The Act of Creation

By Bobby Neal Winters

My house doesn’t have a basement; it has a well that you can walk around in. Down the middle of it is a wall that used to separate part of it off as a furnace room, but at some point the water that regularly bubbles up from below rotted it off at the bottom. Now it is not so much a wall as a curtain of wooden planks.On one end of the planks was a beautifully weathered 3-by-4. 

A month or two ago, I’d gone down there to do some electrical work and saw it anew.  The new woodworking mania that lives in my head now said to me in a voice like Gollum, “We wants it. We wants our precious wood.”

I brought it up and began thinking of what to do with it. My brain--on its own behest and operating under the influence of old-school British woodworkers on YouTube--formed a plan. 

Cut the 3 by 4 into 4 equal pieces and divide the pieces into pairs. Connect each pair together with a stretcher, joining them with mortise and tenon. Then connected those two stretchers together with another stretcher using mortise and tenon.

Rabbet the corners of the top so they fit into a frame at the top, and join the frame to the legs below with dowel pegs.  Then put a top on it.

I saw this all in my head all at once.  It was quite a rush. I knew exactly the design and the materials.  What I didn’t know was what it was.

Given the description and any sketch made from that, it could be an end table, a stool, a step-stool, or a table.

I didn’t know what it was, and I was the one making it.

I was in the process of making the top from one of the planks retrieved from the basement, and my wife Jean looked at it and said, “A game table to put puzzles on.”

And that is what it immediately became.

This is an example of the Act of Creation with the Word. She pronounced it, and so it was.

God spoke the world into existence. After Adam was created, God took him on a tour of the Garden of Eden, and Adam named all of the animals.  Man takes part in creation too, but is somewhat limited. God spoke the animals into existence, but Adam took it from there.

There’s a fellow I know who likes to tell a joke: “If you say that a dog’s tail is a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” His answer is: “Four. Saying that a tail is a leg, doesn’t make it so.”

That is a good, common sense rhetorical argument. A dog’s tail clearly differs from its legs in any number of ways.  But we could call it a leg.  We would then have the linguistic burden of distinguishing it from the other four legs. This leg does not support the animal; it is attached differently; it has a different form.  It differs from the others in so many important ways that picking a separate name for it is just more efficient. 

God has given humankind the power to name things, and over the course of millennia, we have.  It has been a dynamic, iterative process, and we’ve done it in multiple cultures and innumerable languages.

But it is even more complicated than that.

There are layers of naming. (And it is at times like this when I wish I knew more philosophy because those guys can really shell the corn when it comes to stuff like this.) Let’s look at a “human”.  That is one layer of naming.  When we get into another area, I can look at a human, and say that is a “friend” or that is an “enemy.”  There is still another layer when I would look at the same human and say, “That is my brother.”

The last of these is God’s language.  God has names for things as well: “That human that you call ‘enemy’ is your brother because you are both my children.”

Names affect the way we think. We often switch codes when we are trying to make a political point.  The word “slave” is not used in the original U.S. Constitution.  Slaves are there, but the writers twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid using that word. 

When you call someone a slave, that is a step toward separating them from being human.  Think about this when you see illegal immigrants being referred to as “illegals” or pre-born babies being referred to as “fetuses.” 

We have God-given power.  We create with our use of language; or we can destroy. We can bind and we can loose.

This is all rather heavy going for me.  I need to get back out to the shop and glue some more pieces together.  I’ve got a game table to finish.

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. )

Frozen Acorn-Jelly Soup

 Frozen Acorn-Jelly Soup

By Bobby Neal Winters

We can travel in space, but we can also travel in time.  And as has been observed by Einstein and Tennessee Williams, “Time is the farthest distance between two places.”

My group had been visiting Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea.  We were in a (Korean) Barbecue restaurant when I saw something that made me think of a beautiful girl I’d met in graduate school 40 years ago and on the other side of the planet from where I was then.

She was a beautiful latina, though no one I knew used the word “latina” in those days. In the words of Bob Seger, she was born with a face that let her get her way. Her parents were college professors. There was a conversation going on and she mentioned that she had some gazpacho in the refrigerator. 

Being ignorant and wanting to repair that I asked, “What’s gazpacho?”

“Oh,” she said, in a tone that only years later would I be sensitive enough to recognize as condescending, “it is a cold soup from Spain and Portugal...you wouldn’t like it if you were raised on Campbell’s.” 

In hindsight, I can see certain things. One, she had me pegged right off. Not only Campbells, but Campbell's Chicken Noodle if you please. Two, even the beautiful, refined daughters of college professors are works in progress. Three, when a beautiful girl says anything to a twenty-year-old boy, he will remember it even 40 years later, 8000 miles away.

What caused my reverie was the soup I saw on the table in front of me.  There was ice in it, so one could argue that it was a cold soup, like gazpacho.  I looked it over and the only ingredient I recognized was shredded seaweed.  It had the remnants of a thin layer of ice on it like a mud-puddle that was in the process of thawing.

I sampled some.  It was absolutely delicious. 

I looked it up later, and the soup is called muksabal.  I prefer to think of it as frozen acorn-jelly soup.  The acorn jelly is called dotori-muk, and acorn jelly doesn’t quite capture it in my opinion. It is made from acorns--yes the ones from oak trees--and it has a consistency somewhere between that of jello and that of tofu.

The soup was spicy and sour and freezing cold, obviously.  And, to repeat myself, it was absolutely delicious.

The last forty years have had quite an effect on me.  When I was twenty, I thought I was the smartest person in any room I was in.  I’ve learned differently now and am reminded of it on a regular basis. But I have at least been smart enough to cure some of my ignorance.

Our time on Planet Earth is the best university there is...if we want to learn. In our youths we can be ignorant and arrogant.  We can be privileged and insensitive. That is par for the course.  Forgiving ourselves, forgiving others, and even coming to the realization that there is nothing to be forgiven because that’s just life happening.

Everything we encounter is precious.  Even a bowl of soup can remind us of a beautiful girl from 40 years ago and a planet away.

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. )

Angels in Seoul

 Angels in Seoul

By Bobby Neal Winters

As I write this, I am in my hotel room on a Saturday morning in Seoul, South Korea.  I’ve been here as part of a small group which is cultivating partnerships with several South Korean universities.  We look at programs that we have in common.  We examine their similarities and their differences.  If they are too different, we cannot form a partnership; if they are too similar, there is really little point in forming a partnership.  The trick is finding that magical window where the differences add up to value-added for both sides of the partnership.

This is exhausting.

When I’ve not been meeting with university officials or going to and from meeting them on the Seoul Metropolitan subway system, I’ve been exploring downtown Seoul.

By exploring, I mean wandering out of sight of my hotel and getting lost.  Getting lost is one of my favorite things to do in a strange city.  In Seoul it doesn’t require much effort.  There are two factors that make getting lost in Seoul easy.  The first of these is there is a large number of very tall buildings.  Cross a street, walk half a block, and you are out of sight of your hotel.

The second factor is what I like to think of as the Underground City.  As I mentioned before, we used the subway.  There is a tunnel system attached to the subway system that connects it all up.  Attached to that tunnel system is an underground shopping mall.

There are tons and tons of little shops.  Hardly any of those are shops that are part of any franchise that is recognizable to an American, or at least to a Kansan.  Korean has a different alphabet than we do, but some of the signs are in Korean and English and Chinese and Japanese.  And none of that makes it any easier to pick out a landmark. 

So getting lost is easy.  The irony is that I was not lost when I first encountered the Red Angels.

