’t.  It was nothing to me.  They were on the way. I pulled about 100 feet off the main road, dropped them off, and then headed back on my way.

I forget how many Cunninghams there were.  Like I say, it was at least 4 decades ago.  There were at least two.  The younger one--who was 7 or 8 at the time--had the foulest mouth I have ever heard on a boy of his age, but he had his big brother, who I will call Walter Jr because it pleases me,  to take care of him.  It became a routine.  I did it for a year or two and haven’t thought much about it since.  

Then in the course of talking to my brother, he mentioned that Walter Jr. had caught COVID and was in the hospital.

Then, stretched out over time, came news of his gradual decline and death.

His demise has affected me disproportionally to our relationship.  Our entire interaction with each other had been in five minute intervals on a daily basis over maybe a year or two; but I find myself with tears in my eyes.

All I know of him is this: He’d been a good brother who got rides for him and his little brother. I saw his obituary picture on Facebook, and I wouldn’t’ve recognized him if I’d passed him on the street.

We are connected by a tiny, tiny act of kindness on my part that came at no cost to me.

Until now.

Every interaction we have with a fellow human being binds them to us by a tiny thread. As we grow older and busier these threads are spread out.  Those threads we form when we are younger are bunched closer together.  They become intertwined with other threads, other memories.  This is tied up with memories of my car and therefore memories of my father, my mother, some of my school teachers who are many years gone.  

The well of tears is deep.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Do them anyway.

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. )

Bubba and the COVID controversy

 Bubba and the COVID controversy

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last week I got a call from my old friend Bubba back home.  It had been a while since he’d called me.  So long, in fact, that some of you had been asking about him.  I’d been worried myself, but I put off calling him. Bubba is a complicated soul.  While he often comes off as an unsophisticated country bumpkin, under that rough facade resides the soul of an artist.  It’s best when I let him call me.

I smiled when I saw his name on the caller ID.

“Hello, Bubba,” I began. “It’s so good to...,” but I didn’t get a chance to finish.

“Hey there!” He talked over me. “Can you believe how stupid people are?”

There was an easy question, I thought.  Yes, yes I can believe how stupid people are.  I work with people.  While there are some who are brilliant beyond compare, others are plumbing the depths and looking for a longer rope. I was about to answer in the affirmative when he continued.

“Can you believe all of these arguments about masks and vaccinations?”

Here he paused to breathe for some reason.  Maybe a junebug had flown into his mouth.

“Yes, it is something, isn’t it.”

“People are fighting about it day and night,” he said. “You can’t scroll for an inch on Facebook without reading posts on it.  And nobody is being nice.”

I was about to agree, but I wasn’t quick enough.

“If you haven’t got the shots, someone will call you an ignorant baboon.  If you have got the shot, someone will call you sheeple. Whatever happened to kindness, whatever happened to patience?”

Here I decided to be more forceful and broke in.

“What do you think about the whole thing?” I asked.

“Well, you know,” he said. “COVID has turned up the heat on everything.  I personally have lost two friends to COVID that I know of.  One of them was a close friend. Both of them would’ve been vaccinated if they could’ve, but they died before the vaccine.  On top of that, COVID has put such a strain on the hospitals, that there are people who have died of other things who would’ve otherwise lived. So, even if you aren’t in a high risk group, getting vaccinated can turn down the strain on the hospitals.

“But it is a free country. While there are limits to freedom, this is one thing that people can choose not to do.”

This confused me because it seemed reasonable.  It was like I didn’t know Bubba any more.

“So you got the shots?” I asked.

“Well I wasn’t going to,” he said. “But I saw some people in line to get something that was free, so I lined up too and I got a shot.  Four weeks later, the same thing happened.”

“Goodbye, Bubba,” I said.

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. )

  

Time for Silence

Time for Silence

By Bobby Neal Winters

Sometimes I put on YouTube while I am going through my email early in the morning just so there will be a sound.  I got into this habit in June of 2017 while I was teaching Elementary Statistics down in Paraguay.  Jean had been going to go with me, but my second grandson had just been born so there went that.  I went down by myself and I got lonesome. The TV was mostly in Spanish so YouTube became my companion. 

There were times I became so hungry to hear English I began talking to myself while walking down the street.  You kind of have to choose your moments or they might take you away.

All of this having been said, there is a lot of value in silence.

I’ve noticed that while there are times that I need to have input from music, from audiobooks, from conversation for my writing process, there are times when all those things do is drive thought from my mind.  The noise of audio input drowns out my internal dialog and my thoughts become sterile.

I must make time for silence.

Silence is useful.  Silence is a thing.  I am not a musician at all, and while we usually think of music as being sound, silence is a part of it.  In music, not only are there symbols for every note, they have symbols for measured silences between notes.  They call them “rests.” 

Often rests denote periods where one musician stops playing for a while to allow others to do their bit.  We need to have something like this for meetings; that’s all I am going to say about that.

Not only do we need silence ourselves, there are times when we need to be silent.  As someone who has made his living in higher education, let me say that I do know something about this.  I was once in a meeting where someone spoke for ten minutes just to say that he didn’t have anything to say about the topic.

And that is a clue: If you don’t have anything to say, then don’t say anything.  You’d think that would come easy, but as illustrated in the anecdote above, it does not, at least not always.

If you’ve ever read James’ epistle--and if you haven’t I encourage you to--you may remember the passage in Chapter 3 about the tongue.  We all understand--or should--the problem of gossip.  But there is another aspect worthy of consideration.  This is the effect that the things we say have on us.  A lot of people are afraid that hearing the wrong things might corrupt us. I won’t say that’s not a problem, but we do have the power to think about what we’ve heard and make up our own minds.

But when we say something, our ego gets attached to it.  Even when we’ve been proven wrong, it is easy to just double-down and stick with our mistake.  As James says, “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts.”

There is much to be said for keeping your mouth shut when you don’t know what you are talking about.  There is also much to be said for changing your mind when you discover that you are wrong, but that is very, very hard.  It is much easier to be silent.

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. )