The Time of Darkness, Sciatica, and Samuel L. Jackson

The Time of Darkness, Sciatica, and Samuel L. Jackson

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are now in that darkest time of year that runs between Halloween and St. Valentine’s Day. It’s bookended between holidays that are strongly connected to candy. It between we have Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all of the pumpkin spice and parties associated with each of them.  We eat to ward off depression, we eat to soften our fear of Death...and...

And I have gone on a diet.

There is a telephone app associated with it, but it’s basically counting calories.  I am currently on 2000 calories a day.  From the day that I started, November 3, until this writing, November 27, I have lost 15 pounds.

I feel better, my clothes fit better.

Those of you who follow this space know that I’ve been down this road before. 

I’d been having trouble with my back.  The cortisone shots weren’t working.  My back doctor said that we could get in there and “trim off that bone spur” and make my sciatica all better.  But another doctor had told me, “If you are having trouble with your back, look at your front.”

I can be dense sometimes, but I knew he was indicating my stomach.  I’d ignored his advice for a long time, but at that point--caught between sciatic and a surgeon’s knife--I chose to lose weight.  From that point in November 2019 until March 15, 2020, I lost 44 pounds.

That end date is very important.  Those of you who have been around during the last couple of years will recognize that as the first lockdown.  

At the time, I didn’t notice that I was putting weight back on.  It happened so slowly that I never caught on to the fact that I was sliding back (or back-sliding as Baptists are wont to call it) into bad habits.

So by November 3, 2021, I’d put back on 27 of the pounds I’d taken off before.

I’ve lost and regained hundreds of pounds over the course of my lifetime.  Quite frankly, even though I’ve always been fat (I was going to say “a bit on the husky side,” but I might as well own it), it’s always been easy for me to lose weight: I simply stop eating.  I just lock-in that crazy, obsessive-compulsive part of myself that I used to get my doctoral degree, and I pushed on through.  

In short, I made myself crazy.

Those who’ve been closest to me will testify to the truth of that last sentence.

My hope--and it is just a hope--that this time I will be able to avoid insanity.  I’ve got an app.  It has put me on a 2000 calorie a day budget.  I log everything I put into my mouth, and it has a nice library of foods with their calories that makes it easy to log.

On Thanksgiving, I was able to eat everything I wanted to, some of it in incredibly tiny amounts.

I weigh myself every day.  This might be the one lasting bit of knowledge that I brought out of my stint as chair of the university assessment committee: You have a target, you put your measures in place, and when you are off your target you do something.

I’m almost 60 years old.  I’ve been heavy my whole life.  I have no illusions.  By this time I know what my tendencies are.

The app asked me to set a goal.  Initially, it was to avoid surgery, and I think that’s a good one.  If the EMT folks ever come to get me, I’d like to make it easier on them.  And I suppose the final goal will be to make it easier on the pallbearers. 

But I have no illusions.  

Losing weight (and gaining weight for that matter) is easier than maintaining it. Statistically, you are either going up or coming down; there is no maintaining.

Anyway,if you offer me a cookie, and I start channelling Samuel L. Jackson, this is the reason.

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. )

The Rose Window

The Rose Window

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are surrounded by beauty, both seen and unseen.

For the first time in the 32 years I’ve been in town, I visited the interior of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.  I’ve been walking by it almost every day since I started my walking discipline back in 1996.  During that time, every time I passed it, I’d created my own mental image of what it looked like inside.

I was totally wrong.  I’d even gotten the orientation of the sanctuary wrong, though in highsight I don’t know how.

The church faces the south and there is a circular stained glass rose window up toward the peak of the roof.  As beautiful as this window is from the outside, it is even more beautiful from the inside, at least on a bright, sunny day.

When the sun is shining, not only does the backlighting bring out the colors, but the window shapes the sun’s rays, bringing them down to an oval (an elliptical region to be precise) on the floor.  As the sun goes from east to west across the sky, the oval goes from west to east.  

Since the church faces south and the altar is on the north side of the sanctuary, the aisle that goes between the benches follows a north-south line.  Because of this, at one point of time during the day, the oval is centered exactly on that north-south line.  That moment of time is what astronomers refer to as Solar noon.

It’s called “Solar noon” rather than simply “noon” because it doesn’t always occur at 12 o’clock.  Indeed, it hardly ever does.  But it is our original noon. People were noticing when the sun was high in the sky long before anyone ever thought about inventing a clock. Solar noon is nature’s noon.  It is the noon that we learned the idea of noon from, the Mother of all Noons.  Then we mechanized time; calibrated it;redefined it; and have tried to give the impression it belongs to us altogether.

But the sun shining through the rose window, pouring its light in front of the altar bears witness to the fact it was there first.  Let the clock on the wall say what it will, the sun will continue along its ancient highway in heaven.

I find that fact more beautiful than the colors from the stained glass.

We are surrounded by things like this.  Just as I’ve been walking past this beautiful church with its wonderful rose window for three decades, what else have I been walking past?

There is beauty, like the stained glass inside the church, that only requires us to step through the door to see, but there is another kind of beauty as well.  There is a beauty you have to prepare yourself to see.

A couple of decades ago, I attended a mathematical conference. A woman gave a research talk that was of such astounding beauty that it touched me.  It was a beautiful result in my area of specialization that she presented in a very clear way.  To a random person from the street it would’ve sounded like nonsense.  They would’ve understood the words as being English words; they would’ve understood that the sentences were grammatically correct; but the meaning of it would have escaped them.  And they certainly wouldn’t have seen the beauty of it.

