In the Details

 In the Details

By Bobby Neal Winters

Have you seen the meme of the Venn Diagram with the three overlapping circles? There are a number of variations of it. In one the three circles are labeled respectively “Bank Robbers,” “DJs,” and “Preachers” and the region of overlap is labeled “Raise your hands!”

I propose yet another variation on this.  Label the circles as “Good Teaching,” “Good Writing,” and “Good Story-telling.” In this case the common overlap would be “The Right level of detail.”

I’m a big fan of the series Derry Girls on Netflix.  It is set in Northern Ireland during the troubles in a Catholic girls school.  It is hilarious.  It is also irreverent and crude. Neither of those words were chosen lightly, so if you decide to watch it, please keep that in mind.

That having been said, there is a character named Colm who I feel like I know.  Indeed, I suspect that we all know him.  When we are introduced to him, he tells a story about being kidnapped by the IRA and having his car stolen. And he manages to make it boring.

Seriously, the story is torturous. It is about a subject that one would think to be objectively exciting. The characters and the subject are both dramatic, but in telling his story, Colm puts in such a level of--and this word is important--extraneous detail that you find yourself screaming, “Get to the bleeping point!”

If you are a fan of the old TV series “Monk,” Monk’s talkative neighbor Kevin Dorfman provides us with examples of this as well.

Of course, the writers of these series provide them for the sake of humor.  It is funny to watch polite people suffer impatiently while these people get their stories out, but it is a mirror for me.  When am I doing the same thing?  Something to think about, but not too much because I might stop talking entirely.

This happens in writing as well.

For many years, I edited a newsletter which often included items from scientists.  As with Colm who was mentioned above, they would often have a story that was about an objectively interesting topic but insist upon a level of detail that would put off the reader. 

One that I recall was about work the particular scientist had done on a topic connected with clean energy. The newsletter was for a general audience, but in his write-up, he had included graphs.

As the editor, I went through and I took his graphs out.  Having done that as well as some other editing, I sent it back to check if the new version was still accurate.  He put the graphs back in.  I took them out again and didn’t let him look at the final version.

This highlights an important aspect in finding the correct level of detail: audience.

You have to consider who your audience is.   When you are writing for a scientific journal, you need the graphs, you need the tables, you need the jargon. When you are writing for a general audience, you need to boil your story down to its quintessence. Just the cracklings, no more fat than that.

Now we come to what got me started thinking about this: teaching.  I have started to put together a course on low-level programming. In this context, low-level does not mean easy.  It refers to programming a computer closer to the nuts and bolts (closer to the circuits would be more accurate, but it’s not as familiar a metaphor) of the computer.

At its very base, computer programming is herding a bunch of varying voltage levels back and forth through the circuits of the computer.  In the old days, they used machine language and flipped physical switches.  Then they invented something called assembly language which allowed the programmer to get away from flipping the switches. After that came higher-level languages like C, Basic, Cobol, Pascal, Python, etc.  (That “etc” is doing a lot of work.)

The vast majority of programming is done in the higher-level languages, but they are all built on what went on below.  They are easier to learn because they encapsulate much of the detail in memorable ways.

The other day I was discussing boring story-telling with some friends of mine at Signet. Someone there pointed out that some writers could make having a high level of detail workout for them. I have to concede that--even after all I’ve written, but the detail has to be encapsulated in memorable ways. 

To be able to do that is an art.

I will be thinking about all of this as I put my new class together.  I don’t want to be a bore, but considering the subject, I might have to become an artist.

We shall see.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Auld Lang Syne

By Bobby Neal Sinters

We are at the turn of the year. In fairly short order, three things happen.  First, we have the Winter Solstice, where the north pole is pointing away from the sun and for us in the northern hemisphere it is the darkest time of year.  Second, we have New Year’s Day which is the day we choose to mark the starting of a..new year.  Third, not noticed by anyone nor marked in any special way, the Earth passes its closest to the sun on January 2 this year.  

So we begin ascending from the darkness, turn a page on the calendar, and begin a new orbit around the sun.  

It is a time to remember.

I was walking in the evening a short time ago when I made my final turn south. The sun had set and it was inky dark even though it was only approaching 6pm.  I looked ahead and saw Christmas lights one block ahead of me.

My mind went through a series of restarts in the following order. Oh, my mother-in-law has put up lights. No, my daughter has put up lights; my mother-in-law is dead and has been dead for over two-and-a-half years.

I walked past the bright Christmas lights--powered by solar--and crossed the alley.  My mind was taken back to the period during which my mother-in-law was dying.  

Those were different times.  The times of the lockdown. She fell ill on Boxing Day and was terrified it was COVID. This was not an unreasonable fear: I lost a good friend to COVID on the very day we had to rush her to the hospital.

After a month in the darkness of January, they released her into hospice, and my wife went to live with her in order to take care of her.  I would go to have supper with Jean, and then walk home afterwards.

That night after I’d put the Christmas lights behind me, the street seemed to me exactly as it had those years before. The time had disappeared.  I thought about my mother-in-law Janet.  I thought about my friend Steve.  I was back there in time.

I walked in the past in darkness for two blocks.  Then I arrived back home and stepped into a bubble of light.

On January 1, 2011, my mother passed away.  It was a bright, cold, sunny day when my cell phone rang and my brother told me the news.  It was not unexpected.  She hadn’t known me for quite some time.  One of the last times I saw her and she could still talk, she didn’t recognize me. I told her I’d spent $25 on a shirt and she was horrified by the notion.  She didn’t know my name, but she was still scandalized.

She’s gone now.

I relive it every New Year’s Day.

I am not writing any of this for people to feel sorry for me.  My holidays are not ruined by this. Death is a part of life.  Everyone who is as old as me has their own list of people dear to them they have lost.  If they are lucky, it is a long list. And I do mean that.  Statistically speaking, some of those will pass away--or begin down that path--on the holidays.

I am happy to have known my mother-in-law.  I am happy to walk the same streets she walked.  I am proud of my wife for having taken care of her the last few months of her life. It was a hard time.  A hard time.  But we honor hard times by remembering them.  We honor our loved ones by remembering them.

We love our sugar. We love our sweets. We would eat them until our teeth were rotten.  But there are many worthwhile things that have a bit of salt or sour or bitter in them.

Even sweet lives are seasoned with the salt of tears, the sourness of dissatisfaction, and the bitterness of loss. It all comes in the same package.  And we would choose none of it ourselves. None of the loss, none of the disappointment. But it’s given to us anyway.

As I write this, I know that some of you who read this have either experienced or will soon experience loss.  I am not saying this is a good thing.  I am saying that in the years to come, when you remember, let the tears flow.  Feel your feelings. If you hurt a lot, that means you loved a lot. 