When I first encountered the Red Angels, I was about 100 feet from the Plaza Boulangerie, the bakery near where our hotel connects with the tunnel system.  They were not difficult to see.  They were dressed in red--and when I say red I mean Nebraska Cornhusker red as opposed to Oklahoma Sooner red--quasi military-style attire. As the design-types say, their uniforms popped.

Given the connotation for red I grew up with, my first thought was, “Those have got to be the worst North Korean spies ever.”

But as I approached, we made eye contact and the man (there was one male and one female) asked, “May I help you?”

I declined his offer because I was not lost.

I walked a distance further and found a map of the subway system and a map of the underground shopping market, and paused to study them. I’d been there a minute or two when the earnest young man offered again.  This time he gave me a map and pointed to where I was on it.

I accepted the map, and walked off in another direction, out of their sight.  I was grateful to the Red Angels for the gift of the map.  I opened it and began to try to find where I was on it.  Because, as you know, a map is useless unless you know where you are on it.  As I was looking the map over, I was approached by someone else in a uniform.  

I don’t know if it was a policeman or a mall rent-a-cop, but he saw I had a map open and assumed that I was lost.  In uncertain English he asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’m exploring,” I said. But this was beyond his English.

“Where are you going?” he asked again.

I did a quick mental calculation with regard to how likely it would be to get him to understand that I was not lost, but just exploring.  

I told him the name of my hotel.

He led me up a long flight of stairs and pointed to my hotel which was exactly where I knew it would be.

I put away my map the minute he was out of sight.  I was then able to get lost and, after a satisfying length of time, to find my way back.  It was a time well spent. 

“I once was lost, but now I am found/ Was blind but now I see.”

I will see you all on the other side.

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. )

 

 Jesus in Seoul

By Bobby Neal Winters

We went to church in Seoul this morning.  We went to the Myeyongdong Catholic Cathedral, though none of us is Catholic.  It was within walking distance; it had a service in English; so we went there.

One of our party had never been to a Catholic service before, so I offered my advice.  Sit toward the back.  Stand when they stand, though they won’t stand all at once because they are doing the same.  They stand when they pray just like Methodists stand when they sing.

And you’ve got to watch out, because the priest will say, “The Lord be with you,” and you will want to reply with, “And also with you,”(because why wouldn’t you), but the congregation will say, “And with your spirit.”

That worked out pretty well.

Though it was an English language service, virtually everyone there was Asian.  The exceptions were the priest and the readers.  There were four readers, none of whom were Korean, but only one of which was a native English speaker.

One of our party who had been to a Catholic service before noted that there were no kneelers.  During the times when Catholics at home would’ve been kneeling, the Koreans bowed.

The Psalm was read by an African man, who had a strong but very understandable accent.  He read, 

“Kindness and truth shall meet;/

justice and peace shall kiss./

Truth shall spring out of the earth,/

and justice shall look down from heaven.”

And we responded, “Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.”

The priest gave his homily on John the Baptist.  If I were to guess from his accent, I would say he was Spanish--the priest, not John the Baptist.

It was wonderful. There we were more than 7000 miles away from home but united with Christian brothers not only from Korea, but from all around the world.  

Christ told his disciples to take the good news to the whole world and make disciples of every nation.  He also wanted us to remain united.  One is tempted to say that two out of three ain’t bad. The truth is that the first two are wonderful, but the lack of the third is shameful.

When time came for the people to receive the eucharist, the priest pointed out that only baptized catholics could partake, so my little group of protestants remained in our pew.  Then one priest can and looked at us--looked at me in particular--and invited me to come and receive.  Rather than refuse and stay in my pew, I stepped out and when I came to the priest I crossed my arms on my chest as I’ve been taught to do to signify that what God has created to be One has been broken by Man. 

The priest blessed me--which is never a bad thing--and I returned to my pew.

In my heart, that hymn from the 1960s plays,

“We are One in The Spirit,/

We are One in The Lord./

We are One in The Spirit,/

We are One in The Lord. /

And we pray that all unity may one day be restored. /

And they'll know we are Christians by our love, /

By our Love, /

Yes they'll know we are Christians by our love.”

I am on the opposite side of the world from my loved ones, but Jesus has preceded me here, and it’s okay.

A Matter of Interpretation

A Matter of Interpretation

By Bobby Neal Winters

Interpretation is a craft that mostly goes unnoticed, but if there is no interpretation, art can’t be art.

Recently Jean and I went out to a production of Fiddler on the Roof put on by a Broadway touring company.  I’ve seen the movie before, but this was the first time I’d seen it on stage. If there was one word different between the movie and the stage play, I didn’t notice it.  All the songs were there; all of the dialog was there.

But the two productions were different.  It wasn’t just the difference between a movie and a play.  It was bigger than that. The actors interpreted the characters differently.  

In the movie, Topol interprets Tevye as being someone who is very intelligent, but simply uneducated but who desires learning above all else. The Tevye in this stage production took it a different way.  Tevye is not an idiot, but he’s not as smart as the one portrayed by Topol in the movie. This is not due to one actor being better than the other; it’s simply a choice.

A play is just words on a page.  To have meaning, it must be interpreted.  In something like a play, the actors, possibly with the help of a director, do the interpretation.  It goes in through the eyes, is processed in the soul, and comes out on the stage.

I am listening to an audiobook with the title “The Philosophy of Modern Song.”  Don’t let the word “philosophy” in the title turn you off.  The book is written by Bob Dylan and is a collection of essays each of which focuses on a particular song by a particular artist. (If you do a search for the book title on YouTube, you will find a list of the songs.)  I am about a third of the way through now, and I’ve found no particular order, grouping, or commonality among the songs.  Perhaps there will be a summary at the end.

What we do get, however, is Dylan’s interpretation of these songs.  Dylan provides a lens with which we can examine this art.  I say lens, but as a whole, it is a telescope.  There is the lens of the songwriter who looks at reality and interprets; then there is the singer who interprets the words on the page; then there is Dylan interpreting the singer.

The abstract mathematical model for communication has three parts. The first part is the sender who sends the message. The final part is the receiver who receives the message.  That is straightforward and self-explanatory. Between them is the channel.

Mathematically we often talk about a noiseless channel or a noisy channel, but when we bring in an interpreter it is something different.

The interpreter fits where the channel does, between the sender and the receiver.  Technically speaking, the interpreter does add noise, but depending upon the skill of the interpreter, the so-called noise might be added-value.

In reference to “Fiddler on the Roof,” the interpretation of the actors can either amplify or mute.  In the flat words on the page, the conflict between Tevye and Golde is there.  In the movie we see that somewhat, but it is muted to a certain extent.  In the stage production, we see Tevye and Golde are in fact at war.  Ironically, this is made most clear in the song “Do you love me?” at the very climax of the song. 

Tevye: Do you love me?

Golde: I suppose I do.

Tevye: Then I suppose I love you too.

One might not realize the infinity of ways “suppose” can be pronounced nor the effect on the meaning until one hears the actors say the word.  They love each other, but they are at war.

There is the interpretation of the writer, the interpretation of the actor, the interpretation of the painter, but there is also the interpretation of the critic.

Each of these is a lens and the quality they bring to the coloring of the lens might be given the name “Soul.” Soul is the cumulative effect of the miles one has walked, the shoes worn, and the quality of the road.

A book like “The Philosophy of Modern Song” written by someone like Dylan has a whole different weight and quality than one written by someone without his experience, without his point of view. He’s a poet, a songwriter, and a singer who is acting in the capacity of a critic.  He’s been an interpreter in multiple capacities (remember, he’s been an actor too) who is now sitting in a critic’s chair.  He brings with him credibility in interpreting these songs to us; he brings weight with his point of view.

