The Perfect Gift

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve finished the chess set.

Let me take that back.  I may put a coat of wax on the pieces, but, to outside observers, I have finished the chess set.

They are carved.  I’ve stained the hillbilly farmers and have oiled the dairy farmers.  I’ve made a box to keep them in. I’ve put dividers in to keep the pieces in order.

I am only lacking a hook latch to keep the box closed, and that is in the mail.

But, were I to die today.  If I had a coronary between this paragraph and the next one, there would be a tearful moment on Christmas morning when Jean shakily handed one present to my grandsons saying, “Your grandpa loved you. This was the last thing he made.  It was for you boys.”

Kind of makes you want to see the movie, doesn’t it?

This was an incredibly satisfying project.

Those of you who are of a certain age, know what I have in mind with it.  Fifty, sixty, one-hundred years from now, some child yet unborn will be rifling through a closet looking for games to play,come upon this box, and open it.

“What’s this?” the child will ask.

“Your grandfather’s grandfather carved it,” the mother will answer.

We just have to hope that things are going well enough that they don’t decide to use it as firewood.  But if they must, they must, and they have my blessing.

This is the nature of a gift. You give it, and you let go with hope.

I am now in a pleasant period of a good life.  In the 16th Psalm it is written:

Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;

you make my lot secure./

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;

surely I have a delightful inheritance./

I will praise the Lord, who counsels me;

even at night my heart instructs me.

I don’t have to worry financially. I have time to do things. I’ve got as much health as a 62-year-old could hope for. In other words, the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.

In addition to all of this, I’ve discovered the things that make me happiest, the things that give me the most satisfaction: Giving in secret to those who can’t repay.

If they know it’s me, if they thank me, it makes me uncomfortable. I am an introvert at the end of the day.

It’s nice if they actually appreciate it and if I can see that they do, but that is not necessary.

As much as I support giving money to institutions (the University, the Salvation Army, the Lord’s Diner), the feeling is strongest when whatever I am giving goes to individual people.

The chess set provides a nice metaphor for this.  It provides a connection between me and some people who won’t even know me one-hundred years from now. (Again, barring termites, fire, a family dog that likes to chew, etc.) I can think about the person taking it out, setting it up, and using it without the awkward discomfort of them coming to thank me.

My vision of this is somehow better for me than actually seeing it. That says something about me that I might need to think about, but let’s move on.

I’ve made clear the trouble with giving something like the chess set: These earthly treasures can be destroyed by moths and vermin.  We can give things that are harder to destroy.

When you teach someone how to do something, that can’t be destroyed.  Here I am talking about small, tiny things. Like how to wash a sharp knife. You keep it out of the sink until last, and you never let go of it. My father taught me this; his mother-in-law taught him this.  There might be a chain of learning that goes back to the invention of washing cutlery. 

Acts of kindness work in the same way.  If you treat someone with kindness, you are teaching them how to be kind. We are monkeys after all and monkey-see, monkey-do.

As in the sense of giving a gift, you have no control on what happens next; you have no control on what the person you give it to does with it.  There is just this vision in your mind that, maybe, somewhere down the line someone will get just a tiny bit of happiness out of something you’ve given, something you’ve done.

And they won’t even know it was you, so no awkward discomfort of thanks.

How perfect.

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 Right Words

By Bobby Neal Winters

When you are joining a couple of boards together, there are times when one of the boards sticks up a little bit higher than the other. We say that the board that is sticking up higher than the other is proud.  This is the classical meaning of pride: it sticks up just a bit higher than the rest.

If you are a joiner, what you do is to take your plane and shave the proud board down until it aligns with its partner.  Then everything is nice and even.

As speaking humans, words are our tools just as a plane is a tool to a joiner.  Instead of “speaking humans,” I was going to write “writers,” but every adult human being uses words as tools.  

I hate myself for what I am about to write. No, let me correct myself, I feel humbled for what I am about to write. And that is this: We need to be very, very careful in our use of words.

There are three words/phrases that are often used interchangeably.  I am of the opinion that those who are using these fragments of language believe in their hearts they all mean the same thing. 

No.

No, there are important differences.

What are these phrases?  Have I kept you in suspense long enough?  Okay, they are these:  Pride, Self-Esteem, and Self-Respect.

Consider the situation where someone is looking at a homeless person drunk in the gutter.  They see this person and ask, “Why don’t they have more pride?”

They don’t mean to ask that.  What they mean is, “Why doesn’t that person have more self-respect?”

Before you all go off on me, there are other questions that could be asked: What can I do to help?  What can be done to help? What is the best way to proceed with my life?

And there are all sorts of assumptions that are made in the question.

But that is what they mean to ask. They aren’t asking why the person isn't puffed-up, putting himself above others. They are asking why the person isn’t giving himself respect as a human being, as a child of God?

Respect is a call for mindfulness in the sense you really need to pay attention to something.  You respect a sharp knife; you take care when you are handling it so as not to cut yourself.  But you also keep it sharp and avoid abusing it when you work with it.

Respect is a good word.

But we can also get into trouble with the use of the word “respect.”  There is a persistent, and dare I say respectable, cohort of the human race that says, respect must be earned. It carries the sense that you save your respect for something better.

I think about this on and off.  I will think about it some more.

We now come to the phrase “self-esteem” because it is also problematic.  This is to say, it rubs some people the wrong way. In particular, the teaching of self-esteem in the public schools is considered suspect in some quarters.  Is too much self-esteem really healthy?  

I see why there are problems with this, but I also see the attraction of teaching self-esteem. That is, I see why some would say it is a good thing.

Maybe we are trying to get a word or two to do too much work.

The question--it seems to me--is less about the particular words, and more about the actions we take.

We need to look at ourselves to see who we really are. This may be the hardest part, and it might very well be spread over a period of years.  To do this, you have to look at yourself from a distance.  

This is hard. 

As Robert Burns said: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us!”

Then, like you were looking at something that has value but needs help, you go to work fixing it.

The phrase we often use in a situation like this is, “This needs a little love.”

That four-letter word is a bit over-burdened itself, but maybe it is the one I am looking for.

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.

 Rockets, Fanny Hill, Computer Programming

By Bobby Neal Winters

Rules can be frustrating, but they can free us.

One of my favorite science communicators, Scott Manley, did a YouTube video recently about the engineering reasons for the shape of Blue Origin’s rocket. If you don’t know what I am talking about, I suggest you google this very carefully and you will be enlightened. In order to prevent being too--direct--in describing “the shape,” Manley makes use of quotations from “Fanny Hill: The memoirs of a woman of pleasure” by John Cleland.  