Love. That’s what it’s all about in the end.

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.

 Sharing a Moment of Their Lives

By Bobby Neal Winters

I had the privilege of standing in for my dean for some ceremonial duties during commencement this year.  I say privilege because it was.  Any other time, in regard to positions in academic administration, I will try to emphasize that it’s not an honor to be wallowed in, it’s a job. It’s not a trophy to be put on a shelf; it’s a job.  It’s not a medal to be worn around one’s neck; it’s a job.

But on the night of commencement, even though putting on commencement is a lot of hard work. To be there for the student is a privilege. 

I will explain.

If you are an administrator, most of the students don’t know who you are.  They interface with the university through the staff--who work very hard to help them--and through their professors with whom they share a wide variety of experiences.  This is what the university looks like to them.

That is except for the one special night of commencement.  During commencement, the world--their world--is brought together is a small neighborhood of spacetime.  It is gathered together from the county, the state, and, in some cases, the world.  And for a very short interval of time their world is tightly focused on them.

If you are there on that stage at that moment, you have the privilege of being at the center of their universe with them. You get to share that crowning moment.

Many, perhaps most, will forget about your part in it before they clear the stage.  A lot is coming at them. They’ve got their families there; they’ve got their spouses; they’ve got their friends and lovers.

But for that one narrow instant of time, you get to be a part of their triumph.

Think about someone who has spent weeks, months, and years hearing complaints, mediating disagreements, listening to whining, and generally solving problems that people could’ve solved for themselves had they simply been interested in doing so. Then that person gets to be with the people who they’ve spent their career helping at a memory-moment of their lives.

That is a privilege. 

It’s also work.

You have to realize that you are not a human being to these students.  You are a symbol.

They have a space in their head--probably a very small space--that you inhabit.  Small in volume; small in time.  But during that miniscule bit of spacetime, you are the whole university to them.

I’d never done this before so I was nervous. 

I had a--thank God very small--speaking part.  Don’t get me wrong; I love to speak. The sound of my own voice is honey in my ears, but this is different.  I wasn’t there to be me.  I was there to be the mythical entity these students needed me to be. My normal way of speaking is to ad lib to lighten the mood, but given the moment of the occasion for our students, this would have been totally inappropriate. 

Without having humor as a tool, I had to fret and strut my hour upon the stage. (Hour? No. More like five seconds.)

I was helped along by pros who were used to it. Thanks to all, you in particular, Melinda. 

I will say that I enjoyed it very much after I got the rhythm.  Apologies to the first few students that I learned on.  I figured out that even though--or because--this was such an important moment in their lives, they just wanted to get it over with.  They would’ve sprinted across the stage if they could have.  

I was handing out diplomas and getting them to pose for the various photographers.  I told many of them to take a breath.  I tried my best to get them to stop for just a second to experience this moment.  And--at the suggestion of my provost--to keep them from falling off the stage. (It’s important that they don’t break their necks at this important point in spacetime.)

Next year at this time, I will be ready to complete my transition back to faculty with a full load of classes in Spring of 2025.

Right now, I am basking in the glow of being with these students at their special moment.

It was nice.

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.

Amanda, Getting Old, and Haskell

 Amanda, Getting Old, and Haskell

By Bobby Neal Winters

Country singers can explain who we are much quicker than writers like me can.  So let’s get some help.

Bob McDill wrote the song Amanda that Don Williams and Waylon Jennings both covered.  Each has a slightly different interpretation of it.  The lines in question from Williams point of view:

I've held it all inward, Lord knows I've tried

It's an awful awakenin' in a country boy's life

To look in the mirror in total surprise

At the hair on your shoulders and the age in your eyes

Jennings did this part differently. It was “The hair on my shoulders, the age in my eyes.”

To recognize that someone dear to you is getting older and that you yourself are getting older are two different things.  Which of those two awakenings is more awful depends upon who in particular is being awakened.

For me, it wasn’t looking in the mirror where I had my eyes opened, but looking though the document camera. Not at my hair--the Winters go prematurely gray; not my eyes--I don’t particularly look at my eyes. It was my hands.  If I looked at them directly, they looked normal, but if I was adjusting some document on the document camera that I was showing to a class, I saw my hands on their own.  I looked and asked, who do those old man’s hands belong to?

They were mine.

In the song, we might well laugh because this insight of aging is being had by a 30-year-old.  I myself am surrounded by people who tell me, hey at 61 you’re still a kid.

They are beginning to die off, however. 

The folks who are in good shape seem to follow the Triad: Physically Active, Mentally Active, Socially Engaged.  Keep your mind busy; keep your body moving; be around people, however much they annoy you.

So I’m doing my woodworking.  I’m attempting to increase my social reach in certain ways.

And I am trying to learn the Haskell computer language.  Those of you who dutifully follow this space may remember that a few years ago I took up the Python computer language.  If you do, that marks you as being kind of a nerd.  

That’s okay.  We are organized now. You can come to the meetings.

But I’ve learned the Python language.  I can do pretty much what I want to do in it.  True, the “what I want to do” is a pretty big constraint, but still I feel happy with it.

Haskell--I am finding--it a totally different kettle of fish.  While Python possessed many new features that made a lot of things that used to be quite laborious easy, Haskell is the opposite.  It not only lacks those extra features, but they’ve taken away a few more.

I will avoid going into more detail.  If you aren’t into it, I’ve probably told you more than you want to know. If you are, then either you already know or you can ask me: I would love to off load.

What I’ve learned in my 61 years of life is that (1) I am a pretty smart cookie; but (2) there are a lot of people who are a hell of a lot smarter than me; and additionally (3) I am a bulldog in that when I get my teeth into something I don’t turn it loose.  

Together, this is a gift.  What I can do is learn what the smarter people have done through pure stubbornness, translating it from their brilliance into language more humans can understand.

My mental teeth are now sunk into Haskell. 

I’ve recently read that the way the casinos get you hooked on slot machines is to let you win a little every once in a while.  The random shots of dopamine into your brain are addiction itself.

I’ve found the same with Haskell.  I beat my head against the wall for an hour or two being completely mystified, and then something works, and I get a rush.  I find out that I just understood something or I just made something happen by accident. 

One reason I am finding it to be attractive is its connection with mathematics.  It is a very mathematical computer language. Very.  I would say more, but I need to gnaw on it some more so that I can explain it better.

We’re coming to a close, so I need to refer back to the beginning.  I would be nice to say my hair might be gray, my eyes might be old, my hands are a 61-year-old train-wreck, but my mind is still young.

That’s not the case.

My mind is old too. If I don’t watch myself, working on this will give me a migraine. But 21-year-old self wouldn’t’ve known that.  My 21-year-old self wouldn’t’ve had the self-discipline to stick with Haskell and learn as much as this 61-year-old self has.