He’s got enough city-miles on him to make us think he knows what he’s talking about.

The actors in “Fiddler” doubtless have their own preparation in terms of their lives, their experiences, their history, and their beliefs. They bring that in with them, and they offer us the results.

Blessings to them.

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 to Write Like a First Grade Teacher

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve always been a clutz.  I’ve had poor hand eye coordination. My handwriting is horrible and my printing is hardly  better. Over the last year, however, I’ve made a discovery: I can put a Phillips screwdriver into the top of a screw without thinking about it.

That last prepositional phrase, “without thinking about it,” is a necessary part of the sentence.  If I think about it too much, my conscious mind gets in the way, and I miss.  My hands have an intelligence guiding them that is separate from my conscious mind.

When I first noticed this, my mind popped to a phrase from the 137th Psalm: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.”

The Psalmist recognized the hands as having a separate intelligence of their own.

I’ve also discovered that I can print like a first grade teacher if I take my time. That’s what my teachers always told me: I should take my time.  

I think this is all happening now--long after it would have helped any of the teachers who’ve suffered through my handwriting--because I’ve taken up woodworking.

In learning, I’ve always been an adventurer, from the very beginning.  I didn’t listen to my teachers when they told me there was a right way to form my letters.  I figured out how to do it on my own and did it my way. (Queue up Sinatra on the background music.)  My way “worked” but there were better ways that I didn’t even look at because I already “knew” how to do it.

I’ve been a fool.

By the Grace of God, I am what I am, and by His Grace, I’ve lived long enough to see it.

I started woodworking almost exactly one year ago.  I’d found my father-in-law’s old, old Harbor Freight table saw.  By old, old I mean pre-OSHA.  It terrified me.

It terrified me, but I set myself to learn how to use it.  In doing so, I began the habit of study.  YouTube, which I’d found to be useful in other learning endeavors, became my best friend.  In learning how to use this table saw, I became hooked on woodworking.

I’ve learned the skills that my Kindergarten teachers, my grade school teachers, and all the rest had tried in vain to teach me: Take your time; follow the steps; don’t work ahead of the class.

If you want to make a groove in a board, you can do it.  There are a lot of ways to do it, but most of them will put you at risk of getting your fingers cut off, so maybe use the method you are being taught, at least until you know what you are doing.

When you build things with wood, you start with basic shapes, basic joints then you build up from there.  The short way of saying this is that everything is a box.  In this way, woodworking is very mathematical.  The difference between woodworking and mathematics is that in math, when you make a mistake, you can just erase it.  

In woodworking, there are things you can do to fix it, but it’s more expensive than an eraser. You learn to think further ahead; to take care; to take time.

You slow down.

I can now print like a first grade teacher, but I do it very slowly.  I suppose that I would learn to be faster if I practiced at it more.  Maybe I will, because it calms me.  I slow down and think about each word, each letter, breaking the letters into their pieces. 

Letters can be broken into separate pieces just like chairs and cabinets. It only took me sixty years to learn this.

While I don’t use my new skill in printing much, I am using my ability to “stab a screw” because I’ve been transforming my garage into a workshop.  As I write this, I’ve almost finished installing sheetrock onto the ceiling.  I’ve got chalk dust in my hair to prove it. I’ve gained a respect for another line of work and have no regret for missing out on that particular career.

If I were to die today, there would be people who would look at my age in the obituary and say, “Well, he had a good run.”

I would refute that with a line from Tennyson: “Life piled on life \ Were all too little, and of one to me \ Little remains: but every hour is saved \ From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things...”

If God, in His Grace, gives me the time, I will build my shop.  My hands will learn their cunning.

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. )

 Some meandering thoughts on the passage of time and getting older

By Bobby Neal Winters

If the time of year made a sound, right now it would be making the sound of a spinning quarter on a table top. The quarter would be about to tip over and do its final flops before coming to a rest.

We still have the month of December ahead.  On one hand, that is one-twelfth of the year; on the other hand, it disappears like a snowflake in an October snow.  Soon we will find it is New Year’s Eve and we will be wondering where the Old Year went.

Even though I draw the bulk of my pay for the service of administration, I still teach a class.  This is in part because of the advice the academic vice president who originally hired me gave when he learned I was interested in administration. “Never stop teaching,” he said.

And I haven’t.  It was good advice. Rest in peace, Dr. Ratzalf.

I am teaching a small, upper-division class this semester.  The students in it are younger than my youngest child, the daughter we had when we were pushing forty. Time passes differently for them than it does for me.  To me, this semester has disappeared, well, like a snowflake in an October snow. 

In my mind, we’ve just started.  Today, I met them and gave them their last lecture before their last regular exam.  I taught the material, and my feeling was that they couldn’t’ve had the time to absorb the material that led up to this point.

But they seem okay about it.  To them, this semester has lasted months and not just moments.

If only they knew how quickly they would be sixty.

As this is an upper division class, some of them are going to graduate this semester, and some of them are going to graduate school to work on their masters degree.  I still have dreams of that time in my life.  My professors and my fellow students are still a part of my unconscious mind.

They are still with me, but, as I said, it was just an eyeblink ago.  That is, if it takes 40 years to blink an eye.

I spend more time trying to remember words and names than I used to.  It used to be “pop,” and there it was.  Now it sometimes takes seconds, minutes, or even weeks.  I suppose that I should feel good that I remember for weeks that I’d forgotten a word a few weeks ago, but it doesn’t really work like that.

Today, I was telling my students something that had happened in 1995, and it occurred to me to ask, “Were you even born then?”

No. No they were not.

Never ask a question you don’t want to hear the answer to.

My hair is almost totally white now.  I put that word almost in there just in case someone with a magnifying glass calls me on it.

As those of you who follow this space or who are acquainted with me in real life know, I’ve lost a lot of weight recently.  This is good; I feel better than I have in years.  Those who watch me walk by now as I walk downtown will see that I go at quite a bit faster clip than I did even a year ago.

There is a down side though.  Whereas the subcutaneous fat used to push my skin with enough tension to make it smooth, this is no longer the case.  I have wrinkles where they didn’t used to be. And worse, I have waddles in diverse places.

What’s more, these waddles are larger than they might otherwise be because I’ve lost so much weight.

I wonder if I would look younger if I got my waddles pierced and put earrings through them.

Probably not.

I am not as worried about getting old as I may have made it sound.  I had a friend who died of cancer in his forties who was denied this experience.  I think I should choose to glory in it as much as possible.

I’ve never been vain about my appearance--you only need to look at me to know--so the white hair, the wrinkles, and the waddles don’t bother me.

No, if I were to worry, it would be about taking so long to remember words, to remember names.  As my mother had dementia, that might be actually a legitimate thing to worry about.  But I don’t think it’s that.

I think that once you reach a certain age you’ve had so many experiences, have met so many people, have learned so many things, that it just takes time to pick your way through all of them.

I still remember the things I need to know: the number of the director of HR, the number of the University Attorney, and the number of the Title IX office.  Anything beside that, you can take the time to look up.

And I can still solve more problems with one two-minute phone call than most junior faculty could in a month of Sundays.  And NO, I have not retired. Not hardly.

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. )

 Mortise and Tenon, Blood and Sweat

By Bobby Neal Winters

Thanksgiving Day is coming soon.  The blood of the turkey has no doubt already been shed.  The cans of cranberry sauce are sitting in the pantry waiting for their contents to be shaken free.  French onion, mushroom soup, and green beans wait to be combined into a casserole.