My understanding--I’ve never read it--is that “Fanny Hill” (written in the 1700s) is a work of pornography.  Because of the times, Cleland had to be very careful about avoiding direct language. Because of this, he was forced into the world of colorful euphemism.  For similar reasons, Manley makes use of the reservoir of creative description from “Fanny Hill” in his video on the unfortunate shape of Blue Origin’s rocket.

I found it to be hilarious. Perhaps that is a sign of my fallen nature.

But there is a point to be made here: Constraints foster creativity.  Having rules in place to avoid direct description of vulgar objects, forced Cleland to be creative in his euphemisms. 

While goodness knows we don’t have the same sort of constraints in place now that they did in the 1700s, there is quite a tradition of being roundabout in language for the sake of preserving the innocence of children, a noble cause. This tradition has produced quite a bit of very good art.

I faced this myself recently while carving some chess pieces for  my grandsons. (Please, please, if you run into them, don’t let on.) Each of the main pieces was carved from a piece of bass wood that was one-inch square and 4 inches tall.

As you may recall from a previous column, this is a non-traditional chess set.  Instead of a king and queen, there are farm couples.  Instead of knights, one side has dogs and the other has cats. Instead of bishops, one side has priests and the other has preachers. 

There were lots and lots of different ways the carving could have gone, but the size constraint made of a lot of my decisions for me.  There were things that I simply could not have done--with my small skillset--in that space.

Art is not the only place where this phenomena occurs. I’ve run into it in computer programming.  (Indeed, I owe the notion to the computer programming guru Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin.) For the past several months, I’ve been learning assembly language programming.  Those of you who have been loyal sufferers of this space, may recall that I went through a period of learning Python programming.  

What is the difference between these two? By analogy, Python is London where you have subways,taxis, Ubers, and trains.  Assembly language is the Amazon where if you want to get anywhere, you need to first make a dugout canoe, but before you do that you need to make an ax, but before you do that, you need to learn to smelt iron, etc.

This comparison goes further.  Python, like London, has a lot of laws; by way of contrast, there may be laws in the Amazon, but who is there to enforce them?

Assembly language is wide open; there are very few constraints. Which means it can be hard to do, but there is a trick to make it easier: you put the constraints on yourself.  Arrange your code like you arrange your workshop.  Force some structure on yourself.

This will require some creativity on your part, but it will make what you write easier to read.  The time you save may be your own.

None of this is new. Members of religions have been putting constraints on themselves for thousands of years. (Or God, has.)  THOU SHALT NOT! 

Monastic orders impose rules upon themselves. Times of prayer throughout the day, throughout the year.  Times for restricting the intake of food; times for feasting! Rules to be followed.

We do have to be careful.  Too many rules will try us down like the Lilliputians tied down Gulliver. But--as a friend told me once--if a kite doesn’t have a string on it, it can’t fly.

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 Quintessence of a Dog

 The Quintessence of a Dog

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been back in my workshop, back working with wood.  I aim to be an artisan, not an artist.  Indeed, to be recognized as an artisan would be a great step forward for me as a hobbyist. 

But I have made a discovery: If you aspire to be an artisan, you must open yourself to be at least a little bit of an artist. 

To be either, I need to put in a lot more practice.  In order to do this, I’ve set up some projects.

Don’t tell my grandsons, but I am carving them a set of chessmen for Christmas. Before you set the wrong image in your head, let me explain that this isn’t the usual King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Pawn setup.  

It’s a country chess set.  I am carving it out of one inch by one inch by four inch balsa wood.

Instead of the King and Queen, I’ve got a farm couple, or farm couples, I should say, because I am making them different from each other.  One man is wearing a cowboy hat and his wife is wearing a bonnet.  The other man is wearing a baseball cap and his wife’s hair is uncovered.

Instead of Knights, I am giving one side dogs and the other side cats. Instead of bishops, I am giving them preachers. If I can figure out how to carve collars, I will make one side Catholic and the other Protestant. 

Rooks, at this point, are undecided.

Outhouses have been suggested, and I am fond of that suggestion.  I think they will be easy to carve in a recognizable way--and that is important as I will explain later--and that they will be cute.  For the other side, I am thinking of milk tanks because--in my mind--the man with the cap and the woman with the flowing hair are dairy farmers. That is why they have cats.  However, they are not easily recognized.

Let me now explain why that is important.

I am in an interesting phase of my craft. When I carve, say, a dog, I will show it to a nice person to ask what they think. They look at it, study it carefully, and say, “What a cute...dog?”

I will then heave a sigh of relief, and say, “Yes, yes, a dog.”

Let me just say, it takes a lot of work to carve even something that looks barely like a dog, and to do it on a small piece of wood.

I am mentioning dogs rather than cats because they have been harder for me.  It’s the noses, the snouts.  

All cats' noses look alike--at least at the point of view of someone with my tiny skill set--but dogs have a huge variety of snouts. They have all sorts of lengths and all sorts of angles.  If you are just a tiny bit off with a short nose, you go from dog to pig. And that’s no good.

I’ve had to do some thinking about what makes a dog look like a dog, what makes a cat look like a cat, what makes a farmer look like a farmer etc.

To make a dog look like a dog, I’ve had to stop worrying about making it a realistic dog. For me, the snout can’t be realist, or, as has been mentioned, we slide the slippery slope down into pig-hood. 

The snout must be--at least a little--cartoonish.

At my low level of carving skill, the photo-reality of a dog is in tension with the dog’s quintessence. And the quintessence has got to win if someone untutored beforehand looks at it and says, “What a cute dog!” with the exclamation point there instead of a question mark.

What makes a dog--in my opinion at least--is its snout AND its ears.  For the cat, it’s the ears and the tail.  Whiskers add a bit as well, but it is hard to tell in a small medium.

At the end of this, I will have increased my skill set a bit. I know this because I’ve gotten better already.  And my grandsons will have something to remember grandpa by.  

And I hope they will have evidence that they themselves will always be able to learn something new. And that I love them. And that those are dogs.

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.

 

 

 Corruption and Incorruption

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are on a journey:  Each of us as individuals; our cities; our countries.  The journey is through space and time. We walk our own path, but do we walk alone?

I’ve been optimizing my paths as I walk here in Asuncion.  I take a walk every morning, and to give it a point, I walk to a place to have coffee.  I’ve got one particular place up on Avenido Eulogio Estigarribia that is my favorite, and I’ve been trying to find the best way to get there

I walk from where I am staying about 30 yards south to De Las Palmeras.  I then go east. I cross to the plumbing-contractor supply place and continue two blocks.  At the first block, I hop over some exposed plastic pipe that is laying on top of the ground.  I would say this was a temporary fix, but that’s what I said a year-and-a-half ago when I saw it when I was visiting them. When something goes wrong, you need to fix it as soon as you can afford to. If you put it off, other expenses will arise.  With possible exceptions, nothing gets cheaper; nothing gets easier. 