Change in the verse below, change “hillbilly band” to “learning a computer language", correct the ages, and make it rhyme, and you’ve got what I’m trying to say:

Well a measure of people don't understand

The pleasures of life in a Hillbilly band

I got my first guitar when I was 14

Now I'm crowdin' 30 and still wearing jeans

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.

 Ring a Bell; Be awake

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been reading a book entitled “To Govern the Globe,” by Alfred W. McCoy, who is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

It is both interesting to me as history and disturbing to me as history.

He begins with the history of how the Portuguese got into the slave trade. While this is a gross simplification--if you want more details read the book--the Portuguese handed it off to the Spanish, the Spanish handed it off to the Dutch, and the Dutch handed it off to the English.

At each hand-off, it seems like each of these countries added its own evil little twist.  The English basically became drug pushers for a while by selling opium to the Chinese.

And to make it all the more disturbing, they all came up with religious reasons that these crimes they were committing against their fellow children of God were actually good things: They were doing the people they were making into slaves and working to death a favor.

Yep.

I just have to sit back and think about it.  This is history.  This happened. 

I’ve been sitting at the keyboard for a few minutes trying to figure out where to go next with this.  So much of what is going through my head is trying to find some justification for all this. “They would’ve done it to us if positions had been reversed.” “That’s just the way things go when civilizations come into contact.” And so on.

That may even be true.

But what do I know? What is true? Or, as Pilate put it, “What is Truth?”

The truth is people are all the same.  We don’t improve as a species in time.  The changes that come do so because we are capable of learning.  This is hard because it is hard for one generation to change its idea of what is true.  This usually has to wait for the next generation.  And you have to pray that the next generation doesn’t lose some of the truths picked up along the way or learn some new “falses.” 

We have learned that slavery is wrong.  It’s still here.  We call it human trafficking now.  (Any day I expect someone to say that we need to make human trafficking legal so we can regulate it and tax it: “We can use the money for the schools! It’s for the Children!”)  

The truth is we need to be alert.  Those of us who are religious need to be mindful of the fact that there are those who will continually try to use our religion to manipulate us.  This is true regardless of whether you are Protestant or Catholic; whether you are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or Jew. 

The truth is that, in spite of being as alert as we can be, those who would manipulate us will succeed at least some of the time.  That is because we are trying to live our lives among our fellow humans, and “They” are trying to manipulate their fellow humans for profit and power.

The truth is that I can’t comfort myself by saying I wouldn’t’ve been part of all the wrong that was done.  This is something that is taught to me by my religion. One year during Holy Week we had a Tenebrae Service.  The pastor asked us whether we could have abandoned Jesus like the disciples. Would we have denied him like Peter? Would we have betrayed him like Judas?

I can’t say that I would’ve done better than either one.

Neither can I say I wouldn’t’ve participated it the slave trade. Neither can I say I wouldn’t’ve sold opium to the Chinese. Neither can I say I wouldn’t’ve dropped the atomic bomb on Japan or taken part in the Holocaust. 

I can look at myself now and ask if there is anything I ought to stop doing and if there is anything more I ought to do.

I was ringing bells for the Salvation Army yesterday. I was there for an hour.  Different women, my age or older, would get their carts to a particular spot and poke around in their purses for a few minutes and bring out some change or some cash.  They would put the money in the kettle and say--they all said it--sorry this is so little.

Having seen dozens go by not putting anything in, I thought if everyone did as much as your little, a lot of hungry people would be fed, a lot of naked people clothed.

So, given the knowledge of all of the sins of my forebears, what do I do? 

Love my neighbor, love my enemy. Put a quarter in the kettle.  

Ring a bell. 

Be awake.

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 Bois d’arc shibboleth

 The Bois d’Arc Shibboleth

By Bobby Neal Winters

A shibboleth is a test of whether you are part of an in-group or not. It comes from a story in the Bible where people were asked to pronounce it.  There were two groups: One pronounced it with an shi at the beginning and the other with an si.  This difference separated the two groups from one another.

I have a shibboleth for identifying Okies--at least my brand of Okies.  The question is what is the name of the thorny tree that produces a large, yellow-green fruit with lots of seeds in it and has a hard wood.

Folks around here say hedge; some, many of them of a more refined sort, say Osage Orange. My people--my kind of Okie--says bois d’arc.

I spelled it correctly, as it is French, but that is not how it’s pronounced.  As I said it’s French, it almost goes without saying that it’s not pronounced the way it is spelled, but we don’t even pronounce it the way the French would. 

The French would say “Bwah dark.”  You see, bois (the bwah part) is French for wood.  And d’arc means “of the bow” as in a bow and arrow.  They named it that because the indigenous peoples of North America made bows from the wood of this tree.

We pronounce it by way of what is called a folk etymology. That is we let what the word means direct the way we pronounce it even though our pronunciation is off the mark.  We say “Bow-dark.”  We know that bows were made from it; hell, it’s right there in the word.

Bois d’arc is almost mythical for me.  The elders held it with great respect.  You could make a fence post out of it and it would last and last.  You might laugh, but fencing was important.  

Fences separated my land from your land, my cattle from your crops, my chickens from your dogs.  Fences built the Old West; fences ended the Old West.

It came into my mind that I needed some bois d’arc for my woodworking.  It is a long story, but I’ll tell you anyway.

There is a man named Paul Sellers who teaches woodworking with hand tools on YouTube.  He’s either an Englishman or a Welshman. I apologize to both for not knowing.  They have some way of telling that I don’t understand.

Anyway, he’s been around a bit in his day and lived in Texas for a while.  In one of his videos he showed how to make a woodworker’s mallet out of, you guessed it, bois d’arc.

Having seen this, I put in on my list of things to do: I had to make myself a woodworker's mallet with a bois d’arc head.

There are those of you who are reading this who--even if the idea were to appeal to them--don’t see it as a big deal. You’d go out your back door and cut a largish limb off a hedge tree or Osage Orange tree and proceed from there.  I’m not in the same position. I don’t have any growing in my yard, and, in a certain sense, it wouldn’t be the same: I needed something from my native soil.

I put out word to my brother: Keep your eyes peeled for some bois d’arc for me.

My brother lives in the country, in the same house where we both grew up.  We went to visit him the weekend before Thanksgiving and had lunch with him on Sunday at the Catfish Roundup which is about 7 miles north of Seminole, Oklahoma just south of I-40, which separates Oklahoma into north and south.

To work up an appetite for that, my brother’d found some bois d’arc in a little patch of woods in his backyard. He had a nice pruning saw that he loaned me.  He pointed me at the tree, handed me the saw, and said to have at it. He stood on his mown lawn and watched me in the woods that are almost too dense to walk in as I sawed through the bois d’arc tree.

