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.