Stand by Your Man

By Bobby Neal Winters

“I don’t belong to any man.”

This is something a woman could say and receive universal applause. Or almost.  A man could say, “I don’t belong to any woman.” And people would just knit their eyebrows.  They would be confused as to why he would say it.

But belonging to someone is not bad if viewed correctly. That is, if you take care of the things that belong to you. 

I’ve been doing some “historical research.” I’ve changed up the music I’ve been listening to in the garage.  I’ve heard all of the classic rock from the 70s and 80s too many times.  There are only so many times you can hear “Takin’ care of business” without pulling your hair out.

So I decided to go farther back into my roots than classic rock. I’ve gone country.  I’ve been listening to country music from the 50s and 60s.

It opened a door to a different world.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve heard all of these songs before, but I hadn’t even hit puberty yet when I had. When I heard Earnest Tubb singing “Walkin’ the floor over you” I thought he was singing to a neighbor downstairs.

People will talk about all of the progress that has been made in art. Artists--writers, songwriters--can just say nasty things right out.  But that’s the thing about old country singers.  They said it all, but not in a way that the kids could understand.  You have to have a bit of mileage--mileage on a rough country road--before you could understand.

It’s been the women country singers of that era who have really opened my eyes.  They were doing some true art. I am thinking of Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Patsy Cline in particular.  They were all contemporaries of my mother. (I’ll not say anything more about Patsy, but you’ve got to mention her.)

One of the things my mom said that I can still hear in my own head as if it were coming into my ears was, “It’s a man’s world and don’t you think it’s not.”  And she wasn’t particularly happy about it.  However, if you are going to live in a man’s world, then having a man is an important step.

Tammy Wynette sang “Stand by your man.” There have been some who’ve taken a disparaging view of that song.  Hilary Clinton comes to mind, in particular, but let’s just leave that alone.  For me, listening to “Stand by your Man” in close proximity to Loretta Lynn’s “Fist City” and “You ain’t woman enough to take my man” provides a different perspective.

Tammy is not saying “Stand by your man” just because that is the right thing to do.  She’s saying it because, as a woman, that man is her asset.  He belongs to her.  Her well-being to a great degree is dependent upon him.  It is in her own best interest to stand by him and try to improve him.

Loretta’s songs bring home that she really has no illusions as to her husband’s virtues.  She is amply aware that her husband is flawed. Amply aware. Consider “Don’t come home a-drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind.”

But how dare another woman try to steal him.  Such as he is, he is hers. She has put in quite a bit of work improving him and how dare another woman presume to try to steal him now.

Tammy and Loretta provide a contrast. They were both propounding the same sentiment, but Tammy was ultimately married to five different men and Loretta only the one.  Was this because Tammy learned to spell “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”?  I don’t know.  

They walked their different roads, both of them going through the hills and hollers and neither of them paved.

The man-woman thing ain’t never been easy.  The idea of belonging to someone is something that chafes contemporary sensibilities. It needs to be rightly understood.  When someone belongs to us, we don’t control them: We take care of them.  We work for their betterment; we work for their good.  

Whether the country road is paved or not, it’s got to be a two-way street.

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

 The Journey

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is important to “clean house” occasionally.  I mean this literally and figuratively. We’ve got to stop, take stock, prioritize, and move on.  Long trips can give us an opportunity to do this.

I had the pleasure of being gone to Paraguay for three weeks and then coming back.  Three weeks is a long time to be gone from home.  If you want to travel light you have to put thought in how you pack. There are decisions that have to be made. Priorities set. I follow the maxim: “More underwear, fewer clothes.”

But then you pull yourself out of your home, the environment you’ve created for yourself.  There are things there that you use everyday that you don’t even think about because they are always there.  There are things you do everyday that you don’t even think about because you always do them.

So on a long journey, you stop everything. You shake off your habits--at least the nonportable ones.

Then you come back and it’s decision time: Which of these habits do I start again?

Almost the first thing I did on the very first morning I was back was to fry myself some eggs in my little cast iron skillet.  That was easy.  I’d missed it.

I also mowed my lawn that very first day back.  That was an easy decision too. When you can’t see your house from the street, it’s time to mow the lawn. 