It took me three cuts: one through the trunk and two through limbs that were holding it in the canopy of the woods.  Like I said, my brother has woods in his backyard.

Somewhere in the process, I scratched my arm on some thorns and started to bleed.  My old skin is so thin a barrier anymore that it breaks if I walk within twenty feet of a rose bush, so bois d’arc thorns don’t have any bragging rights here.

I got about 4 feet of straight trunk that was between three and four inches thick and branches into a Y on the end.

So far I’ve made two mallets.  It turns out that making the heads is easy because the wood is green.  Making the handles is harder.  They keep breaking as I hammer them into the heads. Really. Bois d’arc is hard and dense.

I plan to continue to make heads as long as I have the wood and as long as it’s green enough to cut a mortise in, but I need to figure out a better way to do my handles.

So I have a bois d’arc mallet that I made myself now. It separates me from most of the rest of humanity.

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 Little Match Girl

The Little Match Girl

By Bobby Neal Winters

It’s getting colder as is normal for this time of year.  We are going into the holiday season: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years to mention the ones most of us pay attention to. Those of us who God has blessed have to worry about eating too much.  

Some folks take this time of year to think about giving to others.  This has been going on a long time.  In a Christmas Carol, you may recall, Scrooge was visited by gentlemen who were trying to raise money for the less fortunate. Recently I received a call from a fellow Rotarian who was raising money for the Lord’s Diner.

It’s hard to turn down a fellow Rotarian, especially when he’s volunteered for something you’ve decided to skip.

But there are other things to do.  I’ve signed up to ring bells for the Salvation Army through Rotary.  We do it at Ron’s. It’s good, inside work with no heavy lifting.

We do it this time of year because those of us who are Christian’s mark Jesus’ birth by giving gifts.  Jesus was a gift to us.  It’s not difficult to pair giving a gift for the use of the poor with giving a gift to Jesus.  I am not overstating this.  He actually said, “Whatever you have done for the least of these you’ve done for me.”

He included food, clothing, and visiting people in prison in this: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”

We often hear of “the deserving poor,” but as I scan through these, I don’t see any indication that they have to be nice, clean, or particularly deserving.  The uniting theme seems to be need.

Christianity can be a radical faith.  While some balk at the notion of a man rising from the dead, someone turning water into wine, someone causing five loaves and two fishes to be turned into enough to feed five thousand people, all of those pale in believability next to the ideas that we should forgive each other and help the needed.

Some writers have the ability to tap into our sentiments in order to help us follow these radical beliefs.  I’d mentioned “A Christmas Carol” written by Charles Dickens.  There is also the story “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Andersen.

The little girl is out in the cold trying to sell matches and is afraid to go home because she hasn’t sold any and because of that will be beaten.  But she’s so cold...

So she strikes a match.

The match provides a little warmth for a little while.  A little light for a little while.

There have been radicals over the years who would like to eliminate poverty.  I guess we all would in some sense, but this can be a monkey’s paw type wish: You eliminate the poor by rounding them up and shooting them all in a Stalinesque fashion. 

While I am an ivory tower academic, in my time I have seen some of the world.  I’ve spoken with the poor and the homeless.  

There are some of the poor who if given a million dollars today would be in the exact same place--or even worse off--tomorrow.  There are those among the homeless who truly want to be as they are.

Do we let them starve? Do we let them freeze? Do we let their clothing rot off their bodies? 

No. 

We feed them; we try to provide some means where they can stay warm when it is bitterly cold; we give them clothing.

At least that is what my religion says.

We light a match.

We try to provide a little light and a little warmth for a little while.  We are not going to cure poverty; we are not going to end homelessness.

We are going to try to be the “salt of the Earth,” something that makes the simple act of living palatable.

So as it gets colder and darker and you get achier and grumpier. Try to do a little something for someone else.

Light a match.

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.

 Bossing your space

By Bobby Neal Winters

I have a very accommodating personality.

I say this neither out of brag or shame, but just as something I have learned about myself.  I consider myself to be easy to get along with.  (My wife’s eyes just rolled as she read that.)

I like other accommodating people.  Who wouldn’t?  They are so...accommodating.  They don’t have to have their own way.  This means that if you hang around with them you will occasionally get to have your way.

Yet...

Yet I have come to appreciate bossy people.

That word appreciate is carrying a lot of nuance along with it, but let me continue.

Sometimes you are in situations where the dumpster that you are stuck in is on fire.  You and your accommodating friends are all huddled together asking, “What do you want to do?” and answering “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” 

Then a bossy person comes along and says, “Okay, guys, this is the way the corn is going to be shucked. You do this and you do that, he’ll do the other thing, and I will coordinate, and we will get this fire put out.”

They might not say it quite so nicely; they might talk loudly because they have to be heard over the sound of whining; but I can appreciate them as long as the fire gets put out.

To get a task done, there must be control. It would be easy to proceed from here to write an essay about the danger of drifting into Fascism.  That’s just a bit too heavy.  I will let someone write a letter to the editor about it.

Instead, I want to write about the need to take control at certain points.

This first one is for students (and their teachers).  When students do their homework, they need to get control of their environment.  They need an ordered space in which to work.  If they are working at a table or desk, the aforementioned work surface needs to be clear of clutter.  Anything needed for the task--paper, writing implements, books, calculators--need to be at arm’s reach.  The surrounding space should be as free of disturbance as possible.  This means turn off the music and TV.  You say you work better with music on.  I reply with something that comes out of the backside of a male bovine. You need order; you need to be the boss of your environment.

This might involve inconveniencing your family, your roommate, or your spouse.  But here I think I can speak with authority. I’ve been dealing with students who’ve had problems with school for well over a decade now.  Not having stability at home is a very common problem.  Stability isn’t having total control on the environment all the time; it’s having it when you need it.

This next example is where I get to brag about my workshop.  I’ve got the best wife in the world who let me turn our garage into a workshop.  From this, I’ve discovered that if you have a workshop you can do all sorts of things easily that were impossible before.  A workshop, however, isn’t just a room with tools in it.  You have to know where the tools are. You have to know what they do. You have to have your workspace clean and in good order. (All of this for the price of a few honey-dos that you would’ve done anyway.)  

As you see, this is a lot like the way I view doing homework. You have to take control of your environment.  

For accommodating types like me--and maybe you too--this can be difficult.  I’ve never liked to put people out.  It always feels uncomfortable to discover that I have.

The insight that has come with age is that it is okay to make other people accommodate you sometimes.  Indeed, there are some who make others accommodate them all the time and are quite successful and don’t seem to mind being bossy.  As I said at the beginning, they have their uses.

