Isn’t She Lovely

By Bobby Neal Winters

I listen to the radio while I work in my shop. Actually, it’s not strictly the radio: It is a radio station on my Alexa.  In any case, it’s a classic rock station.  This is stuff I listened to in my twenties.  

It’s a good exercise to go back and listen with the years of a 60-year-old to what you heard when you were twenty.  At twenty, you may have just heard the chorus, and you may not have even understood that.

A week or so ago, I listened to Stevie Wonder singing, “Isn’t She Lovely?”, and I realized it’s a completely different song than what I thought I’d been listening to for the last forty years.

The difference hinges on the “she.”  If all you listen to is the hook in the chorus, you can be forgiven for thinking that “she” is the singer’s romantic interest.

No.  Far from it.

“She” is his newly born daughter.

Joy is rushing through his heart because of the birth of a daughter.  I’ve experienced this three times in my life, so I can connect.  Doubtless, this would’ve been part of my personal soundtrack at the birth of each of my daughters, but I didn’t understand the song.

This is a song that is, shall we just use the word, religious, and it takes a theological stance.

We have been Heaven-blessed/

I can't believe what God has done/

Through us, He's given life to one/

But isn't she lovely made from love?

The singer here recognizes that couples partner with God in the creation of human life.  He firms it up, by pointing out that in a loving family, a child is created in an act of love.  That child is a walking symbol of that act of love.

The part about being a partner with God in the creation of life was uttered first by Eve when she said, “I’ve got me a man with the Lord.”  This was reinforced when Mary gave birth to Jesus, who Christians hold to be the Son of God.

God’s part in the procreation process was reinforced in Biblical passages where women petitioned God plaintively to give them a child: “And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her and opened her womb. And she conceived and bore a son...”

Whether you are religious or not, this represents the human understanding of the connection of sex with procreation and the continuation of the species.  God is Being Itself and we continue the Being of the human race by having children.

This point of view is deep within our culture.  It has to be or we wouldn’t still be around.

For those of us who grew up when the agrarian tradition was more prevalent, we learned that a bull was a “daddy” cow and the cow was the “mommy” cow.  A rooster was a “daddy” chicken and a hen was a “mommy” chicken.  Those are terms taken from a typical, traditional family that a child can understand. 

Bringing God into procreation is recognition that a child is not conceived every time a couple comes together.  The creation of the child was viewed as God’s blessing of the act.

As children have come to be viewed in some quarters as being an inconvenient byproduct of sex, it might be confusing to some why they were so sought after by the ancients.  Well, children were considered to be valuable in those days.  They could help tend the sheep, help tend the crops, and they could take care of you when you were old.

Beyond that, however, I do believe there is something primitive deep within us that yearns.  We have this collection of ancient voices within ourselves which speak below the threshold of hearing.  They attempt to direct us. Some have called it the collective unconscious, but I don’t know enough about it to go any further.  These voices are sometimes silenced by culture; sometimes they are redirected.  But they are always there.

Religion gives us language and context for this. It provides meaning where we might otherwise be faced with a reality that was just one damned thing after another.

So, I didn’t get “Isn’t She Lovely?” forty years ago.  I do now, and it is indeed lovely. A man, a woman, and if God wills, a new life.

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. )

 Looking at the Stars

By Bobby Neal Winters

The days are getting longer.  This has been so since before Christmas, but the daily changes have been so small as to avoid notice.  But around the middle of February--around Saint Valentine’s Day--the daily changes become larger.

Winter is not over, but we can see the end from here.

The calendar was a gift to us.  It enabled anyone who was able to read a little and to mark off days to know what season it was.  Before that you had to watch the sky. You had to know about the stars.

In the Bible, God creates Light, the Day, and the Night, a few days before he creates the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.  The Sun rules over the Day and the Moon rules over the Night, and the stars are just sort of thrown in.  Later the stars are identified with Angels, God’s messengers.

To say that stars are God’s messengers is quite a natural thing from my point of view.  They tell us of the coming seasons.  Let us consider my favorite stars, those in the constellation Orion.

Orion is the Hunter.  They say you can see his bow.  They will connect the dots and say it’s there, but I can only really see the three dots of his belt.  There have been times when I’ve been in the dry, clear air of the desert when I’ve seen a sword hanging down from his side, but in the thick air of southeast Kansas, I’ve not been able to see it.

The thing about Orion is that he disappears over the summer.  On the first of June, he rises at about a quarter to seven.  On the first of July, he rises at about a quarter to 5.  He backs his way across the night all summer long so that he will be able to hunt all night long in the winter.

