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.