Requiem for the Peacemaker

 Requiem for the Peacemaker

They dress the wound of my people

    as though it were not serious.

‘Peace, peace,’ they say,   

 when there is no peace.

--Jeremiah 6:14

My tendency is to be a peacemaker.  I think this is because my father and my big brother were both hard of hearing when I was a boy. We would be working in the garden or in the yard, and one would say something, and the other would misunderstand it, and there would be an argument.

As I was the only one present with two good ears, I saw it as my responsibility to try to make peace between them.

Somewhere along the way, it became part of my self-image.

More than ten years ago when I was president of the union on campus, there was a disagreement between a member of the union and one of the administrators.  I thought I could mediate a peace between the two.  It was then that the late Dr. Robert Ratzlaff, who was the academic vice president at the time, passed on a very simple, very useful bit of wisdom, “Sometimes people just aren’t going to get along.”

I took it to heart then, and the wisdom of it has become more and more apparent as my experience of the world has increased.  As for the two people I was trying to mediate, they never got along.  I think one of them is dead now. The chance for rapprochement is over.

So what do you do when you have two individuals that don’t get along with each other and you can’t fire or kill either of them? (Killing: It’s not only wrong, it is against the law. This is my mantra.) I go to the Bible for guidance.  There I find a pair of my favorite characters: Jacob and Laban.  After a while, they didn’t even want to try to get along.  They were tied together by Leah and Rachel.  Laban loved them as his daughters and Jacob loved them as his wives.

They piled up a big pile of rocks and used it to divide up the world: You stay on that side; I will stay on this; Leah and Rachel can pass back and forth between.

And since there was no Facebook, Twitter, or anything else like that for them to snipe at each other, that settled it.

This brings us to an important distinction: Solving a problem versus managing a problem.

We like to solve problems because then they...solved.  We don’t have to think about it anymore.  It is all over.

Right now, by all indications, smallpox is solved. We vaccinated everybody and the smallpox virus has gone extinct. (Except for the labs where they keep it around for some reason.) We need not deal with smallpox.

COVID is not solved. It is being managed.  How successfully? Listen to the debate around you and make up your own mind.  Nothing illustrates the wisdom of Dr. Ratzlaff’s words like the hatred filled debate that is swirling around us now.

If we could make a pile of rocks and keep one group on one side and one on the other, that would be quite helpful, but because of social media we can’t.  And in any case, there isn’t just one side. Oh, and it’s been politicized, so we have two political parties which have no incentive to turn down the heat on it.

It can’t be solved; it can’t be managed.  What is a peacemaker to do?

Move out from the position in the middle, take the rocks you were going to use to separate the combatants, and hide under one of them. Or I guess you could get some popcorn and watch the donnybrook. 

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. )

Dread, T-wrenches, and Courage

 Dread, T-wrenches, and Courage

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was lecturing to my class the other day, and I made the statement, “Everything is easier the second time you do it.”  Almost by the time it was out of my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true.  But it still carries a useful truth. Let me explain this contradiction.

We’ve all faced things we dreaded.  I hate the word dread, but there it is.  Dread is an unprofitable emotion.  It takes something that is unpleasant and spreads that unpleasantness over time without lessening its intensity.  There are, nevertheless, things we dread, but so often once we do them they are not quite so back.  We can become more skilled at them and make them less onerous. We discover they were entirely different than what we expected.

So in that sense many, many things can be easier the second time you do them.

But in class I had flash through my mind something that had happened many years ago.  It had come a winter storm. There was four inch of snow on the ground, and it was 20 degrees outside.  The plumbing for our kitchen sink comes up parallel to an outside wall.  You guessed it: It froze and burst.  

At that time I had no inside cut off, so I ran out to cut it off at the meter. I had to get a shovel to pry off the lid to the meter well and I had with me a crescent wrench to turn off the valve.  When the lid came off, I discovered why they call it a meter well: It was filled with water well above the valve.

I plunged my arm into the water up to the elbow to turn it off.  I was having trouble getting it done the first time, so I removed my wrench from the water, readjusted it, and went in again.  

It was more difficult to do the second time.

Knowledge is one piece of understanding this.  On one hand, learning how to do something makes the mechanics of doing it easier. On the other hand, knowing how painful something is makes it more difficult to repeat.

What came out of that experience was I spent $7 to buy a T-Wrench that you can use so you don’t have to plunge your arm into the water.  They cost $21 now, so you can see this was all some time ago.  I wrote about this experience at the time, so the more dedicated among you might remember it.  

Recently, I wonder that in addition to knowledge, there might be something else involved: Courage.  In my case, the baby-courage of sticking my arm into the freezing water to get that valve turned off.  The grownup courage it takes for a woman to have a child, and even a second one.

I talked about dread earlier.  I do consider it unprofitable at best and destructive at worst, but dread is often overcome by courage. Courage overcoming dread can lead us to go through unpleasant things and master them.  At the very least, we may be able to find ways to cope--our own personal T-wrenches.