I was left simply in awe.

I’d had to work for years and years to be able to appreciate the presentation. I’d walked through door after door, reading article upon article.  When the talk was finished, I thought, “If only for this, it was all worth it.”

We are surrounded by beauty.  Some of it is available to us just by walking through the right door.  Some of it requires an amazing amount of work to see.

It’s all grace.

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. )

The Ties that Bind

 The Ties that Bind

By Bobby Neal Winters

That we continue to exist after we die--to me--is just a fact.  I’m not talking about ghosts--though I won’t rule those out at some suitable level of abstraction.  

Before I go on, let me warn the reader that this is going to be a mess because I am still working out my thoughts on this and I’m not nearly as smart as I think I am.  So be forewarned.

We like to think of ourselves as individuals.  Individuality is a problematic notion.  Human beings are born as naked, helpless creatures and remain that way for some time.  (For some, this is into their thirties.) We are born totally dependent and with the help of our parents, our teachers, and other people in our lives, we gradually reduce the bonds of dependency.

But it never quite disappears.

True, there are some people who give more help than they receive, but even they receive help.  And they receive the sort of help that can’t be repaid.  They can’t just cut themselves off from everyone else.  In the words of the song, “Everybody needs somebody sometime.”

By virtue of this, we have connection with others. (My grammar checker doesn’t like “connection” as a singular in the previous sentence, but the computers don’t rule us...yet.)  That connection is real.  They are in our heads even when they are not in our presence. 

We had our kitchen door replaced.  For years it squeaked, and we could live with that, but the cats had about ripped it to shreds so we had it replaced with a metal one and a storm door. (That will show the cats.) Now the squeak is gone.

For years, my wife’s dear mother would come in through that door, and the squeak would be a signal for us that she was coming into our home. Our minds would reorder themselves in anticipation of her visit.

Between the time she died and the time the door was replaced, the door would squeak, and I would think, “Janet is coming,” as an automatic reflex.  Then my conscious mind would kick in, and correct me, no that is not going to happen.

Yet, from time to time, something happens at that corner of the house that gives me the same reaction; this happens to my wife too.  Janet is still here, if only in our heads and hearts.

This is because we are not completely individuals.  Our existence is spread out through the herd, as it were.

It is as if we are tied to each other with rubber bands.  When we are in the process of dying, those rubber bands are stretched tighter and tighter.  When we die, the bands are cut at the point of connection.  They spring out and sting those to whom they are connected, but the connections are still there.  

They are still a part of us.

How we live our lives will determine what those who remain make of the connections when we die.

Whenever I have that fraction of a second when I feel that Janet is going to enter the room, it’s a happy moment.  The next moment is a realization of grief.  Perhaps, I simply need to learn to turn that grief into an appreciation for the continued relationship.

Like I said, I am still working it out.

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. )

Cain and Abel; Caf-Pow; and Lunch Ladies

 Cain and Abel; Caf-Pow; and Lunch Ladies

By Bobby Neal Winters

Human beings are incredibly strange.

I could just leave that first sentence there and never write anything truer.  It’s right up there with two plus two equals four.  But let me expand a bit.

Last week I mentioned the story of Cain and Abel.  Cain’s sacrifice was not accepted and it hurt his feelings.  He was jealous of Abel and you know the result of that.  Before everything went to pot, God told Cain not to worry about what anyone else was doing: Do better yourself, and that will be recognized.

We have a need to be recognized.

Eleven years ago, when I was still getting my feet wet in administration, I did something to ease tension in a particular situation and, as a result of this, I was given a “Caf-Pow.”  For those of you who don’t know, Caf-Pow is a fictional energy drink on the TV series NCIS that Gibbs gives to Abbie for a job well done.  As this is fictional, the Caf-Pow cup given me was handmade. It even came with a Pepsi.  It was a seemingly small thing, but I still have the cup.

Symbols of recognition are important.

This next bit is more complicated.  We human beings have some system of hierarchy that works on an unconscious level.  It is far from transparent.  I remember a story from forty years ago about a football player at my Alma Mater who let himself into a place in the cafeteria that had been roped off.  This was a big guy; a big man on campus; he eventually went on to play for the New York Jets.  A little lunch lady who barely came up to his belly-button read him the riot act and he moved back into the part of the cafeteria that was not roped off all the time apologizing, “Yes, ma’am. I am sorry ma’am.”

We have this invisible hierarchical structure that we all fit into, and sometimes, especially if you try to be modest and humble, it is hard to know where you fit into it.  Sometimes they hand out titles to help with this, but again, if you seek to be modest and humble, it is hard to recognize that you have status in the hierarchy.

I’ve spent some space explaining this, because I’m trying to get a handle on it myself.  The point is that if you are “higher in the hierarchy” people will count what you say more heavily than they would otherwise.  Your praises will raise them higher; your criticisms will take them lower.

If you are a person who still sees himself as a little Okie boy playing in the dirt, it can be kind of hard to get your head around, but there it is.

This tells me if we are to try to do better--even if we seek to be modest and humble--we need to have some knowledge of our place in this invisible hierarchy.  Our words can hurt; our words can heal; we must be aware.

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. )