This is the nearest thing the increasingly secular culture of the United States has that corresponds to the ancient practice of blood sacrifice. Please bear with me as I expand on this.

Right now as I type this, I have a scab that is a 16th of an inch wide and one-and-a-quarter inches long on the index finger of my left hand. With any luck, it will make a nice scar to remind me how I got it.

I’d been cutting a tenon because I wanted to learn how to cut a mortise and tenon.  I’d done the mortise first, because that’s how you do it, and I was cutting my tenon to fit it.  I’d had my tenon in the vise as I’d cut it, but I’d taken it out to have a look at it.  I noticed that it needed to be trimmed a little along the edge.  Rather than put it back in the vise, a lazy voice in my brain told me I could just hold it with my hand as I trimmed it.

It was a lazy and not too smart voice.

My Japanese pull-saw slipped, and its cutting edge slipped along the top of my knuckle. There was a lot of blood, but I managed to staunch it with some paper towels. I went into the house with a bloody paper towel wrapped around my finger.  My wife looked at my finger and then looked at me with that expression she has when she questions her life-choices.

No stitches were required, but I will, as I said, have a nice scar, a memorial to my stupidity. 

You might well wonder what a mortise and tenon is.  It is a joint for holding two pieces of wood together.  These are words from Old French. A mortise is a hole that you cut into one piece of wood and a tenon is a peg that you carve from the other piece that goes into that hole.

Given that description and the fact that the words come from Old French, anyone who has ever been a 14-year-old boy might be forgiven for having certain hypotheses about what the words mean in the original French, but no, get that right out of your head.  Tenon actually came into French from the Latin tenere, which means to hold.  The origins of mortise are more mysterious, but some believe it came into Old French from an Arabic word that means to hold as well.

Those meanings work well with the application because this is a joint that does hold.

The fact that I cut myself and drew quite a bit of blood while learning who to make this joint works well with the idea that one must suffer to learn one’s art.  Though I will be the first to say that calling what I do art is to stretch that small word beyond all recognition.  I probably should have used the word craft instead, but there is some stretching going on there too.

In any case, it ties into that ancient idea of the blood sacrifice.  If we get something, we must give something.  The better the thing we are asking for, the higher the price we pay.  Something really good requires blood because blood is the stuff of life itself, and life is the most precious thing.

To give blood in exchange for knowledge and skill is appropriate.  Knowledge and skill are some of the most precious assets we can possess. They are more portable than diamonds; they can be stolen; and you keep them even if you give them.

As we come into Thanksgiving, we are participating in another sort of sacrifice.  I was reminded of this by one of my pastor’s sermons the other day on tithing. (It’s that time of year, folks.) While some tithes were to be given to the priests of the temple, others were given as feasts to be shared with one’s fellows.  God directed his people to take some of their “increase” and share it with their neighbors and family.

This sounds a great deal like Thanksgiving to me.  We offer the food as an offering in thanks to God and this is done in exchange for greater fellowship with our friends and family.

This fellowship joins us more tightly with each other.  We sacrifice food, time, a bit of conversation, and a bit of ourselves in exchange for bonds that will connect one to the other like mortise and tenon.

As you sit around the table on Thanksgiving, join hands and pray--if you do--and deepen than bond.  Join to your loved ones and hold on to them as tightly as you can.

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. )

 On Darkness, Death, and other Parts of Life

By Bobby Neal Winters

With the passing of Halloween, autumn is fully upon us.  There is no denying it now. My morning alarm goes off in the pitch black of night; we sit down to supper in darkness.  Leaves have fallen to cover the sidewalk and whatever dog poop that might be there.

Time to shift gears.

Death is a part of life.

The trees spent the summer growing their leaves out toward the sun, making them out of air, water, and a few other ingredients taken from the soil.  

The leaves have now fallen and will spend the winter in decay.  By decay, I mean they are themselves food for bacteria and various other microorganisms.

The poop under the leaves will decay as well.

It all goes back into the system of life.

The Indians, the indigenous peoples, understood.  They believed everything was living. They believed even the rocks were alive. And consider this: rocks are broken down by lichen and other organisms.  Their components are released into the soil and into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The rocks themselves are a part of the system.

The Indigenous Peoples thought the earth itself was alive. Some of them found the notion of plowing the earth to be as offensive as cutting a woman’s breast.  The earth was their Mother.

The Earth is our Mother. We--Life--springs forth from it.  Life on Earth is made from it just as each of us is made from our mother’s body.

That is a good paragraph.  Reread it. It will do you good.

But I digress.

We who live in the northern hemisphere are now going into our time of darkness; our time of death. We mark this with Halloween; with All Saint’s Day’; with El Dia de Los Muertos.

We think about those we love who have died. We think about our own death.  We think about the day when we ourselves will fall like leaves onto the Earth to be taken apart and put back into the system.  Even dead we are part of life; like the soil; like the rocks that become the soil.

But that is just a part of it.  There is a layer of human life that is above just eating and drinking; urinating and defecating. 

Satan tempted Jesus to turn the stones to bread. Jesus replied that “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

When we die, our lives are broken down by those who are left much like microorganisms break down the leaves.  By our lives, I mean our actions, the way we conducted ourselves, the way we treated others. This can begin at our funeral in the pastor’s homily as he lays our life out as an offering. That casts the pastor doing something analogous to what a vulture does to a fallen wildebeest, so I think I will not press that analogy too far.

In any case, our deeds become a part of others' lives as they choose to repeat them.

Talking about death, talking about the dead is a necessary and good part of life.  We honor them and we serve ourselves by emulating what was worthy in them.

They live again to the extent their lives were words from the mouth of God.

During the summer, we are turned outward into the world.  The World of Light and the World of Life is all around us. When the light recedes, we turn inward.  We examine ourselves.  We assess who we are, and we plan who we would like to be.

We sit in front of the hearth (usually tuned to Netflix or Amazon Prime) to contemplate who we are, to plan who we would like to be.  Can we make the actions of our lives to be words coming from the mouth of God?

We think such things when the darkness and cold are at our door like a pair of starving wolves.

The sun will come again. Life will begin anew.

Until then we wait.

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. )

A Metaphor made Manifest

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last Wednesday I was either teaching or in a meeting every hour from 9am until 4pm.  My 4pm meeting was a half-hour telephone call, and then as I drove home I got a call from someone who had missed my 2pm Zoom meeting.

My schedule was tight. There were no gaps, no cracks.  Every event flowed exactly into the next.

When I’d gotten the last of my schedule done, I went to my garage and I cut dovetails.

That’s what I’ve been working on lately: I am learning to cut dovetail joints by hand.  I will forgive you for not knowing what dovetails are because one year ago I didn’t know what they were myself.

I’d heard the word dovetail.  I have even used the phrase “that dovetails nicely,” but when I did so, I was a fraud.  I didn’t feel it. I didn’t have an appreciation for the phrase.  I didn’t know from whence it came.

Now I do.  I don’t know that makes me a better person, but I do feel a bit more...smug.  That’s it: Smug. Smugness is what I am feeling.

Let me now transition from being smug to being pedantic. The two dovetail as it were.

A dovetail joint is a way to join two pieces of wood together. If you have an old chest of drawers, open one drawer a crack and look how the front of the drawer is connected with the sides. If you see the wood on the corners of the sides fan out into something that looks like birds’ tails (dovetail) the drawer has been made using dovetails.