For us accommodators, we don’t ask for much.  We have the right, the need, the obligation to ourselves, to carve out a little space around ourselves every once in a while to control it in order to do what we need to get done.

It’s okay.

You might annoy someone, but they’ll get over it. You always get over it when someone annoys you, and you’re a better person for it.  Give someone else a chance to grow every once in a while. It’s good for them; it’s good for you; it’s good for everybody. 

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 Good Foundation

By Bobby Neal Winters

The phrase back to the basics gets used a lot in education.  It’s a nice phrase to use.  It’s hard to disagree with.  But then it gets messy when you start asking what the basics are.

Yep.  What are they?

I don’t know.  However, let me come back with a phrase that, while it rolls less trippingly off the tongue, it is easier for me to defend intellectually. 

The foundation you lay for learning will shape the learning that comes afterwards.

It is a good metaphor, a good foundation for an essay, as it were. Rock solid.  Let’s build on it.

Children do need the “three Rs,” of course, reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic.  That should go without saying.  I’ll say it anyway.  But if that is the be-all and end-all that kills the imagination.

Children are natural learning machines. (I am not fond of the “machines” metaphor for children; if it’s still there in the final draft you will know I just couldn’t come up with a better one.) When they are left to play on their own, they engage in some of the best learning they can do: They pretend.  

Pretending builds imagination.  Imagination builds not only creativity, but problem solving.  They learn to think things through.  A lot of this happens on the playground.  They get together in groups and make up their own games.  They learn things from each other.

Time spent in free-play in the school yard is not wasted.

I will also make a case for art.  By this I mean the kind of art taught in kindergarten and the lower grades.  There should be more of it.  It should be extended up the grades.  It is basic.

And I am not being an elitist here.  Far, far from it. I am not talking about turning out a bunch of Picassos or Georgia O'Keefes. 

No.

Doing art work forces you to plan things out.  It’s not just some people can draw, some people can sculpt, some people can do whatever.  There are techniques you can learn.  You learn to break things down into doable steps.  And, as I said earlier, it forces you to learn to plan your artwork out.

And--this bit is key--when you are done, you can see with your own eyes how it all came out. It either works or it doesn’t.

This is coming from someone who never took art after kindergarten.  By living, I’ve come to appreciate that the craft it takes to produce a work of art is transferable both intellectually and vocationally.

A pithy phrase to use here would be “Don’t take art out of school and complain that your workman does ugly work.”

I get to this point, and I notice that so far I’ve concentrated on the skills.  Skills are foundational for everything else.  If you are good enough at reading, you can just go ahead and teach yourself a lot of things. 

And I can write about them with some idea of having a receptive audience because having skills is not controversial. No one was ever annoyed because his kid learned algebra or learned to glue two pieces of wood together.

The skills are not the problem.

It is how we teach the application of the skills where the problem comes in.  The most basic skill, reading.  Everybody agrees we teach our children how to read.

But what are you teaching them to read, eh?  Aye, there’s the rub.  

On one hand, demographics are trending to where a smaller percentage of our population will have Anglo heritage so why teach them through the writing of “dead white men.” On the other hand, if we leave out the writing of dean white men, they can’t appreciate the fact that I quoted Shakespeare in the previous paragraph, and that is very important to me.

We’ve got problems, and we haven’t even started talking about history yet. It’s one of the most important things to know to be a good citizen, but, golly, it is a mind field.  But it is a good venue in which to improve your skills in reading, thinking, synthesizing, and writing.

So let’s do this.  Let’s do the best we can at laying a good foundation for learning--and I am not kidding about art and recess--and just fight about the rest of it forever and ever. 

That is a useful skill too, especially in a democracy.

Let us now use our skills to imagine what we can do to help our school systems teach our children.  They are going to be running the show before too much longer.

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 Coming of Darkness

 The Coming of Darkness

By Bobby Neal Winters

I struggle with the coming darkness.

Intellectually, I know it is a cycle.  We are on a speck of dust that goes in a circle around a point of light in an unbelievably vast cosmos that is full of darkness.

Our speck of dust is round and spins like a ball around an axis. That axis is at an angle with respect to the plane of the orbit it circles in.  We are at a point in the orbit where our end of the axis is pointing away from the sun. 

It is getting darker, and it’s not going to be getting better for a while.

This is the time of the year where we think about the Dead.

The Dead, the ones who have gone before us, our ancestors, our progenitors.

I think this has been going on a long time.

The Celts used to mark it in a festival called Samhain.  For some reason, the folks who introduced the Roman alphabet to the Celts got particularly creative, and Samhain is pronounced savin in Irish Gaelic, sawin in Scots Gaelic, and sauin in Manx.  Maybe it’s not the Romans’ fault, the Celts have been known to be a little contrary.

It turns out that the Christian Church marks All Saints Day about the same time.  I don’t know whether this is just a happy accident or whether the Church was trying to put a more positive spin on the festivities marking the Dead.

The Dead become the Saints.  They are not something to be feared; they are something to be celebrated.  We don’t huddle in fear away from them; we sing songs to honor them:

For all the saints who from their labors rest,

who Thee by faith before the world confessed;

Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest.

Alleluia, Alleluia!

Death becomes a thing not to be feared, but a rest well-earned.

In England, at least at one time, All Saints’ Day was called All Hallows, so that the evening before the day of All Hallows was Halloween.

Though the fearsome Dead become the comforting Saints, and Death not something to put is into terror, but something that we will ultimately embrace, I am reminded of a line from Game of Thrones: “And what do we say to Death: Not today!”

The weather as I write this is perfect for the contemplation of Death.  It is dark; it is cloudy and raining; it is cold.  As I type this, my hands are cold.  As cold as a corpse’s.

That is something that I do know.  When I am passing the open casket at a visitation or funeral, I will sometimes reach out and touch the body, touch their hand.  I only do this with people who I would’ve done this with when they were alive.

I do it because I remember a member of my family--one of my uncles who is gone himself now--saying he did it. You touch the hand to let yourself know they are gone now.  The hand is as cold as clay, the clay from which Adam was made, the clay that God animated with his breath.  That life is gone now.

Maybe God lets our hands and feet get so cold when we are old as a reminder.  It’s like the bartender announcing, “Last call for alcohol!”

If you are going to do something, do it.

The darkness will continue to fall until about Christmas when it will be announced that the children who have lived in darkness have seen a great light.

But that is a while away.

Until then, it will be getting darker and the time-change will take an hour of daylight from the evening and give it back to the morning from whom it was borrowed.

Our evenings will become long and inky black, as dark as the grave.

We can, we should think about Death, but we are not to be afraid.  Think about the Saints; think about those who’ve been here before us that we remember.  We remember them because we loved them. We loved them because they loved us. 

Our love will keep us alive in memory.