Some ancient mind looked up at that random pattern of stars, named it, and remembered it; made up stories so as to remember it; and noted its behavior in connection with the seasons.

Then passed it on down.

There were doubtless those who asked, “Why are you wasting so much time staring up at the sky?  You could be chewing leather, making pots, or chipping flint.”

But those who carried the information, kept staring at the stars.

There is something about us that likes to do it.  The stars are pretty.  They become prettier when you know their names and their stories.  We get the reward of beauty when we look at them.

They do bring us God’s knowledge when we look up at them.

Since Galileo and the telescope, we’ve been bringing stronger instrumentation to looking at the stars.  We’ve created ever more sensitive instruments to measure their motions and the light they give off.  By doing this we’ve determined that there are planets that circle around those other stars.

We ask whether there is life on those other planets?  If so, is there intelligent life?  And if so, how is that intelligent life like us?

In my more cynical moments, I wonder if there is intelligent life here.

In science fiction, there is a trope of humans populating the galaxy by sending out colony ships.  Or perhaps the Earth is doomed, and they send out spaceships that are modeled on Noah’s Ark.

Maybe that will happen.  Who knows?

For my part, I think that we will ooze out into space.  First we will do mining, but the miners will need food.  To get the food, we will set up farms.  In setting up farms, we will begin the process of setting up an ecosystem.  The ecosystem will spread along with us.

We will step by step spread that ecosystem everywhere it can be spread: To the asteroids; to the moons of the gas giants; to the Kuyper belt; to the Oort cloud.

At some point in the far future, our nth-power great grandchildren will be hopping the rogue planets that travel among the stars like the ancient Polynesians hopped islands.

Then, after tens of thousands of years, they will come to other suns and start it all over.

Then--maybe--they will think back on the ancients and all of their whimsical thoughts and silly stories.

In the meantime, the days are getting longer.  Summer is coming. It will be here one day, I promise.

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. )

Communing with My Grandfathers

By Bobby Neal Winters

I want to make a wooden chair from two-by-fours, and I’ve started.  

I can see it in my head.  Getting from that mental picture and some eight foot long two by fours to the chairs is the task at hand.

The main barrier in the path is a process I’ve heard called, “Scooping out the butt.”

If you’ve ever sat for long on a perfectly flat piece of wood, you know that it becomes unpleasant after about five minutes.  I once attended a two-hour concert in the city of Irkutsk, Siberia at a Polish Catholic that had perfectly flat pews.  I have to believe that the God-hating communists were behind it.

In any case, in order to make a wooden seat comfortable, it is customary to make some sort of an accommodation for the tailbone.  If you look at a lot of wooden chairs, they have a pair of butt-cheeks carved right in them.

So, if I want to make a wooden chair, it follows that I am going to have to learn how “to scoop out the butt.”

My mother’s father, J.T. (not Knoll by the way), was a carpenter and my father’s father, Sam, carved.  

J.T. built houses.  He built the house I grew up in.  He did this when he was 70 years old.  I was always told that he never drew a thing, never put a thing on paper. He planned it all out in his head.  He ordered the wood, and, when he was done, he only had enough left over to make a picnic table.  It is arguable that he wanted to make the picnic table from the beginning.

As he lay dying in the nursing home, he was still building houses.  He was in that state into which the dying sometimes drift, reliving their past lives in a dream.  I remember having heard him call out, “Fourteen feet...you can’t sh*t me!”

And I am sure you couldn’t’ve.

Sam carved.  He whittled and he carved.  One whittles to pass the time.  One whittles to hone your skill.  One carves to make something.

Sam carved toys for my brother and me.  Whimsical creatures, dinosaurs, things that had only ever seen reality after he realized them in wood.  He would also carve himself fishing lures.

I used to whittle when I was a boy.  I had to stop because I was becoming a danger to myself.  I have a tendency to go off on reveries, to wander different places in my mind.  This is not a good trait in a whittler.

On one occasion, I looked down and I had cut up the right thigh of my brand new dress jeans.  On another occasion, I’d done the same, but this time I’d cut an inch-long incision in my own right thigh.  I probably should’ve gotten stitches, but I didn’t.  It’s been fifty years, and I still have the scar.

As I continue on my way down the rabbit hole of woodworking, I learn there is a continuum of those who work with wood.  The carpenter and the carver are two points on that continuum. To me, it seems that the furniture maker is at a sweet spot between the two points, and the chair I am working on proves that point perfectly.

To scoop out the butt, I’ve had to get some different tools, some different sorts of knives.