Then there was the scary decision: Do I take up woodworking again?

Over the better part of the last year, I’ve been turning my garage into a workshop.  I’ve gone to a lot of time, trouble, and expense to create this workshop because of my woodworking habit.  I had established the habit of doing a little something in the shop everyday, but it had been pushed to the side for three long weeks.

When I came back, I had a choice: Take it up again or not?

Well, this isn’t meant to be suspenseful, so let me tell you now, I did.  I’d left a big project halfway finished, and I’ve gotten back into it.  I’ve also begun some smaller projects.

Woodworking is hard; it requires an investment of time and money; but it is something that I want to be a part of me in the long run. 

This process--leaving home, paring down, starting over--reminds me of the story of Noah’s Ark.

Noah, under God’s direction, packed only the bare essentials for what he needed: His family and enough animals to start life again when the trip was over.  Then everything was disrupted. He and his family were on a trip for 40 days and 40 nights, enough time to disrupt all their habits.

Then they started over.

Noah was a farmer, so he planted a vineyard. He made himself some wine and he got drunk.  Then something happened that has difficulty coming through translation. 

We are spared knowing the exact thing by changes in time, changes in custom, and perhaps the delicacy of transcriber or two.  Suffice it to say that even though God had flooded the world to start over again, there were still problems.

People can’t leave all their problems behind them because people are the problems.  I’ve heard this encapsulated in the phrase: Wherever you go, there you are.

But you can make an attempt to shape what the future will look like. I want to continue woodworking, and it looks like I will. 

I also have a couple of writing projects I want to work on. Returning to these has been more difficult for me.  Explaining why would take us too far afield, but suffice it to say that I am working on it for the same reason as the woodworking: I want it to be a part of who I am.

We are all on a journey through space and time.  We have a choice on what we take with us on this journey.  And wherever we go, there we will be.

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.

 What God put me here to do

By Bobby Neal Winters

Teaching is one of the strangest, most wonderful professions ever. Our job is to take something that we have and give it to others.  When we are done, not only will we still have what we gave away, but if we’ve done it well, we might just have more of it.

I’ve always liked to learn things.  I’ve always liked to share things with others.  This could mean I am a gossip; it could mean I am a journalist; it could mean I am a teacher. As I journeyed through that sentence, I came to the self-realization that I am--to a certain degree--all three of these things, but mostly, I think, a teacher.

It is in my opinion what God has put me on this world to do.

Since 2006, however, I’ve had additional duties. I’ve been working in university administration.  Originally, it was mainly helping students, but increasingly over the last few years, that has changed.

In 2017, I was given the responsibility of chairing a small department; in 2018 I was given an additional department, a bigger one; in 2020, the first small department was swapped for a larger one.

Every step I took along the way meant less teaching.  Less contact with students.  Ultimately most of the students I got to see were ones who were complaining about something.

There is a line in the parable of the prodigal son.  Jesus says of the prodigal son, “He came to himself.”

Late in the fall semester of 2022, I came to myself. I began to think, “This is not what God put me here to do.”

It was unconscious at first.  I was talking to one of my best teachers when I told her, “If anyone ever offers you the job of department chair, remember that God put you on this Earth to teach.”

I realized I was talking to myself.

There are chairs who teach, teach a lot, and teach well.  Don’t get me wrong.  

When I came to myself, I realized that, other than the moments I stole from the administrative work, I wasn’t really enjoying anything I did.

The fact that I turned 60 in October was also in the picture.  While as a mathematician I realize that the zero at the end is just an artifact of the base-ten system we use, you look at the center of the circle, and it is like staring into the abyss.

Are you using your talents? Are you building on a foundation? How much time do you have left?

So I made a decision to go back to teaching.

I’ve been around long enough to know that if I dropped dead right now they would replace me at work in a week, week-and-a-half tops, and maybe with someone who’d do it all better.  But they’d rather not have to, and I’ve enough consideration for my bosses that I don’t want to leave that abruptly, so I’m staying in administration one more year.

When that decision was made and when that decision was shared, my heart began to soar.  Doors that had been closed began to open; paths were revealed to me.  I didn’t actually have a dove descend from heaven to say anything, but I’ve gotten all the confirmation I need to know that I’ve made the correct decision.