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.

Mjolnir and Rough Cut Lumber

 Mjolnir and Rough Cut Lumber

By Bobby Neal Winters

We cannot learn until we are ready.  When we are ready, learning comes proportionally with effort.

I am now into woodworking with hand tools. My favorite tool is the chisel.  I’ve learned to appreciate them.  There are cheap chisels and expensive ones.  You do get what you pay for, but there are some things that come by grace.  I’d been using a rubber mallet with my chisel.  It was large and heavy--24 ounces--and I was happy enough with it.  It turns out I just didn’t know better.  

All the time I was using it, there in front of me was my father-in-law’s old wooden mallet.  It was very light in comparison to my rubber mallet.  I thought surely the heavier rubber mallet was better.  Then one day--and I don’t know whether it was because my arm was tired and I wanted to try a lighter implement or whether my rubber mallet was at another table and I just was too lazy to get it--I decided to try the wooden mallet.

Well, there is no comparison.  It is ridiculous how much better it is than the rubber mallet.  Ridiculous.

I’ve decided to name it Mjollnir, after Thor’s Hammer, because suddenly I am worthy to use it.

This is not the only time I’ve had such a sudden insight lately. The next example requires a little more backstory.

I’ve got a friend at work who shares my love of woodworking.  Whenever we want to clear the room, we start talking about it and suddenly we are alone. Not everyone is as refined as we are.

Anyway, one problem we share is the great expense of wood.  However, he was talking about woodworking at the gym, and someone who hadn’t fled the room told him he had some rough cut lumber he wanted to get rid of.

That was great, but my friend didn’t have a place to store it.  He knew that I did, however.  Thus a partnership was born.  We would get the wood from his contact; I would store it; then we’d share it.

This was the first time I’d ever seen rough cut lumber.

Rough cut lumber is not like what you get down at Home Despot [sic]. That lumber has been sized and milled, i.e. smoothed.  When you get rough cut lumber, you have to mill it yourself.  That is a lot of work, but I am goal oriented, not task oriented: The details will be worked out on the way to the goal.  (I wear the task-oriented people around me out.)

There turned out to be a great deal of rough cut lumber.  I now have it sitting in my garage.  It has to be sized and milled before it can be used.  It could be milled by hand with hand planes and such, but after doing that for one board, I bought a new DeWalt 745 planer. (While I am a hand tool woodworker, there is no need to be a fundamentalist about it.)  At this point, my “free wood” has cost me hundreds of dollars.

However,...

There is something about taking a piece of rough cut lumber, smoothing it, sizing it, and making it square.  I’d noticed in watching the woodworking videos the old gents who teach treat the wood they hold with reverence. 

When my father-in-law died, 15 years ago this very month, he’d left not only his tools, but a supply of wood.  I’d thought it was just ugly old lumber and had even used some of it to make items for use outdoors.

I now recognized it as rough cut lumber.  I took a piece that was rough, gray, and stained by at least 15 years of exposure to the elements, and I milled it and sized it. It is beautiful white maple.

I’d not recognized it.  I didn’t know.  I’d been ignorant.  It was as if scales fell from my eyes.

The years of stain are still there, but that just gives it character.  I’ve taken it and some of the walnut I’d gotten with my friend, and I’m making a Harry Potter magic wand box that I plan to donate to the local library if it turns out well.  

It only seems right to give away what has come to me as a gift.

I look back at what I’d meant to be an article on a phenomenon of learning only to discover that I’ve also written an article on grace.  That seems appropriate.

I’ve become worthy to wield Mjolnir by working but was only successful because of the elements of grace that were there.  The path had been set up before me and I’d walked down it.

I can think of a couple of other Carpenters here, Noah being the first one.  He made the Ark.  His family and the animals he saved profited from it by grace, but they still had to walk on it.  

I’ll leave it to the gentle reader to figure out what the other Carpenter has done for us. You’ll learn when you are ready.

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.

 Missy walking with her Gods

By Bobby Neal Winters

Mischief has disappeared.  We called her Missy, but her full name was Mischief, and now that she has disappeared, I feel obliged by honoring her with her full name.

Mischief is our cat. Our indoor cat, I should say, because we still have two outdoor cats. 

Her disappearance and probable death disturbs me because we have no closure.  Absent of finding her body, we will not be able to do a funeral.

Though, I have to admit, I am not sure that I could do a proper funeral for her.  I only have the United Methodist Book of Worship, and while that has a ceremony that could be used for any Christian funeral, Mischief was not a Christian.

Mischief was a follower of the ancient religion of Egypt.

I know very little of that religion, but I do know the ancient Egyptians worshiped cats.  That was Missy’s point of entry into that religion.  She firmly believed that she should be served and worshiped. She made that abundantly clear on any number of occasions. 

My family--some willingly, others not so much--were part of her cult of followers.  She hated me with a fury stronger than the devil’s hatred of holy water, but I was still one of her servants who could provide warmth for her when it was cold enough.

She had found us about 14 years ago.  She was something of a bad girl in the beginning.  Often she turned up in the morning with both a little blood and a smile on her face.  Whose blood it was and how it came to be there was never clear, because she had been declawed.

Because of her declawed status, we transitioned her to become an indoor cat. As a result of that, she began to view the inside of our house as her dominion to be jealously guarded. She hated it and protested violently when any other animal entered into her domain.  It should be noted, she considered children to be animals.  They are, but you know what I mean.

In particular, she didn’t like it when my youngest daughter’s dog Cowboy came to visit.  Cowboy is an Aussiedoodle, part Australian shepherd, part poodle.  He is relatively huge.  Missy could cow him with a hiss from ten feet away, so strong was her hatred of him.

Mischief had been in frail health for a number of years, yet the end--if she is indeed dead--came suddenly.  I believe it was precipitated by the arrival of our new dog, Percy, on the scene.

As much as Missy hated Cowboy, she hated Percy even more.  Given her religion and her failing health, I believe she viewed him as a manifestation of Anubis, the dog god of the dead--and dyslexics.

She began acting out more.  She would wake up Jean in the middle of the night, demanding to be fed.  She would make messes in inconvenient places.  Once she even befouled our bed in the manner of Johnny Depp’s ex-wife.

Eventually, she began demanding to go out of doors, as she had not in years.  Given her recent history of making messes, we, her cult, relented in our protection of her.  I believe she was seeking the out of doors so she could more fully connect with the gods of her religion.

Primary among these would Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess, of course being her patron.  But she had a particular reverence for Aten, the Sun god.  So many times I found her lying peacefully in a spot of sunshine, with a look of love and contentment on her face.

On the day before she went missing, I was coming back from my afternoon walk, when I saw her lying by the sidewalk near my house.  She was in a spot of sunshine, her body formed into a circle with her head near her bottom.  It was as if she were forming herself into a circle to mimic her god Aten.