After a year-and-a-half, this above ground plastic pipe is a feature.  

A block past that is where I turn north.  This is a good street, but there is a large abandoned house on the corner. It was impressive in its day, but it’s been empty for a while now.  It has caught my attention now in particular because of a smell that is coming forth from the overgrown courtyard behind the impressive wall on the corner.

It is the smell of something rotten and it’s not fruit.

Something, some animal, is dead behind that impressive wall. It could be--and probably is--that someone’s pampered pet made its way back to go to its last sleep within the impressive foliage that has overtaken the once rich courtyard.  Very probably.

My problem is that I am a Law and Order fan. If this were an episode of Law and Order, the person walking along the street would climb the wall and find a dead body.  He would then report it to the police, who would detain him from going home until he was cleared of being a suspect.

I see a policeman who’s pulled a motorist over to the side.  Given what I’ve seen happen in traffic here, it boggles the mind what the motorist must’ve done to be pulled over.  I could tell him about the smell.

But...

This isn’t New York, and I’m not a character in Law and Order.  I am not hanging around until I’m cleared as a suspect.  I am getting on a plane at 2am on Saturday morning and going home.

I turn the corner and head north.  Soon the smell is behind me.

I’ve chosen this as the best way because the sidewalks are so nice. In Asuncion, as in many places, you are responsible for your own sidewalk. Some folks build a nice one when they build their house.  But there are two parts of anything, the building of it and the upkeep.  Just because you had the money and desire to build it doesn’t mean you will be able to keep it up.

What I’ve noticed is there is a correlation among the conditions of sidewalks in front of one house and the next.  If your neighbor has a nice sidewalk, you are more likely to have one. It’s called keeping up with the Joneses. But you come to an abandoned house or a house that is owned by people who’ve fallen on rough economic times, and its side walk has deteriorated.  There is then not the pressure on the neighbors to keep up appearances, so they let theirs slide. 

On this street, San Roque González de Santacruz, the correct socio-economic factors are in place that will allow me to walk on the sidewalks without playing hopscotch.

Here I see courtyards with well-kept gardens; walls decorated with art and statuary; sidewalks being hosed-down by groundskeepers, and swept by house maids; locked gates and armed gatekeepers.

No trash, no overgrown foliage, no mysterious, malevolent smells coming over the nicely painted, well scrubbed wall.

So different from the house at the other end of the street.

Who we are requires so many things: work; spirit; luck; the times we are in; the neighbors we have; and the people we know.  The road we are on has two ends to it.

Where will we end up?

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.

 

 

 God’s Imagination

By Bobby Neal Winters

God has a much better imagination than we do. He sees opportunities where we do not.  His grace encompasses everything.

I’ve been doing a scientific sampling of the coffee shops that are within walking distance of where I am staying here in Asuncion.  There are many fine places: Juan Valdez Café; El Café de Acá; El Café de Porfirio. None of them quite as good as Signet or Root, but all much, much better than...well you know. The big chain.

In my explorations, I was directed to one that was located “behind Centro Medico Bautista,”  the Baptist Medical Center.’t 

It’s a hospital. A hospital established by the Baptists.  I would guess Baptist missionaries.  I walked by and read the signs.  In addition to the hospital, they’ve got Sunday School on Sundays; two services, morning and evening; they’ve got Wednesday evening services; and something on Saturday for the youth.

And a biggish hospital. I say “biggish” because I don’t know their numbers.  It ain’t KU-Med, but it is a teaching hospital.

I was born, raised, and baptized as a Southern Baptist.  The week of your birthday, you were supposed to go to the front of the church, put in a penny in a little house for every year old you were, and have the congregation sing happy birthday to you.  That money went to missions.

I stood for a long moment looking at what I believe to be some of the fruit of that collective effort.

As I continued to walk, I looked at the neighborhood.  There were lots of nice service businesses here. Well, of course, they are next to a hospital. There were restaurants--coffee shops!--pharmacies.  There was a “Beef Club”. (I’ve no idea what the hell that is!) All of this was drawn by the hospital.

Then I thought about all the doctors who would have houses and in this culture housekeepers, groundskeepers, etc.  Many incomes are being generated beyond those just in the hospital.

The ripples go throughout the city.

And, in my mind at least, this is connected with all those pennies Baptists are putting in the little red-roofed houses for their birthdays.

I want to hold on to that.

Sometimes when I am scrolling through my Facebook Feed (doom-scrolling they call it), I come upon statements like: “Not a dime of foreign aid while there is a single homeless veteran.”

And I have to agree with the sentiment of helping our veterans.  All gave some, some gave all.  

We owe them.

We owe them, but this is not an either-or thing.

The quote “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can” is often attributed to John Wesley.  This is probably a misattribution, but we don’t know that he didn’t say it, and it makes Methodists happy to think he did.

Doing good has a way of spreading in unexpected ways.  God’s imagination is better than our imagination.  Helping in foreign lands might unwittingly help ours.  Some of the businesses moving in around Centro Medico Bautista were North American-owned chains.  The little pennies put in the red-topped houses are coming back as dollars to North American corporations.

There’s nothing wrong with that.  The sick are still being healed, but the big McDonald’s across the street is making some money.

I can hear the traffic out my window.  Asuncion is beginning to wake up on this Saturday morning.  I think I will make a circle to get a cup of coffee from that little place behind Centro Medico Bautista.

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.

Baptized into the Church of Asuncion

Baptized into the Church of Asuncion

By Bobby Neal Winters

Yesterday, I went to the movies .  I saw the Joker, Part 2 with Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga. It was playing in the Paseo La Galeria mall in Asuncion. This is the ritzy-est mall I’ve ever been in, for what that worth.

I went totally unprepared. I’d not read anything about it, though I had seen the movie that it follows. Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best American actors of his time so I thought it would be worth it.  

For me it was. I, however, sometimes have a rather strange taste in movies.  I’d not expected Joker II to be a musical.  But it is: a good one.  I’ve not followed the work of Lady Gaga, nor do I plan to, but she has a good voice which can shape emotion.

I’d not expected it to have a compelling love story.  But it does: a strange, twisted one. 

I’d not expected so much Jungian imagery.  But I got it: from the very first.

It is the story of broken people in a corrupt society. The corrupt society breaks people.  The corrupt society distorts any means by which those people can be healed.  The refuse of that society believes they have found someone who embodies their brokenness and who can extract vengeance for them.  When that fails, well, you won’t be surprised.  Or maybe you will: I was.