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. )

Drama and Ice Cream

 Drama and Ice Cream

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last night we went to Braums to pick up supper and bring it home.  We’d turned in our order and were waiting when an Indian couple came with their ice cream cones and sat down at one of the booths by us.

For the sake of my readers in Oklahoma, let me say, yes, Indian.  These were not descendants of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of our continent.  They were from India or from some region in ethnic continuity with it.  And they were speaking a language that was not English.  It had the tonal quality of Hindi, but the specifics don’t matter.

I said they were speaking, but it would be more precise to say she was speaking.  A lot.  She was speaking in a tone that the males of the species had better learn to listen to should they wish to lead simple, happy lives.  

They were each dressed like they were out on a date, and she was dressed in a very classy manner.

As I said, she was talking to him as they both sat on the same bench of the booth.

Were I to guess--and please allow me that liberty--I would say she was giving him an unsolicited assessment of his character.  It sounded thorough. I don’t think she missed too many spots.

Then, at one point, he gently plopped his ice cream cone down on its side in front of her, and walked quietly out the door of Braums.  I think that my wife and I may have been the only ones to notice. 

For her part, she sat there in the booth for a small space as if nothing had happened.  Then she carefully gathered her accoutrements, both ice creams included, as if nothing happened, and left quietly out the door of Braums as well.

I couldn’t see if she departed in the car with him or she went home by Shank’s Mare. It will remain a mystery.

Again, I think that my wife and I were the only ones who noticed this as it was done in such a quiet, classy fashion.

I was going to say I hope they work it all out, but I think it’s better to say, I hope they both find their way.

Culture--which includes art, literature, religion, and so many other things--is a collection of ways we develop for living in a fallen world.  Things don’t always work out the way we would like or the way we would expect.  As human beings, we learn ways of dealing.

Their cultural way of dealing with a disagreement in a public place was quiet and classy.  That makes them different from many of us.  However, they are united with the rest of us in the challenges that come with being men and women.  Our feelings are deep and strong. They are often difficult to contain.

But I have now seen this can be done with dignity and class.

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. )

Mowing and Yellowjackets

 Mowing and Yellowjackets

By Bobby Neal Winters

As those of you who labor behind the mechanical beasts known as lawn mowers are fully aware, this season has been more strenuous than average.  For those who don’t, let me explain.  All God-fearing mowers--and I am more afraid with each passing day--begin the season on a weekly rotation. (I say weekly rotation, and most of us mean seven days, but there are those who mow every eighth day and eliminate a whole mowing after seven repetitions by this numerical sleight of hand, but let’s not go too far out into the weeds.)

After a while, as the spring rains subside, we can make the shift to mowing every other week. (I tried to write bi-weekly, but does that mean every two weeks or twice a week. God forbid!) That took longer than normal this year.  Typically the last time we have to mow every two weeks is around the first of July, when rain becomes a fable.  This year, by way of contrast, I remained in my two-week cycle until August.  

Quite frankly, I was only able to go from early August until early September without mowing because I simply didn’t have time to. In any case, it has been an unusual mowing year.

And then came the Yellowjackets.

No, I haven’t been stung, and I shall endeavor not to be, but my sweet wife has.  She has been painting some trim on the exterior of the house.  At one moment, she noted some Yellowjackets keeping her company; in the next moment she’d been stung five times.

She is the sturdy one from our family.  Five stings would’ve put any of the rest of us in the hospital.

The Yellowjackets are a particularly nasty member of the order hymenoptera.  I’ve seen them referred to as [redacted] with wings, where the redacted word is the plural of a rude term for the anal sphincter. They are very territorial. Bees will only bother you if you bother them; I’ve actually seen my wife pet a bumblebee.  Yellowjackets are proactive.  If they think that you might eventually think about bothering them, they are on you.  Bees make honey; Yellowjackets make misery.

You may have noticed I am capitalizing Yellowjacket.  I am afraid not to.  I am afraid of not showing them sufficient respect.

My wife went into defense mode because she wanted to finish her painting.  She put together a Yellowjacket trap that she found online.  It consisted of a milk jug, soapy water, and a strip of salami on a string.  Yellowjackets perished in it by the thousands...and still they came.  It was like watching one of the more over-the-top zombie movies.

This is my wife, the butterfly lady.  She has a butterfly larva she is fostering right now. She loves living creatures, and they love her.

But the Yellowjackets.

She escalated her effort through several levels of chemical warfare, until she thought the numbers were sufficiently diminished for her to continue painting in peace.

No.

They got her again.

This time on her arm.  From one side, she looks like Popeye. 

The territory was yielded to the Yellowjackets.  

What does this have to do with mowing?  If you walk by my house, and look into the back yard, you will be able to see approximately where the Yellowjackets are.  Their territory is unmown. We’ve yielded them 100 square feet of the state of Kansas as theirs until the winter freeze takes them. 

We are told they will not use the same nests next year.

We shall see.

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. )