There was a smile of contentment and satisfaction on her face.

I never saw her again.

It has been a week. Having worked through the denial stage of grieving, we are thinking of disposing of her various accouterments: litter box, drinking bowls, etc.  While we are left with two outdoor cats, neither will be promoted to an indoor cat.  Missy made sure of that before she passed-on.

While we do have a cat number of three at our house, I am hopeful that Percy is persnickety enough to fill that niche.

I will miss Mischief though. There are so few entities who hate me as much as she did, but at my age one learns to appreciate any strong, long term relationship.

God with your gods, Missy.

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.

 Wearing Tennessee Orange for Him

By Bobby Neal Winters

God has gifted me with three daughters.  My wife was involved to a certain degree in this as well, but I am giving God the credit because the sex of the child is a random process, and I am thanking God for loading the dice.

Don’t get me wrong.  Boys are okay. I’ve got a pair of grandsons I can build things for, but I am happy that I’ve had daughters.  Even before I was married, whenever I thought about the future, I imagined having daughters, never sons.

Well it happened.

And what I want to tell you is that my experience is that daughters own you, heart and soul.

I always knew I loved them, but I didn’t realize how much until just before bed on the day my eldest got married.  We’d had the wedding. We’d had the reception. I’d danced the first dance with my daughter to the song “I Loved Her First,” and I cried a bit then.

But then I got home and was locking up the house.  Before whenever I locked the front door I’d always left the porch light on because my eldest would be coming home late.  When it occurred to me than I could turn the light off because she wouldn’t be coming home, I absolutely lost it.  It was not a moment of great control.

Indeed, in recalling it more than a decade later, the tears are here on my cheeks again.

But this doesn’t happen often.  I am a man. I bury my feelings like we are supposed to.  It frightens the women and children when we don’t, so they lie there within us covered up.

Until something taps into them.

With me it’s usually music. “I Loved Her First” by Heartland will do it, of course, but recently in my woodshop I was listening to the Dolly Parton Channel on Amazon Music from my Alexa as I was chiseling away when it played a song by Megan Moroney entitled “Tennessee Orange.”

For those of you who are familiar with the song, you might be surprised.  The lyric set up is kind of a joke.  A girl is calling her mother and is going through the process of breaking shocking news: In spite of being raised correctly in a good, southern home from the State of Georgia, she has not only fallen in love with a boy from Tennessee, not only begun to attend football games with him, but is wearing “Tennessee Orange” as she does so.  She is even a bit disgusted with herself because she is learning the words to “Ol’ Rocky Top.”

Moroney’s skill as a singer--as well as that of the lyricists--keep this from being a novelty song.

We men of the traditional stripe view ourselves as protectors.  We were raised that way.  We were taught from the time we were little that we shouldn’t ever hit a girl and, because of our greater physical strength, should open doors for them, reach heavy objects from shelves for them, open jars for them, and protect them from the violent, baser sort of men who were not raised correctly.

We did not create this tradition; we were simply born into it.

That tradition was created with the knowledge that, however well we might take care of ourselves, we will get older, more feeble, and less able to be protectors.  Indeed, we will eventually die probably long before our daughters.  At that time, we won’t be able to do anything at all. It is because of this, that there is the part of the wedding ceremony where we give our daughter away.

Then it’s the husband’s job to protect--unless he’s the baser sort of violent man and we have to shoot him.

There is a line in the chorus of “Tennessee Orange” that goes:

He ain't from where we're from, but he feels like home, yeah /

He's got me doin' things I've never done

This took me back to the same feeling I had turning off the porchlight all those years ago.  My youngest daughter has found a young man from another state.  He’s a motorhead with many of the skills that go along with it and has her--who was in all the time she was at home quite a girly-girl--working on cars and occasionally welding.

All of the emotions that we men are taught to bury came bursting forth, and tears flowed from my eyes like a waterfall.  Fortunately, it was just me and my chisel to witness it.

But, as I said, thank God for my daughters.  I don’t know what life would be without 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.

The Works of Our Hands

 The Works of Our Hands

By Bobby Neal Winters

Math teachers are strange.

I wrote that because every once in a while I like to write something that no one will argue with.  Because it’s true.

We are so very strange and we will not argue with that because math teachers, above all, value the truth.

We like blackboards.  There are multiple reasons for that. One of them is that we don’t like change. We absolutely don’t. 

To quote Richard Neuhaus: “Change is bad.”

But there is a more important reason.

The teaching and learning of mathematics is a work of the hands.  It is a physical thing. 

I think I’ve “known” this for years. In grad school, some of the lecturers would talk about the “need to get your hands dirty” in doing the calculation. 

It has been something my colleagues and I have discussed among ourselves, but with my journey into woodworking it has really gelled with me: Our hands know how to do things our conscious mind does not.  The author of Psalm 137 knew this: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,let my right hand forget her cunning.”

Users of hand tools call it “muscle memory.”  I would say it’s the unconscious mind.

But I’ve seen it in other places.

When I do my Duolingo Spanish in the morning, I find my hand typing certain words before I get a chance to myself.  My left hand seems quite fond of typing aqui.

This realization is disturbing to be because of the changes technology has wrought in the way I teach.

When I started teaching, I would go into a classroom and fill up the blackboards with writing. (And I do mean blackboards. Whiteboards with markers are not the same. I’ve never picked up a piece of chalk and discovered it was empty!!)  The classroom was best when there were chalkboards on all four walls.  Sometimes the kids sprained their necks, but we all have to suffer for our art, eh?

Then came the introduction of technology into the classroom and there was encouragement--not to say pressure--to switch to something that would project onto the screen. There is a place for this, but it is a matter of finding the correct proportion.

You could make out slides.   Give your students copies of the slides.  Then as you showed the slides, they could make notes on their copies of the slides, while paying better attention to you.  

All very efficient, but not a good learning experience for the students.  Oh, they will learn very well how to just sit there and watch someone show them a presentation involving mathematics or statistics, but they will not become practitioners of the Art itself.

To learn how to do it themselves, they need to see someone performing the calculations.  They need to see the calculations being done in real time, and they need to replicate the calculations themselves.

Not only do they need to copy what the teacher is physically putting on the board, but it wouldn’t hurt them to wait a space and then recopy their notes, while trying to understand the process at their own pace.

I will say there is a place for technology in learning.  I’ve learned woodworking from watching videos, but the folks in the videos don’t just show slides stating what they are doing.  They don’t just talk about it.

They do it.

And those of us who want to learn, see it and try to replicate it as soon after watching the video as we can.  After we goof up, we can then rewatch and see what we missed.