The joint consists of two pieces.  One one piece, has the eponymous dovetails and the matching piece has the pins.  The idea is that you cut the pins so that they mesh so tightly with the dovetails that a thin layer of glue will barely fit between them and not much else. The flaring out of the dovetails helps hold the pieces together.

Tightness is the name of the game, so I cut them with a Japanese dovetail saw.  The saw is very thin so that it has a very small kerf (look it up). Japanese saws cut when you pull toward you rather than when you push so that they don’t bend in a tight kerf.

One marks the dovetails in a very particular way.  It is almost ritualized, and that word “almost” might not belong there.  There might just be different denominations of dovetail cutters.

You can measure with a ruler and divide the end of your board that way.  The folks on YouTube sometimes deride that as being too mathematical.  The alternative is to use dividers, which are similar to a compass, to mark the ends of the dovetails.  I find this much more satisfactory, and, ironically, much more mathematics.  It harkens back to Euclidean geometry and constructing geometric figures.

You learn this process by watching someone else do it, but you don’t really understand until you do it yourself.  Let me rework that last clause: “until you do it wrong yourself.”

When you do it wrong, thinking that detail didn’t matter, you get to the end and...ssss...there is a gap.  The joint still functions, but it’s not as beautiful as it was in your head. You see the reason it was done that particular way.

Your wife will look at it, and say that it’s beautiful. But you know what it’s supposed to look like.

This semester my Wednesday schedule at work fits together as tightly as a very finely crafted dovetail joint. It all consists of talking to people and listening to people.  Paying attention. Taking notes. Making promises. Trying not to make promises.

I begin to suffer from a malady I call “too many conversations.”

I’ve been a part of too many conversations during the day.  I start replaying some of the conversations in my head, and they are never the conversations that went well. Words swirl in my head like sawdust in a shop vac.

The ritual of marking, measuring, and cutting focuses me.  I am no longer in a world of words whirling in my head.  I am in a realm of things. The world of reality. It is a good world; a solid world; a world that is just better somehow.

In this world, I can see the mistakes I make and work to fix them.  An ugly gap? Fill it with epoxy resin. The wood is not even?  That is why God invented random orbital sanders.

The dovetails aren’t perfect.  Well, they are never going to be, but they will be better next time.

My central task these days is making a cabinet of drawers for my shop. I am using cedar pickets from the fencing section of Home Despot [sic] for the drawers.  They are cheap and they smell nice when you cut them.  Good for practice.

The wood is, however, horrible for this purpose.  By this I mean it is very soft.  It is very hard to get a tight fit and very easy to break and make it ugly. But it’s good for practice, and I am the only one who I need to please.

The stack of drawers in my cabinet is a history of my introduction to learning dovetails. The latest is better than the first. You can stack them from bottom to top and see the difference.

It all fits quite nicely.

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. )

So you want to live forever

 So you want to live forever

By Bobby Neal Winters

You can remember someone who is no longer living but whose life has had an effect on you. Their existence has continued after death. To me, this is just the plain truth.  I am sure there are those who are learned that could rip that logic apart, but I am just going to let them.

My mother’s family were town people.  They were small town people, but they were still town people.  My father’s family were not.  Town people come into contact with more people than country people do. Hence the name “town people.”  My mother’s family knew more of the little things that get you through the day.

My dad learned a lot of these things and he kept the ones he thought were smart.  My mother’s younger brother, Tommy, wore glasses.  He taught my dad that it’s not a good idea to put your glasses down lens first on any surface because they would get scratched.

My mother’s mother always said that when you are washing a sharp knife to never let it go.  You pick it up; hold it the whole time you are washing it; rinse it, again holding it the whole time.  You only put it down when you put it in the drainer.

Dad was fond of both my Uncle Tommy and my momma’s mother.  He learned those things, and whenever he taught them to me and my brother, he mentioned where he’d learned them.

Wearing glasses myself, I still lay them down face up religiously. On those rare occasions that I do dishes by hand [we will pause here for my wife to chuckle], I never let loose of a sharp knife. (I think that particular one could be raised to a higher level by a Mafia Don or some such, but let’s just let that one go.) 

But my point is what these people taught my dad still affects me. And, because I’ve shared this with you, they are still teaching.

This could be a point where I could digress into the value of teaching.  It would be handy to do because my Uncle Tommy was a grade school teacher who taught the Navajo in the Four-Corners region of New Mexico.  But my mom’s mom wasn’t, and in any case, Tommy didn’t tell my dad about how to handle glasses as a teacher but as a friend.

Dad learned from them because he liked them.

While as a teacher that is something I might like to keep in my mind, it is something everyone might do well to remember. It is not a crime to position yourself in such a way that people like you.  

And I don’t mean that you have to be a pushover. You can exercise kindness without letting people walk all over you.

There, I said the word: Kindness.

You can be kind.

You can be kind, but sometimes it’s quite an exercise.  Sometimes it requires capturing the flow of events and slowing them down so you can get a handle on them. There are times in conversations when you need to delay what you say so that you can understand what has just been said in order to edit what you are going to reply.  That was quite a long sentence; you might want to read it again.

And there are times when a good editor just marks a blue pencil through everything.

Kindness goes beyond niceness.  There are wicked, wicked people who are “nice.” Kindness has a spine of love in it.

Love: there, I’ve said it.

If you’ve only watched movies, you likely don’t know what love is.  Love is not a state you fall into.  Love is a choice. You can choose to love people.

We can’t always choose our feelings, but love is not a feeling. I was going to write that love is wanting the best for someone, but let me be more careful.  It is a consequence of love to want the best for someone. 

We are to love our neighbors; we are to love our enemies.  That is quite a spectrum there.

It was the love of my Uncle Tommy and my Grandma Byrd that caused them to want to teach my father these small things. He felt that love and returned it, so he was able to let himself learn from them and pass it on.

These were only two of the things he learned from them. There are other things we learn unconsciously.  We absorb things just by being with them.  And we pass them on as well.

We learn love; we pass on love; we live forever in love.

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 Bacon Grease Gospel

By Bobby Neal Winters

A short time ago, my wife made us some BLT sandwiches. Well, as I don’t eat iceberg lettuce, mine was a BT sandwich, but I digress. There was bacon grease leftover in the pan afterwards, and by morning it had cooled and congealed.

Every morning, I fry myself two eggs.  I usually use vegetable oil, but there--right on the stove top--was the congealed, nitrite-full fat of the bacon-beast.  I took a big spoon and ladled it out into the cast-iron skillet that I use to fry my morning eggs.  I was, of course, careful to miss the kitty footprints that were in it; there are always kitty footprints in it.

The results were delightful.  I was able to stretch out the bacon grease for a few mornings.  

Life is good.

Many of you are shocked. You are saying that he has fallen off the weight-control wagon. That I have backslidden.

No.  Not yet. Not because of that.

Whether you gain or lose weight depends upon the number of total calories you consume.  There might be other reasons you shouldn’t eat bacon fat, but this is not one of them.

Every group has its own type of fat.  Our Mediterranean brothers and sisters have olive oil; the dairy farmers in Wisconsin have butter; the Jewish community in New York City has chicken fat,schmaltz I think it’s called.

Bacon grease is the fat of my people, and we are a People who know about fat first hand.

On my mother’s stove there stood a Crisco can.  The one thing that I never saw in that Crisco can was Criso.  The store-bought Crisco was always quickly used up--for what I don’t know--and the can was then put to permanent use for storing bacon drippings.