It is one of those I don’t want to take responsibility for advising you to see, but it did give me a lot to think about. 

Today, I went to church. Saint Andrew’s Chapel, an Anglican Church, on the north side of Avenida Espana just to the west of where it crosses Avenida Maximo Santos.  I’d made a failed attempt last week. This week I regrouped.  I knew exactly where it was; I got on google maps to mark my path out.

Then I woke up to the sound of thunder this morning.

They have been needing rain here.  There have been fires in the Chaco, and the smoke from them has been coming into the city.  While there have been cool days with clouds, there’s been no rain.

It had begun to rain what I called an “8-inch” rain in that the drops were hitting on the sidewalk 8 inches apart.  I thought about walking, then I thought about going into a church sopping wet, so I decided to take an Uber.

The rain remained more speculative than real as we drove along.  I could have walked it.  I vowed that I would walk back.

I was the first one there.  I minister--Donald--was setting up the altar.  He saw me and came back to greet me. We chatted.

The congregants began to trickle in.  There were so few even trickle is too generous a word. More than 20, fewer than 25.  All sizes; all shapes; all economic conditions.  Three Americans; three South Africans.

Broken people from a corrupt society. Just like anywhere.

Music consisted of one man with a guitar who led us in hymns. A sincere voice that kept the focus where it should be. There was a sermon that the Apostle Paul could’ve given, in the sense there was nothing novel in it: Repent and God will forgive you because He loves you.

The usual prayers; communion; going forth; then lemonade and cookies. 

My heart felt light and was strangely warmed.  I began my walk home.

There were drops of rain here and there.

I stopped at a grocery store and bought some oranges so I could have a little plastic bag to put my phone in.  Just in case.  The store didn’t sell umbrellas just to let you know.

While I was in the store the rumor of rain had become the real thing.  

I pressed on.

While storm sewers are not unknown in Asuncion, their system is not, shall we say, fully developed.  As a consequence of this, the streets were beginning to run like rivers. Little rivers, but rivers nonetheless.

I pressed on.

I came to an intersection with a very busy street.  Direct across from me, I saw a graffito scrawled on a wall: “Sonria, Cristo te ama.” Smile, Christ loves you.  Above this heartfelt scrawl was a video billboard that was 30 feet wide and 40 feet tall. In flashy, dynamic fashion it was offering all of the joys of a commercial society.  All of this can be yours if you bow down to worship me.

I was standing there, waiting for the light to change with this running through my head when a city bus came by and hit one of the rivers flowing down the street dead-on, and I was baptized in the church of the city of Asuncion.

They believe in full-immersion.

The rain never got any lighter.  I made it home and changed into dry clothes.

It’s been a good day.

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.

 Family, neighbors, friends, and Watermelon

By Bobby Neal Winters

On many days during my stay in Paraguay, I walk to the Superseis that is on Avenida Argentina, just south of the intersection with De Las Palmeras.  At the intersection, there is a fruit stand.  They will bring fruit to drivers in their cars as they wait for the light to change.

I see that they have watermelons.

They call a watermelon by the name sandia in Paraguay.  I pay attention because I love watermelon.  I love watermelon on many levels.  It is sweet, it is filling, and it has few calories per unit volume.

I also love them because of memory.  They open a door back to a world that is almost forgotten to me.   They remind me of my Grampa Sam.

Summer days were long in the cross-timbers of Oklahoma, not just in the measure of hours of daylight, but in the measure of perceived time.  A summer day would sometimes last an entire year in the mind of a 5-year-old.

The sun was bright: it bleached my hair; it tanned my skin.  My bare feet were made hard by walking through grass and gravel.

On some days, when the season for watermelons came, my Grandpa Sam would mysteriously obtain one or our neighbor Buck Crabtree would bring one by.  Neither mentioned ever buying one.  Sam and Buck were men who had friends, and often the friends would give them things.  Those were the way things were in that time and place; at least that is the way I remember them.

There was a ritual. One would obtain a watermelon, but more needed to be done.  Watermelon is a dish best served cold, as they say.  The watermelon would be immersed in cold water or--even better--water that had a big block of ice floating in it. It would be chilled in this manner for as much of the day as possible.

Then, after a few months of the day had passed, as the sun sank low in the west, we would gather around with family and neighbors and eat the watermelon.  And it was always the whole family and neighbors, because all of the watermelon had to be consumed at one sitting.  The idea of cutting up a melon and putting it into the refrigerator for later consumption had not yet entered our culture.

No, we gathered around this offering and shared with our neighbors.  We shared melon; we shared news; we shared triumph and tragedy.  

We shared ourselves.

But now individuality has crept so into our society it even affects our consumption of watermelon. I can buy a watermelon now; cut it up; put it in the fridge; and breakfast on it for a week.  That is, I can get a week’s worth of breakfast out if others who come through my household--they know who they are--don’t steal it from me.

That last sentence is a measure of how deeply the disease of individuality has taken root.  I seek to gather to myself what was once an occasion of sharing.  Indeed, I resent sharing.  But in my defense, I might not resent sharing my melon as much if I got to share lives at the same time.

I talk to my students in Paraguay.  What are their plans for the weekend?

For many the answer is that they go to their grandparents--their abuelos--for asado--barbecue. Large families, sharing food, sharing lives.  One would imagine them gathering after having shared the eucharist.

I bought half a watermelon from the fruit stand on the weekend.  They are aggressive; they wanted to sell me a whole one.  I protested that I would have to carry it very far.  The young lady rubbed my shoulder with her hand and told me that I was strong.

Oh, please.  Give me a break.

But I did buy half a melon and only worried later about the perils of buying melon cut by people who were so ruthless in their sales technique.

I am alone; I am in journalist mode, whether I’ve a right to that state or not.  I am an atomic human observing a sea of molecular humanity.  I’ve not seen the likes of this since I was a boy.

A boy in Oklahoma on an infinite summer day having watermelon with my family, my neighbors, and my friends.

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.

 Sunday Morning Coming Down

By Bobby Neal Winters

Word has come to me here in Asuncion that Kris Kristofferson has passed away.  I was thinking of him just yesterday morning.

I am in Paraguay for 3 weeks.  I’ve made a point to try to find an English language church service here. Sometimes we pray for help; I googled. I did a search for “English language church service.”  I got the website for St. Andrew’s Anglican church.  Services were at 10am.  There was a location.  

The site had last been updated in 2016.  Churches are notorious for not keeping their webpages up to date, but it was all I had.

Google maps assured me that it was a 34-minute walk, but I gave myself an hour, starting at 9.

It was a beautiful morning.  Traffic was light, mostly people who were clearing going to church.  I walked past two or three churches where services were being held in Spanish.