So I have a year left on my sentence.

Actually, I just say that to make people laugh.  I’ve come to realize that my time in administration has been very educational. I know how the system works better now than I did 17 years ago.  As my position has shifted through those years, I’ve learned several new perspectives.  

I now know how to operate as a teacher more effectively.  I can help my students to find their way through the system more effectively, and I will be doing it while building on the foundation of my own discipline which I do love.

And to those who will listen I will share what I’ve learned on my journey to the degree that I am able.

In the meantime, you can find me in my office, marking days off of a calendar, looking forward to going back to what God put me here to do.

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.

By Choice

 By Choice

By Bobby Neal Winters

I told my Paraguayan Elementary Statistics Class.  My Russian snake vodka story.  While it has nothing to do with statistics, every once in a while it is good to let the young people know you weren’t always the old boring thing that you are now.  

Anyway, if you catch me sometime, I’ll be glad to tell you, but for my current purposes we only need the end: I am on my Rotary Group Study exchange to Russia in June of 2000 in the dacha of my host’s father.  His father was retired military and had a nice summer country house, aka dacha.

Earlier in the day, I’d had a toenail ripped from my foot, and I was sitting in the dacha’s living room.  The father had made sure I was taken care of.  My foot was propped up; I had a beer in one hand and a glass of vine in the other; and the father was showing me his rifle.  I’d praised the rifle, perhaps too effusively, perhaps too politely, because then the father got a gleam in his eye.  

He spoke to me through a translator:

“I have some medicine that I brought back from China,” he said. “It will cure your foot.”  Then because I’d told him I had three daughters. “After you take this, your wife will give you sons.”

He then brought out a large jar of vodka.  Vodka with the body of a snake suspended in it.  The vodka had leached enough pigment from the snake’s dark green body to render the vodka in the bottle a clear yellowish green color.

I took a look at it and prayed, “Jesus, if you get me out of this, I will never miss church again.”

At that point the father’s wife came in to call us to dinner.  I said, “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus.”

Then the mother spooned out the vodka into a shot glass. The father took the glass and put it in front of me.  

At this point in telling the story to my class, I stopped, looked at the young men in class, and asked, “What would you do?”

The answer came back almost immediately: “You’ve got to drink it.”

And I said, “I opened my esophagus as wide as I possibly could and threw the vodka down my throat.”

I woke up in the middle of the night and began to ponder the young man’s answer: You’ve got to drink it.

While everyone in the class understood, the sixty-year-old that I am now as opposed to the thirty-something of 23 years ago or the twenty-year-old from my class says: No, I chose to drink it. 

I’ve been meditating on the use of food in the Bible, in Genesis in particular. The serpent said, “Go ahead and the fruit; you aren’t going to die.” Eve did, then took some to her husband.  He chose to eat it.

Esau came in hungry from a hunt.  Jacob was making some stew.  Esau said, “Give me some of that stew. I am so hungry that I am about to die.” Jacob said, “Only if you give...your birthright...this day...to me.”

Esau wasn’t going to die; he was hungry.  He chose to sell his birthright.

During the famine in Egypt, the people first gave all their goods, then all their animals, and finally themselves to Pharaoh in exchange for food.  The Children of Israel sold their descendants into slavery for hundreds of years for food.

On the flip side of this, Satan tempted Jesus and Jesus chose not to eat.  He chose not to turn the stones into bread and ultimately the Cross.

The point is to say, I chose to drink the snake vodka.  I didn’t have to.  Ultimately, we have very few things we can choose: I can’t choose to live forever; I can’t choose to jump over the moon; I can’t choose to lift the Empire State Building.

I can choose what goes into my stomach.  That day 23 years ago, I chose to drink the snake vodka. The reasons? To make my host’s father happy for one thing, but I think on a deeper level it was to make a better story.

This was before I began to write, but even then I was a storyteller, and the stories I brought back from Russia were the first ones I had appear in the paper.  It was then that I got printer’s ink in my veins.

It has been an addiction, but I choose to do it.  It has made my life a better story, don’t you think?

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.