When I was a boy, I used a pocket knife to do my whittling. That 10-dollar pocket knife cut up two 30-dollar pairs of jeans.  Sam had had a pocket knife too, but some of my older cousins had bought him a woodcarving set that consisted of scalpel-like, which he did use for some of his more delicate work.  (He castrated an overly amorous dog on one occasion.)

I’ve obtained a tool called a gouge.  Think of it as a thin chisel that is curved around its longitudinal axis.  It is sharp.  The one I bought was shipped with two Band-Aids. It is a knife in the same way a chisel is a knife.

I am also using a box plane.  A plane, if you think about it a certain way, is just a knife that is held at a fixed, controlled angle. And I have a spokeshave.  A spokeshave is a plane that has a short base.  I’d never heard of one before the new year, and now I own two of them.  If I’d had one when I was a boy, I’d never have given up whittling. 

I’ve worked on the seat a couple or three nights this week, and I’ve about got the butt scooped.  

In stages I will put the legs together and then the back.  Along the way, I will be communing with both of my grandfathers.  And I hope to have a chair when it is done.

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. )

Holy Joinery

 Holy Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is a ritual.  Take your wood and use a marking gauge to mark walls a distance from the end. Then make your marks on the endgrain.  Take your jig and mark slanting lines from the endgrain down to the wall.  Then you make your cut.

This is all done in silence until the saw begins cutting the dovetail.  It’s just you, your tools, and the wood.

This week, I made a box to put my drill bits and such in.  I made it out of two bed slats that were given to me.  I used neither nails nor screws. Just dovetail joints, rabbet joints, and glue.

My dovetails were noticeably better this time.  It’s something about practice, I suppose.

Sometimes while doing this, I find myself thinking about the Lord’s Supper, Communion, the Eucharist, or whatever you call it.  Maybe it’s because sometimes I cut myself, “This is my blood...,” but more seriously, I think it’s because there is a cadence to it.

I remember taking the Lord’s Supper when I was a Baptist, which was more than 30 years ago.  Well more than 30 if you count from when I stopped attending regularly, and I don’t remember the cadence of that ritual.  The cadence not in my heart is that of The Great Thanksgiving, which begins:

Pastor: The Lord be with you.

People: And also with you.

Pastor: Lift up your hearts. 

People: We lift them up to the Lord.

Pastor: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give our thanks and praise.

The words and the rhythm have a power to them and so does the fact that we do it the same every time with only minor variation.  The rhythm puts it in the realm of music which reaches the emotions.  The sameness makes it eternal. 

When I take part in it, I am connected with every time I’ve done it and every group I’ve done it with.  Clearing this reaches into the past, but my future self will be doing this as well, so my connection is with that which is, that which was, and that which shall be.

There are minor variation, here and there, but there is a consistent core that connects back to scripture:

On the night in which he gave himself up for us, he took bread,

gave thanks to you, broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: "Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me."

This connects everyone back to that original night two millenia past.

If you go through this often enough, you’ll even begin to pay attention to the words: “This is my body...”

And you begin to think, “If Jesus is God and so has the power of creation with the word, and if the celebrant is performing the ritual as an agent of Jesus, then that Bread is the Body of Christ.”

You begin to wonder what that means, and whether there is a means of understanding the world beyond simply the scientific, a metaphysics beyond the one that is commonly understood, a mystery to be comprehended.

Reveries like this may be the reason I usually am listening to Classic Hits 93.9 on my Alexa Echo dot while I am sawing away on my dovetails.  Sometimes it can get scary when it’s just you and eternity.

While I do have my dovetail cutting ritual which I am refining in a consistent, steady way, I am changing the way that I cut rabbets. For those who don’t know, which would probably be most of you, a rabbet [sic] is a cut made along the edge of a board to make it thinner there.  It gives you more surface to make for a stronger glue-up.

I used to cut my rabbets with a router.  This takes time, patience, and makes a lot of sawdust.  Now, I am cutting my rabbets with my table saw.  I can do this because I got a new DeWalt table saw for Christmas.  This is quicker, potentially more accurate, and puts a lot less sawdust in the air and on the floor.

The rabbet is still a rabbet even though I am cutting it a different way.  Before rabbets were cut with routers, they were cut with a special sort of plane. There were probably other ways before that.  And, quite frankly, all of those ways are still going on.

All of these ways connect us with the Wood, and connect us all with the others who are seeking that connection.

Similarly, at our Holy Rituals, we connect with God and with all others who are seeking that connection:

By your Spirit make us one with Christ,

one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world,

until Christ comes in final victory, and we feast at his heavenly banquet.

Through your Son Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in your holy Church,

all honor and glory is yours, almighty Father, now and for ever.

And so we are all connected. Our Lord was a carpenter after all.

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. )