The sounds of liturgy came out from the sanctuaries, which were open to the outside.  Outside men stood in white shirts.  I don’t know if they were waiting for the next service, waiting as their wives worshiped without them, or just having a smoke.

I walked past kindergartens and grocery stores; past restaurants and bars; past car dealerships and ice cream parlors. 

Google maps took me up a street called Avenida Senador Huey P. Long.  Yes, that Huey P. Long.  It was a very nice neighborhood with inviting restaurants, bars, and pubs.  Senator Long would have approved.

I crossed Avenida Espana.  Google told me I was getting close.

“Destination on your left,” it said.

No. Not there. Neither a church nor anything that could plausibly serve as a church. Ever.

I still had half an hour, so I searched again.  This time from my phone instead of my computer.  I don’t know, maybe it would make a difference.

There it popped up: Saint Andrew’s Chapel.  This time there was a picture.  There was a sign in the picture in front of the church that confirmed that services started at 10AM.  Google maps confirmed that the chapel was on Avenida Espana...50 minutes by foot from where I stood.

Maybe I am stubborn. (Surely not.) Maybe I just didn’t have anything better to do. (Probably.) I began the trek.  Google told me I would get there by 10:24 am.  

So I would be a little late.

I began.

I set a good pace.  I was enjoying the morning, practicing my Spanish by reading signs.  Being philosophical about how they used English in some of their advertisements compared how we use Spanish. 

Then it got surreal.

I was walking under a palm tree and a bird dive-bombed my head.  It was kind of scary, but no harm done.

I walked two blocks further and it happened again.

I began to think about Joseph in pharaoh's prison and the baker who had had the dream about the loaves of bread being picked at by birds.

Nevertheless, I pressed on.  See the remark concerning stubbornness above.

Google assured me my destination was ahead on the right. I looked and saw the chapel.  I also noted there weren’t many vehicles there.  Not many as in not any.

The gate to the driveway was closed. 

Hmmm.

I talked to the gate to the sidewalk and checked the handle. It opened; I entered.

In the twinkling of an eye, there was a guard there.

Okay, the guard was somewhere between 16 and 20 years old; he wasn’t wearing a uniform; he didn’t have a gun; but I am still going to call him a guard.

I’ve reached a level in my Spanish where I can make myself understood a lot of the time, and I can kind of guess what they are saying to me.

This was the Sunday the priest went to preach to the Guarani, the local  indigenous people. There would be church at this location next Sunday.  

I walked back to a supermarket I’d passed and got a bottle of pop. Paraguay’s version of Fresca.  I drank my pop and thought it over.  Then I got a taxi to head back to the room.

Today I learned that Kris Kristofferson passed away yesterday. I think he would’ve kind of liked my story.

There’s nothing short of dying/ half as lonely as the sound/ of a sleeping city sidewalk/ Sunday Morning coming down.

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.

 Breakfast in (South) America

By Bobby Neal Winters

A remix of Breakfast in America was coming over the sound system. I was feeling good about myself for knowing what a re-mix was, kinda.  And I am old enough to remember when Breakfast in America was new.  I knew about Supertramp because my friend from high school (I was going to say old friend, but she will always be 17 to me) Robyn Phillips listened to them.

Anyway, I was in the La Vienesa on Civil Legionnaires de Extranjero next to where it crosses De Las Palmeras and this remix of Breakfast in America was playing.  This was my first morning in Asuncion.  I’d slept like the dead after a long day of travel the day before.  

I’d woke up refreshed, took a shower, and headed to breakfast.  After examining the menu, I ordered the cheapest breakfast item they had: Vienesa.  I figured they’d named it after themselves, so they were probably proud of it.  It consisted of coffee, orange juice, two slices of toast from thin bread, a slice of ham lunchmeat, and a sandwich slice of swiss cheese.

That was it.

From many years of traveling to Paraguay, I know this to be a typical breakfast.  You will see eggs in other places, unexpected places, but not at breakfast, normally. Eggs are for frying and putting on top of a steak.  Cold cuts are for breakfast.

And that was fine.  I wanted only a light meal, and cold cuts did it.  

I then went out on my mission: Shopping.  My shopping trip was two-fold: get some groceries and buy a pill calendar.

The groceries were easy: fruit, potatoes, yogurt, meat, and beans.  I sort of looked for the pill calendar at the Superseis, but experience has taught me that in Paraguay groceries and groceries and medicine is medicine.  You can’t get so much as a bandaid at a grocery store, you need a pharmacy.

I went to a pharmacy in one of the malls near this particular Superseis.  The sales girl--and it was a girl as the population pyramid is properly shaped here--was very attentive.

At that point it occurred to me that I didn’t know the Spanish phrase for “pill calendar.”

This kind of thing has happened to me before, so I have a strategy.  Step one: try a naive direct translation.

“Quisiera un calendario de medicinas,” which is “I would like a medicine calendar.

She became very excited at the challenge and began to look through her files.  She then produced a pill-splitter.

I then took my other method.  Recreate my world for her.

“Todas las semanas yo pongo mis medicinas en domingo, lunes, martes, miércoles,...”  

That is to say, “Every week I put my medicines in Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...”

I saw the light of understanding go on in her eyes.

“No tenemos.”  We don’t have it.

Of course not.  In Paraguay everyone is young.  If you are old enough to take so many medicines that they have to be laid out, you can find some other solution.

That’s what I am going to do.

I think I will make some black beans and rice for supper tonight and have some left over.  I might fry up my meat for lunch tomorrow.

But I may very well head back over to La Vienesa for breakfast on Sunday morning.  Nothing quite like ham lunchmeat and cheese for breakfast.

Take a jumbo, across the water//

Like to see America.

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.

PIttsburg is on the map

 Pittsburg is on the map

By Bobby Neal Winters

I have a friend in Philadelphia who sends me news stories he thinks I might be interested in.  Most are about mathematics and mathematicians, but a recent one that he sent me was about Pittsburg, Kansas, my home, and for my Pittsburg readers, our home.  It was from the Associated Press and was concerning the new abortion clinic in town.

One of the themes of the article was that this is a small town, you know everybody, and you are going to see the people you disagree with. In reading the article I noted that I knew people on both sides of the controversy. I don’t need to mention their names because they know me too. This is a small town.

That there would be an abortion clinic in our town was not a surprise.  Indeed, from a particular point of view, its arrival was almost certain. This is because of the juxtaposition of two events.  The first was the reversal of Roe v. Wade which sent abortion laws back to the states.  This decision, I believe, was part of the impetus for the attempt to pass the “Value Them Both” amendment to the Kansas Constitution.