You fry bacon; you eat it; you save the drippings in the can. After the grease was used, it was alway carefully retrieved.  At least as much as hadn’t soaked into the food was retrieved.  So some of it was used over, and over, and over. One might wonder whether it would eventually polymerise or develop into a living thing.  One might wonder, but one oughtn’t if one wants to sleep well.

You might have a nightmare about the contents of a Crisco can terrorizing and isolated Oklahoma town like the movie “Tremors” or something.

I submit that the saving of bacon grease is at the very least educational and at most a means of grace. 

We learn not to waste: the pig died for us to have the bacon, so it is a duty upon us to put it to as much use as possible. We learn the accumulation of small things builds up: a piece of bacon only has a small bit of grease in it, but over time you can fill a whole Crisco can. We learn to postpone a celebration: it takes a long time to save up enough to fry something big, so you’d better learn to wait.

My marriage is a mixed marriage.  I married out of the bacon and into the butter. Though her parents had lived in Oklahoma long enough to learn the good of bacon grease, they had not learned the discipline of saving it. Try as I might, I could not convince my wife to begin it on her own.  When I tried to do it, I was banished from the kitchen for “starting with frying four pieces of bacon.”

If we’d saved our bacon grease, I wouldn’t have had to.

Well, yes, I do get the point.  You can have bacon grease; you can eat fried foods.  But it is all in amounts: Portion size and frequency.

I can get away with two fried eggs, and even two fried eggs every day, but fried chicken--especially the chicken fried in bacon grease like Momma used to--one has to separate those occasions far from each other: Sundays? Birthdays? Humans setting foot on Mars?

We need to get beyond the superstitious thinking that some foods are magically good and some foods are cursed.

Bacon grease is not cursed.  It is blessed,but with a blessing that requires its controlled use.

The Catholics advise a controlled use of meat during lent. Perhaps there could be a similar but more stringent control of bacon grease: Only between 6 and 7am on weekdays and 7 and 8am on weekends.  (If that seems a little specific, it’s only your imagination.)

It’s something to think about.

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. )

 Sugar and Attention

By Bobby Neal Winters

I will be turning 60 soon.  Very soon. I’ve learned a few things. Among these is that there are some things--and maybe most things-where it is not about all or nothing.  It is about finding the right measure. Right measure is not even right.  It is about finding the right path.  As examples, let’s take sugar and attention.

Sugar and attention are a lot alike.  They both should be treated like controlled substances.  They are addictive and once you get hooked...

Well, trouble can follow.

I will begin with a confession that I am a sugar addict.  I have a sweet tooth as big as Texas.  The simile would be better if Texas were made of chocolate, but then I would probably have been found dead a long time ago with Fort Worth dribbling down my cheek.

Nutritionally, sugar is complicated.  You don’t actually have to eat sugar to live.  It does occur naturally in some foods, like fruit, for instance, but you don’t have to eat sugar.

But--and here is where the word complicated is justified--your body has to have it.  That may confuse you because I just said you don’t have to EAT it.  You do have to HAVE it. Sugar is your source of energy.  Your body makes sugar.  Your liver does it. Your liver makes it for you from the other foods you eat.

But you don’t have to eat it directly.  When you do eat it directly, you get a quick boost.  I don’t need science to tell me this.  I learned it on my own. Eating candy while I drive will keep me awake better than caffeine. Caramel M&Ms are perfect for this.  They are like crack cocaine to me, though I don’t know that for sure.

Since I began my weight loss program last year, my consumption of sugar has gone way, way down.  I don’t remember the last time I even put sugar in my tea. I’ve begun to use it more like medicine.  Last week I was falling to sleep at the wheel as I drove back from Oklahoma, so I stopped for Caramel M&Ms and they perked me right up.

But this is a slippery slope because the addition is real. It’s been a week and the Caramel M&Ms have been calling to me ever since.

As I said above, attention is a lot like sugar: We have to HAVE it, but the way we receive it is important.

This following example may sound brutal, so consider this as a trigger warning.  When I was a little kid, I was with a group where there was a group of younger children playing along with the adults looking on.  One of the kids fell down and did the equivalent of scraping his knee.  My grandfather, my dear Grampa Sam, told the rest of the adults present: “Don’t pay attention to him or he will cry.”  They didn’t pay attention to him, and he didn’t cry. 

I’ve been in similar situations where the child has begun to cry and the adults pretended not to see, and the child quieted himself.

This might not be strange to you, but I’ve been living in a social circle where every boo-boo is immediately kissed and every tear is immediately dried. This has an effect, and time will tell us what it is.

Clearly there are times when we must immediately pay attention to our children’s pain--a bone sticking out of a leg is a pretty good clue--but if you give more attention than a “boo-boo” is worth, then that is a net reward. We get more of whatever we reward.  

One could call the amount of crying that is beyond what is warranted by the name “drama.”  If you reward drama, you get drama.

There are things we should reward with attention. When my daughters were younger, they took part in music for a short time. (They were fired by their teacher, but let’s not go there.) We went to music contests.  The children played their pieces; stood and took their bows; received their applause.

It occurred to me that for a talented young person, this would become an entitlement. It then occurred to me that the same thing happens to academics. Work hard, do good on a test: Get rewarded with attention. Work hard, write a good essay: Get rewarded with attention.

Work hard and perform well: Get attention.  

In the right measure, this is good.  You should be rewarded in the learning process...in the beginning.  But there has to be a time of transition to something more mature. You have to transition from working hard to become excellent so you can receive the reward for the excellence to the point where the excellence is the reward itself.

My model for this comes from the movie “Babe.”  After a remarkable performance, the trainer says, “That’ll do, Pig.”

Addiction to sugar can lead to obesity and diabetes.  Addiction to attention can lead to narcissism and all other weird quirks of human behavior that I don’t have space to go into.  Those of us in academic administration like to call it “job security.”

I am dealing with my own sugar addiction by giving myself rules for when I can eat sugar.  I can eat one cookie in the church parlor right after church, for example.  I can eat one regular-sized bag of Caramel M&Ms if I am falling asleep at the wheel while driving.

The attention thing is harder.  The “that’ll do, Pig” level of attention is not for everyone.  It is an area where I’ve more questions than answers, but I can at least share my ignorance with you.

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. )

My Trip to the Nations

 My Trip to the Nations 

Or

Of Rivers and Indians

The sun has burnt the ground and bleached the earth. Since mid-June, the rain we’ve received has reminded me of the water mother used to sprinkle on her ironing.  It’s only been enough to provide steam.

I got the call on Friday.  My brother, who has been ill this week and tested for COVID twice, was taken to the ER by an old neighbor, a friend, a spirit-sister. Not COVID. 

It’s an infection of the foot.  In his bones.

I was to have gone to a choir dinner with a 70s theme that evening, but it was not to be. We made our apologies; saddled up the Honda Ridgeline; headed south.

Jean and I have been making this trip for more than thirty years.  Three decades.  We’ve done it with a single small child; with two small children; with two children and their kid sister.

And now by ourselves.

I’ve long been cognisant that Baxter Springs, Kansas was the first cowtown, so my mind shifts to cattle drive mode about the time we cross into Oklahoma. What would it’ve been like to drive a herd of cattle up this way?  In the movies, it’s all about crossing rivers and Indians.

My brother texted me as we made our way down.  He first says they are going to amputate his leg.  Then his foot.  

We cross the Arkansas in Tulsa.  It is a shallow creek compared to its normal self.  

At about the same time we would’ve been at the choir dinner, we stopped for provender in Stroud, getting corn nuts, peanut butter crackers, and iced tea.  We pass the Sauk-Fox Casino south of there without undue interference: they only make us slow to 55 for a couple of miles.