The motto of Pittsburg State, where I teach, is “By Doing, Learn.”  

It’s a good motto.  We do give lip service to it now and then. But a lot of us take it seriously, and we ought to.

It’s a good way to learn, and we needn’t be ashamed of getting our hands dirty.  We should be proud, and we need to learn that.

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.

Living in a New World with an Old Soul

 Living in a New World with an Old Soul

By Bobby Neal Winters

The Biblical prophets were poets.  They expressed many of their prophecies in verse. Today, we consume the overwhelming bulk of our poetry in the form of songs.  It is for this reason and others that I refer to some singers--Bob Dylan for instance--as prophets.  I am not joking when I do this.

There are some who believe that the only function of a prophet is to foretell the future.  I am not going to argue with that, but I will share my opinion.  True prophets speak for God.  They will share God’s message.  Sometimes that message is foretelling the future.  Sometimes that message is the creation of a vision upon which a future can be built.  Sometimes, it is like when the prophet Nathan confronts King David: Speaking the Truth to Power.

Here’s the kicker though. How do you know who’s a prophet and who is not?  Jesus said that you just have to wait and see whose prophecies come true.

I’ve recently heard the voice of someone who sounds like a prophet.  His name is Oliver Anthony. His putative prophecy is entitled “Rich Men North of Richmond.”

I used a $20-dollar word up there: putative.  Is it a prophecy or not? Don’t know.  But when I listen to it I find myself listening for the truth with it.

I’ve read a column about this song by an economist named Tyler Cowen writing for Bloomberg.  As learned as Professor Cowen is, he might be missing the point.  Though he does acknowledge the emotional impact of the song, he looks at it in a very left-brained way.  One needs to view the song through the words of Napoleon: “"A man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him."

In “Rich Men North of Richmond,” Oliver Anthony is speaking to the soul.

In listening to the song, I hear the pain and frustration of the working people.  Out of habit, I almost wrote “working man” instead of “working people,” but these emotions are not confined to that sex. Neither are they confined to whites.  

Working people of every color, ethnicity, and religion (or irreligion) are frustrated. I’ve listened to a few of them. The frustration is real.

In this age of identity politics, they are an identity that has been left out because “working people” are just not sexy enough and they don’t have enough money to fund political campaigns.

In the days of the New Deal, the working people belonged to the democrats to a large degree, but currently they feel spurned. The republicans--through Donald Trump--have made passes at them with the same nuance Trump uses in all the passes he makes. They’ve been playing along so far, but they are smart enough to know that the republicans are just after one thing: their votes to get into office.

These people--the working people--are the people who get things done in this country.  They know how to do things. They are effective.  And this song--”Rich Men North of Richmond”--is coming out of the tradition of country music that birthed such songs as “A Country Boy Can Survive,” “Long-haired Country Boy,” “Copperhead Road,” and “Wait in the Truck.”  These are all songs coming from the rural, anti-city slicker tradition that lives somewhere in the continuum between libertarianism and lawlessness.

We are all shocked by the events of January 6th, but one might wonder what would’ve happened if the people involved had been set up for success as opposed to being set up to be patsies.  Working people don’t dress like buffalos and take selfies.  They know how to get things done, and when they believe they’ve been pushed too far, they do them.

If you listen to ”Rich Men North of Richmond,” you are listening to a warning.  It is like the prophecy Jonah delivered to Nineveh.   Repent or you will be destroyed.

Is Oliver Anthony a prophet?  Only time will tell.  It is my hope that the “rich men north of Richmond” will heed his prophecy and repent.  It is my hope that they will turn from indulging themselves and trying to appease the people, to governing the country and nurturing its people.

In the book of Jonah, Nineveh did repent.  Will it do so again?  We will just have to pray and 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.

 The Journey through Terra Incognita

By Bobby Neal Winters

The subject of mathematics offers us a wonderful mixture.  It teaches us down to earth useful skills, but it also teaches us the disciplined use of imagination.

I love trigonometry. I took a class in it in high school back in 1978.  That would be 45 years ago.  I have good friends who are adults of some level of achievement that have not been alive as long.

Trigonometry has two parts to it.  One part is its use for measuring physical objects.  If you know how far you are from a tower, you can measure the angle from the ground to the top and use trigonometry to tell you how tall the tower is.

That’s just cool.  Students of a practical mind can get their teeth into that and chew even if they don’t think it’s cool.

The other part consists of functional identities.  Let me explain what I mean by that. You see, you’ve got these trigonometric functions sine, cosine, tangent, secant, and cosecant, and there are all sorts of formulas about how they relate to each other.  A large part of a well-taught course consists of proving those formulas are true.  

You can go on for hours and hours filling page after page with formulas that would make a hawk dizzy.

While I think the first part is cool, I think the second part is really cool.  But that sets me apart as a person with a peculiar turn of mind.

The thing is: When you learn the first part in your initial course, that is just about all there is to it.  What you see is what you get. You’ve got something that is quite useful in the practical world, but you are done. It’s over. Fini!

The functional identities are a doorway to a whole new world. (Key music from Aladdin: “A whole new world...’)  The functional identities are used in integral calculus, Fourier series, vector analysis, complex analysis, differential equations, quantum mechanics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

A freshman in trigonometry will look at these functional identities and say that they are useless. They will cling to the measurement formulas as being the only part that should be taught. But the stone that was rejected by the builders has become the chief of the corner.  Where did I hear that?  I think another teacher said it.

Mathematics puts things in order.  It finds patterns.  While this statement will put quite a few chins on the floor, I will say it anyway: It seeks to make things easy.

Every once in a while we find a pattern we can extend and extend and extend.  It will go on like Michael Pena’s stories in the first Ant Man movie.  It goes all over town, all around the world, but then it comes back to the here and now and points out a truth.

In mathematics, we create a language in which we talk about things that we can’t see, things that no one can see.  But we are careful.  We mark our paths with every step that we take.  We map out territory through terra incognita indeed through terra incomprehensibilis.  However wild our maps might be, we are vindicated because when we come back to good ol’ terra firma we are right.

We are living in an odd age.  I wrote that and immediately thought maybe not. Maybe it’s always been this way.  What I mean is that we don’t trust experts, but we don’t have patience. 

On one hand, we praise--and perhaps rightly so--those who won’t just take someone’s word that something is true.  Trust has been lost.  On the other hand,  these same people don’t have the skills to ferret out the truth themselves.  Not only do they lack the skills, but they won’t take the time.

Mathematics, by its nature, teaches skills that allow us to ferret out certain kinds of truth.  But this takes patience. Patience is one of those gifts of the Holy Spirit that is mentioned in the Bible.  I’ve been accused of having too much of it, and I listened to that accusation...patiently.  It might be true; I will figure that out eventually.

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.