The second event was the subsequent defeat of the “Value Them Both” amendment. Its defeat solidified, in a political sense, Kansas’s very permissive abortion laws for the foreseeable future. It was defeated so decisively that it will take a while for its proponents to regroup. The current legal situation in our state is stable and possibly set in concrete.

Given those two events, human nature, economics, and geography, the establishment of an abortion clinic in this part of Kansas became something that was going to happen, a fait accompli. 

Full disclosure: I am pro-life, so I take no pleasure in the new clinic in town. 

Am I angry?

I’ve reached the age where events like this simply make me sad. The 1st verse of the 9th Chapter of the Book of Jeremiah hits tragically on the mark: “Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!”

But, regardless, the clinic is here. In our town. In my town.

What’s going to happen?

Yes, that is the question.

As the AP article pointed out, there have been times in Kansas where this state of affairs has not been handled very well.

I don’t want that for my town. For our town.

For those of us who are against abortion, what do we do?

In a small town, just ignoring it is not an option, not even if that option was acceptable to your conscience.  For my part, my personal physician and the pharmacy that I use are just a stone’s throw from the clinic.  I will be reminded of the clinic and what is going on there every time I have a checkup, everytime I get a prescription refilled, both of which happen with alarming regularity because I am old.

I can’t tell you what to do. You might be pro-choice and just be happy with this. You might be pro-life and getting guidance from your church on what to do.  

What I am going to do is pray.  

Prayer seems to have become more a theme of these columns recently.  I don’t know whether it’s because I am getting old and wise or simply old and irrelevant.

I think we need to pray for the women who are going through this. Please give me a moment to make my point.

Men are traditionally supposed to be brave, but women are the brave ones. Historically, childbirth was probably the number one cause of the death of women. Yet consider the story of Rachel from the Book of Genesis who was absolutely desperate to have a child. She eventually did have two and died while having the second one. 

In that world, the women knew the risk; they had all seen other women die in childbirth; had been there as it happened; and yet they continued.

That is bravery.

I know that there are those who will disagree with me, but I believe nature has planted a desire in women to become mothers. For a woman to come to a point where she believes that killing her baby is a way out is in tension against that nature. 

It’s tragic.

But right now at this point in time, I believe prayer is just about all I can do.  Pray for the women; pray for their children. Pray that the men who fathered these children would step up and be men. Pray that these women will be able to find another way out.

God help us.

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.

Learning Arithmetic

 Learning Arithmetic

By Bobby Neal Winters

Arithmetic was never my favorite subject. (Can I have an AMEN?) Indeed, I hated it. I used to get my mother to do my long division homework for me.

What an irony then that I am now a Professor of Mathematics at a respected state university.  They probably won’t want to include that in their press release.

Actually, the take away from that is mathematics is quite a bit more than arithmetic.

But here I am now, turning 62 next month, relearning arithmetic. 

Having stepped out of administration, I’ve been having a sabbatical of sorts before going back to the classroom, and I am using it to equip myself to step into my university’s growing Computer Science program.

As a part of that, I’ve been learning the architecture (that’s the term they use) of a particular integrated circuit and learning how to program it in assembly language.

I will be getting a little technical but will try not to fly off into full geek mode. You will need to tell me how I do.

Computers store numbers in binary form.  The number 0 is still zero, and the number 1 is still one. Okay, hang on, here we go: The number 10 is two; the number 11 is three; the number 100 is four; and the number 110 is five. I could go on, but it’s not important that you understand the particulars, but that there is a different way numbers are stored in a computer.

The numbers are stored in “bytes.”  This is a pun on the word byte. (Geeks have always been geeks.) Historically bytes have had different sizes.  It’s now been pretty well settled that a byte is 8 bits, i.e. 8 binary digits.  So 11001010 would be a byte.

The unit of memory that a processor works with is called a “word.” The size of the word varies from one type of processor to another.  In most computers these days, you can figure that the word is 32 or 64 bits long.

To bring me back to my topic, the longer the word size the more arithmetic you can do.

The chip I am working with uses the 8-bit byte for its most basic operations and you have to build up from there. You have to know some arithmetic. Let me show you what I mean.

An 8-bit byte can represent a number between 0 and 255 (between 00000000 and 11111111). If you want to add say 17 (00010001) to 20 (00010100), you can do that easily enough to get 37 (00100101). But if you want to add 250 (11111010) to 10 (00001010), you’ve got a problem. The answer is 260 (00100000100). I’ll save you the counting; it requires more than 8 bits to represent.

On this chip, you have to write your coding to extend the addition process.  It’s not hard. The designers of the chip knew this limitation was there and prepared for it.

They did this with multiplication as well. By its very nature, multiplication gives you bigger numbers quickly. The chip I am working with anticipates this by assuming that multiplying two 8-bit numbers will require 16-bits of storage. So right off the bat you can have a product that is as big as 65535 (1111111111111111).

As nice as that is, it will only get you so far, but you can get around this limitation by doing a little math and a little more programming.

Subtraction is handled in a way more similar to addition than it is to multiplication, though there are some complications in the way negative numbers are handled. (Buy me a coffee and a cookie at Signet, and I will tell you about it. You might want a whiskey. Signet can’t help you there.) 

We can even do the equivalent of decimal multiplication using this chip, but I am still getting my head wrapped around it.

Here we come to my favorite subject: division.  This chip doesn’t have 

If I am going to deal with division, there is not going to be any help from the chip. It’s all going to have to be done by programming.

I wish my momma was around to help, but I think she’d just tell me I was on my own.

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.

Fighting about words

 Fighting about words

By Bobby Neal Winters

Is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit?

A lot of time has been spent--not to say wasted--arguing this point. We think of fruit as being sweet, and a tomato is not sweet, so one would then argue it’s a vegetable. And the argument goes round and round, unresolved.

This is because the question is set up wrong.

First of all, this is not an either or sort of question.  It’s what is called a “false dichotomy.”  The world of objects is not split into disjoint sets, one of which is fruit and the other vegetables. What we have here is different sets of nomenclatures coming into conflict.

When we talk of vegetables, it is almost always in the context of food for human beings. We think of a meal as being constituted of meat and vegetables.

Fruit, by way of contrast, is the name of part of a plant, that is the fleshy part of the plant that contains the seeds. 

So a tomato is both a fruit and a vegetable.

This may disturb you, but this is just logic and using a dictionary.  If you are disturbed, hold on to your horses, it gets worse. 

An apple is a vegetable and a fruit as well.  So is a grape; so is a banana.

The devil lies in the word vegetable, because vegetables are just parts of plants that people eat.  We don’t speak that way in English, though.  We like to give fruits a special place--because they are sweet for the most part--and refer to fruits and vegetables.  But in reality we are just singling out fruit as a special kind of vegetable.