We pass the Seminole casinos as we enter and leave their territory as well, crossing the North Canadian and South Canadian respectively.  Like the Arkansas, they are a tiny fraction of their normal flow.

We arrive at the hospital at 8:30pm and make our way through the halls to my brother’s room.  The signs say masks are required, but I don’t put one on.  They still let me in.  Things are lawless down in the Nations.

My brother is not alone.

Friends are there with him. More than friends: a sister and a brother from another mother.  

We’d all been neighbors 40, 50, 60 years ago.  We know things about each other that only siblings know. We know them; our parents knew their parents; our grandparents knew their grandparents.  And before that, the place we lived was not a place.

Some things are stronger than blood.

My spirit sister had taken my brother to the ER when his “COVID” turned out not to be COVID.  

They are going to have to amputate.  We don’t know where.  Still don’t.

When bones get infected, it’s difficult to cure the infection even when the patient is not diabetic which my brother is.  Where they make the amputation will depend on where the infection ends.

My brother lives alone.  Well, alone with his dog.  

Whatever happens, brother will not be able to take care of his dog for quite a while.

In the room the doctors come and go, but nobody is talking about Michaelangelo.  They are talking about pockets of infection in the metatarsals.  Options of mid-foot amputation versus below the knee amputation. General surgeons versus orthopedic surgeons.

It is becoming more and more apparent that nothing will happen until Monday.

We need to drive our herd north.

We go to brother’s house.  It used to be my house, my parents’ house.  It was the last house built by my mother’s father. He was 72 when he did it.

We retrieve my brother’s dog, Billy.  He is a clinically insane Boston terrier, but maybe they all are.

We then drive our herd north.

Before we cross the North Canadian, we stop for chicken fried steak--one of the local delicacies--at a place called The Catfish Roundup. It’s within spitting distance of the Seminole Casino, but we are not molested.

We arrive home at 6:30pm with our new charge and find a place to put him after letting him run around in the sunburnt grass and the baked earth.

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. )

 Take up and Read

By Bobby Neal Winters

The words of the Bible--the biblical idiom--are the glue that holds good literature together. This is true even in popular music.

This article started taking shape when my youngest daughter got a dog and named him “Cowboy.”  It planted an earworm in my brain that has been coming and going ever since.  There is a song by the Oak Ridge boys that begins:

She played tambourine with a silver jingle /

And she must have known the words to at least a million tunes /

But the one most requested by the man she knew as Cowboy /

Was the late night benediction at the Y'all Come Back Saloon

It has been my frequent companion for months.  As earworms go, I could have done worse, but I don’t want to speculate about that too long for obvious reasons.

When a song like this goes through my mind like this unbidden for such a long time, I start thinking about how it’s put together. What toolbox of words is the writer pulling from?

One thing I noticed right there in the beginning is that the author of this song assumes a certain familiarity with church services.  You need to know that a benediction consists of words of comfort said at the close of a service that is meant to send the congregants into the world with hope.

The songwriter is telling us that the Y’all Come Back Saloon is a church for the people who go there.  This theme is returned to later in the song when 

“...all the fallen angels and pinball playing rounders /

Stopped the games that they'd been playing for the losers’ evening prayer”

It is not uncommon for writers to pull from a religious or biblical idiom to construct their texts.  And it is not always used to propound an overtly pious theme.

Leonard Cohen did this all the time:  “I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord”; 

“And everybody knows that you're in trouble /

Everybody knows what you've been through /

From the bloody cross on top of Calvary /

To the beach of Malibu /

Everybody knows it's coming apart /

Take one last look at this Sacred Heart /

Before it blows /

And everybody knows”

He was absolutely brilliant at it.

Once you start listening for it, you hear it in surprising places. In Bob Seger’s night moves, for instance:

We weren't in love, oh no far from it /

We weren't searchin’ for some pie in the sky summit/

We were just young and restless and bored/

Living by the sword.

One artist who has gone beyond drawing from biblical idiom into writing new books of the Bible is Bob Dylan. In his time, he has been a prophet. To me, “The Times they are a-changin’” reads like a chapter of Jeremiah;“Masters of War” is an imprecatory psalm; “Like a Rolling Stone” reads as if written to a latter-day Jezebel.

He could write like that because at some point he’d absorbed the Bible. He went from using it as a flavor to something much more powerful than that.  In his best work, even when the language isn’t explicitly there, the Bible still is.

The Beatles used explicitly religious in “Let it Be”:

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me /

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be /

And in my hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of me /

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

And let’s not forget the Rolling Stones:

Please allow me to introduce myself/

I'm a man of wealth and taste/

I've been around for a long, long year/

Stole many a man's soul and faith/

I was 'round when Jesus Christ/

Had his moment of doubt and pain/

Made damn sure that Pilate/

Washed his hands and sealed his fate

The language of religion and the Bible provide a common pool that can be drawn from.  As a writer you can use it to speak to a broad audience. It talks about important things in powerful ways.  

But as we grow ever more atomized as a people we are losing that common core, that common language.  People are not going to church; they are not going to Sunday school; we are having a second Tower of Babel, and we will get to a time when they will not understand what I just said there.

I do have hope. If nothing else, maybe our grandchildren will discover our music, and in order to understand it, will pick up a Bible.  They might hear the little voice tell them, “Take and read.”

Sorry about all the earworms.

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. )

 Electricity, Insulation, and Psalm 91

By Bobby Neal Winters

Our biggest barriers are in our own minds.

Fear is our most powerful enemy.

Fear of failure is the tallest wall we have to climb.

My attention was directed to Psalm 91 when I was poking through social media last night.  I looked it up, and the following portion spoke to me:

You will not fear the terror of night, /

    nor the arrow that flies by day, /

nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,/

    nor the plague that destroys at midday. /

A thousand may fall at your side, /

    ten thousand at your right hand,/

    but it will not come near you.

At the time, I felt the need to “do something with this.”  This is the result.

I am insulating my garage.  I am turning it into a workshop.  This was Jean’s idea.  She looked upon me with pity as I worked until my hands were red and numb last winter in my former workshop while her car was safe and dry in the garage, so she yielded the garage to my use.

This meant the garage had to be heated or I would be back to where I was before.

When I was director of the general studies program on campus, giving advice to the students who entered that program, I would tell them to look at where they wanted to go and to set up a plan that would get them to that end.

I took my own advice.  I wanted a warm workshop, so I looked at some YouTube videos: How do you heat a workshop? There were a lot of options, but I settled on electrical heat. 

My endpoint was a garage heated with electrical heat, but if I didn’t insulate it first it would (1) cost a fortune and (2) still be cold.  It was also clear that the electrical heater I needed would have to run off of 240 volts. (I grew up calling this “220” but it’s actually 240.) 

The electrical had to be done before the drywall and the insulation was put up. It’s just easier that way.

But here’s the thing: I am terrified of “220.” I have a cemetery in my mind of people--good, kind, smart people--who have been killed by 220.  Most of them are imaginary people, true, but that mental cemetery is there.  It is not irrational to be afraid of electricity.

Fear is a manifestation of something that God has given us to protect us.  It comes from a good place.  But like a fierce, wild mustang, it must be captured, understood, and domesticated before it can be a useful racehorse for us.

We should capture our Fear and domesticate it to Respect.

Electricity has the power to kill me, but if I respect it, it will be my ally. 