Another question that suffers from a bad set up is this: Mickey’s a mouse; Donald is a duck; Pluto is a pup. What is Goofy?

Here we are referring to classic Disney characters.  Characters they had long before they became the Borg of the entertainment industry and acquired Marvel, Star Wars, etc, etc.

It was a much simpler world made complicated by a deliberately bad question.

Mickey, Donald, and Goofy are characters who interact with each other. They possess the ability to speak what appears to be English to each other, though be it in annoying accents.  They are natural creatures who are caricatures of human form.  To put it in Greek and make it sound scholarly, I could say, Mickey is an anthropomorphic mouse and Donald is an anthropomorphic duck.  Pluto is still a pup, but Goofy, with this nomenclature in place, is an anthropomorphic dog.

As Disney has taken its Star Wars intellectual property and made all sorts of new back stories in the setting, do you think they would ever go back and create a mythology of how Mickey, Donald, and Goofy attained the power of human speech but how little Pluto was left out?

We now come to what is to me a more serious matter:  The story of Jonah and the Whale.

Any serious Bible scholar will know that the Bible doesn’t refer to the creature who swallowed Jonah as a whale, but as a fish. However, in popular telling of the story it becomes a whale.

Here’s the thing. It makes no literary difference to the story: Being swallowed by a big fish and being swallowed by a whale are exactly as dramatic as each other. It makes no theological difference to the story: Jonah prefigures Jesus with the time in the belly of the fish/whale as the time in the tomb.

This is a pointless argument from every dimension.

But more so pointless because at the time of the writing a whale would’ve been considered a fish because the ancients (the ancient people in general and the ancient Hebrews in particular) had a completely different way to classify animals that we do. Linnaean taxonomy was far in the future; DNA after that.  Distinguishing fish from mammals was not one of their major problems.

Considering they were sheep herders who had very little business to do with the sea, I think they left a remarkably large impression on the world.

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.

 These Precious Days

By Bobby Neal Winters

In June and July, the sun remains in the sky until late in the evening, and to us it feels like youth. Not to say that we feel young, but rather to say it feels normal. It feels as if it is due to us. It is owed us. We are entitled to it.

The long, warm days will go on forever, and we will be young and vigorous forever, until the end of days.

But June passes and then July is gone.  August disappears like an ice cube on a Dallas sidewalk, and we find ourselves in September.

The days don’t last as long now.  The sun remains abed later and it pulls the curtains earlier. It’s as if the days themselves are entering into old age.  Those that once bounded out of bed like they were mounted on springs now have to sit on the edge of the bed awhile to get their balance before staggering off for the start of their day.

We are still at the part of the year where there is more daylight that night.  We can still hear the grasshoppers singing in the grass. (Or is that my tinnitus?) Light and warmth still have the upper hand, but the Old Ones know those times are ending.

In a few weeks, there will be the equinox, and after that, darkness will have the upper hand for six months. The darkness will come and the cold along with it.

There was a time when I hated the cold and dark of winter. There was a time when I hated the heat and aridity of summer. There was a time when I resented spring’s unpredictability.

At some point, I decided to stop wishing my life away, to stop rushing through the seasons, to stop hating the moment, to stop hating life.

The summer may burn our faces with the blistering sun; the winter may chap our skin with its cold wind; the spring may rob our sleep with thunder and hail; but everyday is still another day of life.

All that said, I do love autumn in particular.

Here on the Great Plains, we see the extremes. Sun and snow; Darkness and dust. From ten degrees to a hundred and ten in the same calendar year.

But God owes us nothing in compensation. 

I am owed nothing.

But if we were, if I were, these coming days of September with cool mornings and warm afternoons are days of blessing, days of grace. They would make it worthwhile.

I love them.

Sometimes I just stand still and try to record the moment, to put it into memory for later. I just want to make a mental tape of the way the sun and the air feel against my skin and play it on a loop.

We come into this world naked and we take nothing with us when we leave.  If we are truly wealthy, it will be known from what we leave behind: friendship, love, truths said and knowledge passed along.

Everyday is a gift, but these glorious days of September, days of the Fall are especially so.

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 Time of Life, a Place of Life

 A Time of Life, a Place of Life

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve reached a certain age.

I’m at an age where I’ve started looking after myself proactively with diet, exercise, and mental activity. I know my age; I know the age my older friends are and I know the health challenges they face; and I can subtract.

It’s coming.

I want to take care of myself, so that I can help take care of my children and my grandchildren.  

We care for ourselves so we can care for others. We care in a circle centered at ourselves but certainly not ending with ourselves. The circle goes out in distance and in time as well.

There is a purpose to it all. At the core, we want human beings to flourish.

Flourish. I like the word.

Helping humans to flourish is a hard task.

There is an old chestnut about the contribution of three scientists: Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud.  It goes like this: Copernicus proved that Man was not at the center of the universe; Darwin proved that Man was an animal; Freud proved that Man was a sick animal.

Not to diminish any of these great men’s achievements, but we’d known all of that for a long time.

I want to zone in on Freud’s part: Man is a sick animal.

If you are born a squirrel, you’re born and you know what your life is going to be like. You wake up, you eat nuts--and steal fruit while in season, pesky little so-and-sos--you climb trees, and you bury nuts. At the end of the day, you climb into your burrow, go to sleep, and do it all again tomorrow.

Animals are like that. They live, and they don’t think a whole lot. Squirrels solve a lot of puzzles; ask anyone with a bird feeder. But they don’t seem to worry.

Man--the Human Animal--does think; does worry. We are animals, but we differ from the other animals. As one ancient teacher said, “Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”

We are an animal that has clawed its way out of its niche.  We are an animal but we hold ourselves separate, superior to animals.  

It is a paradox.

We’ve had modes of life where people were happy.  By all accounts, the hunter/gatherers were happy.

There are many accounts where children of European ancestry came into the care of indigenous tribes. (Please note the careful use of language in the previous sentence as an effort to keep from being distracted.) When the children were reclaimed by their relatives, they didn’t want to go back. One can talk about Stockholm Syndrome or resetting after having lost one’s parents, but I think it was just a better way of life.

They became part of a tight-knit group of people who cared for each other.

Man, as a species, has a disease.

That disease is related to consciousness.

Consciousness is just a part of who we are.  Most of what our brain does is unconscious.  We walk, breathe, our hearts beat. All unconscious.  Every once in a while, consciousness has to step in and say, cool it.

Consciousness has been involved in my decisions to eat better, to exercise, and take care of myself.  I pay attention to how hungry I am; I make sure I schedule time to walk. The word they use for this is mindfulness. You might prefer to call it taking care.

Consciousness, though, can make you miserable if you allow yourself to think too much about things you cannot control. The word used for this is neurotic.

We think too much. We cut ourselves off from other humans too much.  We become “atomic people,” people as isolated atoms rather than being part of a tribe.

There is no going back to being members of mutually supportive  nomadic bands of hunter gatherers. (I like having a dentist too much, anyway.)

We do have churches, though.  A church should (good word) be a place where we can find some balm for that human disease, a place where we can contribute to the flourishing of our fellow human beings during their whole lives, from conception to natural death. A place of 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.

 Trade Anger for Pity

By Bobby Neal Winters

As Christians we are under orders to love not only our fellow Christians, but to love our neighbors (broadly defined) as well as our enemies.  This is hard, especially the first one sometimes, but there it is. You can find it in black and white right there in the Bible.

This puts us in a quandary when we move from the safety of the church sanctuary out into the real world.  There are some difficult people who live out in the real world.  They will say things that hurt your feelings; they will do things that will hurt your body.  

They may even disagree with you.

But we are not given any loopholes.  Love in the answer.

Here I would be remiss if I did not say that love means desiring good things for the person you love.  The good things that we desire for them are that they be brought closer to God.  This is not done by preaching to them, nagging them, or any other means of speech or persuasion. 

It is done by praying for them.  Pray for them, and don’t tell them about it.  

C.S. Lewis wrote: “I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me.”

In taking up seriously the idea that I should pray for my enemies, a remarkable thing happened. My emotions shifted.  What had been anger at someone who annoyed me and caused me trouble, shifted. I didn’t feel the heat of anger burning in my heart anymove. The sharp pain of anger shifted to the softer pain of pity.

The person who had been causing me anguish was another human being like myself. That person was made in the image of God.

That person was in pain.

I remembered something a preacher had said to me a couple of decades ago. At the time it seemed, well, idiotic, quite frankly, but something has changed in my head and heart in the meantime.  He said, “Hurt people hurt people.”

So I go from being very angry to being a bit sad.

Anger is nasty: It fouls everything.  Anger is an acid: It burns you up.

Many of those in politics are now using anger (and its sibling fear) like the ring in the nose of a bull, to turn the head of the voting public to the left or to the right.

Is exchanging anger for sadness a good thing?  We don’t like being sad, certainly.  While anger is acidic, it has a narcotic-like effect: you may have a hangover, but there is a certain exhilaration. 

While we don’t like to be sad, sadness--and maybe pity would be a better word--doesn’t steal your brain in the same way wrath does.  Sadness allows us to think; to inspect our own hearts; to see if there is anything we can do to actually help the situation.

Sadness can often be a manifestation of love. Love can’t live long within anger.

In chapter 21 of Revelation we are promised, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

Through prayer, we turn our anger to tears, and God will wipe away our tears.

Loving your enemies is not easy.  Loving your friends can be a chore at times. We live in a beautiful world, but as has been said by many before me, our view is obscured by this veil of tears over our eyes.

This is radical. If you follow it to its logical conclusion, slaves should feel pity for those who enslave them. The victims of the Holocaust should feel pity for those who exterminated them.  That is a big ask, and not very many can get there. I am not saying that I can. 

But that is the way we were pointed.

Maybe I’m a fool.  No, I take that back, I AM a fool.

But not because of this.

Love your enemy. Give up anger for pity. Pray a lot.

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 Process

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve recently read a book entitled The Master and His Emissary which was written by a scholar named Iain McGilchrist.  The writer was making a case that Western Civilization is going awry in a particular way--which is what almost every book is about this day it seems. Along the way he writes about many things that interest me regardless of the merits of his case as a whole.

McGilchrist is a brain scientist.  In simple terms he says that the right half of our brain takes in our experience of the world; the left half of the brain creates a model from the information it gets from the right by putting it into language that can be manipulated.  The model is then sent back to the right brain to be tested against reality.

I’ve read the book and a group I belong to is now discussing it.  All of us in the group are all either teachers or retired teachers, so this sort of thing is of interest to us. It parallels the best way to learn something and the best way to teach something.

Right now, as someone who is going to be 62 in a couple of months, I am learning to program in assembly language. I am doing this because I am preparing to teach a class in low-level programming.  Here “low-level” does not refer to the level of difficulty; the word “low” refers to how far you are above the hardware.

To understand this better, let me talk about high-level programming. I’ve written before about learning to program in the Python programming language. In Python, you put in your numbers and commands and run it.  You don’t worry at all about the particular machine you are using. Regardless of what machine it’s going to be running on, everything is the same. 

In low-level programming, you need to know about particulars. You need to know what CPU you are running your code on. You need to have its data sheet. I’d never even seen a data sheet before I started working on this.

I’ve been googling articles, buying books, and watching videos.  And making notes. I’ve forgotten from time to time. In my youth, I just remembered things. I paused in conversation and they were just there. Now I need to write them down, and sometimes I forget that I’ve written them down.

From time to time, I need to pause and write down in prose at length what I’ve learned. I write from the point of view of explaining to someone else.  I then come back the next day and recopy it, expanding on the points where I was just a bit too terse. Once done, I put a paperclip on it, and put it in a file. 

I then go on to the next thing I want to learn.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

My plan is to come back--after I’ve gotten the whole process done--and type it all up.  In the past, I’ve found that what I’ve done at the end will make me want to change what I’ve done at the beginning.

This is a great way to learn. This isn’t my discovery by the way.  It’s well-known.  Make your student go through an experience and force them to think about it enough to explain it to someone else.  

We do it by writing. Writing is probably the best way to do it, but talking works.  We have kindergarten kids do it in Show-and-Tell. The great story-tellers of old from the ancient oral traditions did it. Do it; think about it; explain it to someone else.

Writing allows us to remember details better.  Writing allows us to revisit, to correct, to amend. Writing allows us to share through time.

As wonderful--and to me, enjoyable--a method this is, students resist it.  Students don’t like to write.  Writing requires time; writing requires thought; writing requires time.

Writing requires rewriting.  Indeed, for you programmers out there, writing is rewriting in the same way programming is debugging.

Writing puts our grammar and spelling on display for all the world to see.  There is a lack of appreciation for creativity in either of these areas.

In any case, once you get over the bump of hating to rewrite, a whole new world of learning opens up.

[As an advertisement, the University has a writing center that helps students and teachers in stuff like this.  The staff there is brilliant. Just sayin’.]

There is a process we go through naturally. It’s the way the brain works: Take it in; think about it; explain it. This process goes in a circle. Good education, education at its best makes use of this process and perfects it.

Welcome back to school!

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.