So I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on how to install a 240 volt outlet.  All of them showed how to do it, and then said it was for entertainment purposes and said to hire an electrician.  Darned good advice.  If you can get one to come out, please let me know how you did it.

After preparing myself, turning off the power main to the whole house and checking at the breaker box that the electricity was indeed off, I installed the “220” breaker and hooked it to the outlet.  It took 20 minutes wall-to-wall if you don’t count the hours of YouTube videos I watched.

Since having done that, I’ve been putting up roll after roll of fiberglass insulation and screwing panels of osb to my garage walls.  I’ve got about an hour’s worth of work to finish the walls, and I will do that after I finish this column. (The ceiling still needs to be done and if any of you have a drywall jack they can loan me, let me know.)

I was as afraid of doing the insulation as I was doing the 220.  This wasn’t because I was afraid of being killed.  It was simply because I had never done it.  It was filed away in my brain as something only experts could do. I had erected barriers in my own brain.

The barriers were taken down in the same way as before: I watched a lot of YouTube videos on insulation. (Watching YouTube videos is dangerous too; their algorithm will start bringing you a lot of ads for Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Menards.)

Just as God has given us the gift of Fear which we need to tame into Respect, He wants us to use the Respect to gain the knowledge we need in order to overcome the barriers we meet.

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. )

 Of Weathermen and Queen Elizabeth II

By Bobby Neal Winters

I liked going to Safeway when I was a little boy because they had automatic doors. They were like magic. They open even though you don’t touch them.  I still think they were pretty cool.

Once I had just stepped through those magical doors and looked up to see the weatherman from KTEN-TV (channel 10 in Ada, Oklahoma) right there in front of me.  Had it been Jesus Christ himself, the shock could not have been greater.

Looking back, I consider myself lucky that I didn’t wet my pants.  As it was, I just ran off crying at the top of my lungs. There wasn’t a puddle for anyone to mop up, but just a story my big brother could hold over my head for YEARS.

Now things are different. Until he moved, I walked past the house of the KOAM morning weather guy every day. When he was out in his front yard we would pass and repass. If he was on his phone, he’d nod his head and wave. Occasionally, I would thank him for the good weather we’d been having. 

So I now, as a grownup man, know that these folks we see on TV every day are just people, just human beings, like us.  No, not like us, they are us.

But there is something there, some special quality that the folks that “everyone knows” have. This is a place where I am running out of words. I am pretty sure someone knows them and that I will be told them--perhaps even nicely.  I want to say they have a power, but that’s not precise enough.  Would one use either the word charisma or charism here?

I’ve run out of words, so as I am a teacher, let’s do some examples.

As I write this, Queen Elizabeth II has just passed away at the age of 96.  She arose to her position not out of merit, but out of birth because that’s the way such things are done. That position gave her this quality I am talking about. Just because she was who she was being in her presence would have a certain effect on you depending who you are.

I wouldn’t run crying from her presence now like I did for the KTEN weatherman. I would stand there like a grown up and wet my pants.  Of this, I have no doubt.  There would be a custodian there with a mop as the EMTs rolled my unconscious body off to the ER.

Others would be affected differently I’m sure.

While I said that Queen Elizabeth didn’t rise to her position because of merit, she did fill that position as well as any could in this modern day.  Others will speak of different things, but I most respected her quiet, but unapologetic, Christian faith. She expressed this faith not as a theologian nor a preacher, but as a simple professing member of the faith.  This is something of a trick when you are the titular head of the Church of England.

Pastors have this quality to a lesser degree within the scope of their churches.  Bosses at work have this quality. Politicians have it, God help us.

A word from them one way or the other can affect the way we feel.  Recognition from them can make our spirits soar; retribution from them can crush us.

People who go to church will skip church on days when the pastor is on vacation--even if they don’t like the pastor.  People who are often absent from Rotary will show up when a politician is there--even if they don’t like the politician.

Not everyone who has this (quality/power/charism) acquits themselves well.  The Kardasians who are famous for being famous use it as a cash cow.  There are people who would swoon in their presence.  They are like insects which the wind has lofted to a great height. Everyone can see them and there is money to be made as long as people keep looking.

Queen Elizabeth was wise in the sense that she allowed tradition to protect her.  She guarded her gift so that it could be a boon to her people. When she bestowed an honor upon someone, it meant something to the person who received it.  It lifted them up.  It buoyed their spirit.  

Those who share this quality would do well to follow her example.

Those who know sociology or psychology will understand this all better than I do.  I am just a child, a child walking through magic doors looking in wonder upon it all.

You weathermen out there, you with all your power and charism.  Be careful. And when you send a child screaming from your presence, be kind.

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. )

A Grain of Sand Held at Arm’s Length

 A Grain of Sand Held at Arm’s Length

By Bobby Neal Winters

How do you love God?

Christians are taught to love God with all your might and to love your neighbor as yourself.  And it’s not just us, it’s there in Judaism too. 

The older I get, the more I think about it, the harder it becomes.  I suppose that’s why we are told to come to Jesus like little children.

God, we are taught, created the Heavens and the Earth.  The Earth we’ve had a lot of direct experience with, but for so long, the heavens were just up there completely out of reach. Now, there are those who will say that in this context the heavens are symbolic.  They represent something that is completely out of our reach, something that is completely beyond our understanding. I will grant that.

Let me make that symbolic value a bit more powerful by--ironically--making it more concrete.

In contemplating the heavens, we’ve created instruments to help us:  First simple telescopes; then more sophisticated ones;  then radio telescopes; then telescopes in space. 

Right now we’ve got the James Webb space telescope that is positioned in space at a place called the L2 point, which is out beyond the orbit of the earth, out beyond the moon.

One of the first things the James Webb space telescope did was to take a “Deep Field” picture.  This was inspired by the Hubble Deep Field picture which had garnered a lot of attention. In each case, a picture was taken of what to the naked eye was just a tiny piece of empty sky.  In the case of the James Webb space telescope it was a piece of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length.

A grain of sand...at arm’s length.  Do this yourself to see what it’s like.  It won’t matter if you drop the grain of sand because you won’t be able to tell.

What they saw was like what they saw in the Hubble Deep field. Galaxies. Thousands of them.  In an empty spot. Behind a grain of sand. At arm’s length.

This does nothing to diminish the value of “the heavens” as a symbol of the unknowable.

Each of those thousands of galaxies contains something like a hundred billion stars. Most of those stars have planets around them just as big as Earth.

And that is just the stuff we see.

So it’s big.

For the religious person, you can roll that into wherever you keep your idea of the Majesty of God stored.  Even if you are an atheist, you should experience something like awe.  I know of a few who do.

For the Christian, it presents a question. We are to love God.  How can we express that love to the creator of something that is enormous and complex beyond our imagining?

I will be turning 60 next month.  Don’t send me any presents...please.  Last April I was asked three times in a 24-hour period by three people independently of each other whether I had retired yet.  Not if I was thinking of retiring, but whether I’d done it yet.

I am getting old.

Experience is one of the few fruits of old age.  Indeed, it might be an only child. You get older and you get more stuff.  Anything you want, you’ve bought it yourself. What can anyone get you to show you that they love you?

Well, they can give their love to your children or grandchildren.

Seeing that is a gift.  We can see something of God in ourselves even if it is the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length.

Loving your neighbor is loving God. Loving God’s other children is loving Him.

This brings us to potentially a harder question. How do you love your neighbor?  Have you seen some of them? 

Well, you work on that.  They are not hidden behind a grain of sand held at arm’s length.  They are right there.

You’ve got your homework now. Work on 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. Search for him by name on YouTube. )