Trees, Wells, Forks in the Road

By Bobby Neal Winters

Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it!”

If you go over that sentence, parse it carefully, and analyze it, you will wind-up frowning with your whole face.

I understand it perfectly however.  That is to say, I’ve got my own interpretation. “If you come to a place where there is a choice to be made among multiple alternatives, make a decision and proceed apace. Don’t suffer from paralysis by analysis.”

That way of saying it is more amenable to pedantry, but it doesn’t pack the rhetorical heft of the Yogiism.

True, there might be other interpretations of what Yogi said, but that just makes it better. 

That’s because there are ways of thinking and there are ways of thinking.

Right now we are in the age of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  They like to call it STEM. We do love our acronyms in this age.  We love the precise, mathematical language.  We love to reason with axioms. We love to reason with data.

And it’s good. Logic and math, science and technology, have cleaned up the water supply, cured smallpox, given us central heat, provided us with little boxes to stare at over dinner instead of talking to family members.

It is a good language to speak in.

But it’s not the only language.

There is another language that is ancient and far more ingrained in us: let’s call it the language of stories.

We could also call it the language of dreams, but that is going to turn off my audience.  You hear “the language of dreams” and you heave a sigh so heavy as to knock down trees and take the roofs off houses.  

“OH. One of those,” you say.

And I get the point.  The people who talk only in the language of dreams are every bit as tedious in their own way as those who speak only in the language of logic.

I understand because I have heaved my share of heavy sighs.

Yet, I’ve come to admit there is something there, and my reason for saying so is that it has improved my reading of the Bible, it has enhanced my enjoyment of literature.

I’ve said it’s the language of stories and the language of dreams, but perhaps it’s best described as the language of symbols. Let me give you an example.

In “A Christmas Carol,” Dickens describes Scrooge as being “as solitary as an oyster.”  Certainly, an oyster is alone within its shell. Oysters don’t share shells.  But the oyster is a symbol. The shell is hard; it offers protection; it keeps the oyster from being hurt. Scrooge has cut himself off from the world because he doesn’t want to be hurt. He’s been hurt by people before, and he doesn’t want it to happen again.

All of that, in a symbol.

We run into all sorts of symbols in the Bible.  Let’s keep it simple to begin with, and if you have the sense of humor of a middle school student, I ask you to put it in a box for the next few minutes.

Trees and poles are masculine symbols. I don’t think I need to put a finer point on it as it were.  Wells and bodies of water are feminine symbols. That is fairly clear as well, but in addition to whatever else you might be thinking, water is the stuff of life. It gives life just as women produce life.

In this way of thinking, the feminine is creative and the masculine is structured.  The two are necessarily complementary; they are parts of a greater whole.

In the Old Testament, you have a lot of men meeting their wives at wells. If we carry this to the New Testament, it brings a new lens to the story in the Gospel of John where Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well.  We later read that the church is the bride of Christ, we could interpret that the church is made up of sinners such as this woman.

When Jesus is crucified, the women are at the foot of the cross. The Cross is a masculine symbol, and the women at the base are a feminine symbol.  From this we can interpret that something new, a new world, is going to be born from this.

As I’ve said, this is not everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s real. It has opened up a new level of interpretation to me. And the thing is, it’s not new. This is the way the Rabbis interpreted scripture before Christ; it’s the way the Church Fathers interpreted scripture.

And it’s an Art: I make no bones about that. It’s not STEM; that’s for sure. But keep an open mind, not to let your brains fall out, but to let some beautiful light in.

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 Ark of the End-table

The Ark of the End-Table

By Bobby Neal Winters

God told Noah to make an Ark 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits. Because of the context, we might think an Ark is a boat, but later, God instructs Moses to make an Ark that is 2 and a half cubits long, one and a half cubits wide, and one and a half cubits tall.

An Ark is a box. When you work with wood, just about everything is a box.

I’ve been working on a box.  A big box.  I’ve just finished it, but it took on a life of its own.

Since just after Thanksgiving, I’ve been working on an end table for my brother.  We’d gone down to see him the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and I saw a table he had in his living room.  I determined to make him an end table to match it.  

If any of you have seen “Lonesome Dove” it was like when Captain Call determined to take Gus’s body back to Texas, but I didn’t recognize it at the time.  I was put on a path.

The key thing that set this path for everything that followed was that the legs were to be made from a four by four. Everything was on rails from that point on.  

The table needed to be two feet tall. (I don’t work in cubits.) Therefore, the end table was destined to weigh at least as much as an eight-foot four-by-four.

If there are any young men reading this, they might not get it.  If you are reading this and have never personally wrestled with a four-by-four, you might not get it.  However, if you are a man beyond a certain age, I believe you will understand.  There is a certain amount of heft involved. You can carry them yourself; and if you’ve taken care of yourself, you might do it easily; but you don’t do it thoughtlessly.

I will say this.  When you cut an eight-foot four-by-four into four pieces, it does reduce what physicists refer to as the “rotational moment of inertia,” but the weight remains. Every darn bit of it.

As work progressed, my project became approximately a 2-foot-by-2-foot-by-2-foot cube.  That is bigger than it sounds, especially when it’s heavy and is gradually growing in weight.  

I started with the legs, and then chiseled out the mortises. (It loses a little weight. Yea.) Then you put in stretchers made from scrap 2-by-4s. (And it gains quite a bit more weight. Boo.) 

All the time, it’s taking up space. What’s more, it’s taking up working space.  And did I mention that it’s heavy.

There are spots on the floor, here and there, where I could put it, but it got to be so darned heavy that moving it back and forth got to be quite a chore.

An enmity grew between me and my end table.

I am not quite sure enmity is the right word there.  I was annoyed at it.  It was in my way.  There are all the other things I wanted to do while the glue dried, but I couldn’t because the carcass of the end table was in my way.  

Carcass.  That is the word that is used.  Like the dead body of an enemy that you’ve killed.  Some ancient furniture maker understood.

The answer may seem obvious: Just finish the project.

Ah, but the project was getting so big that it was getting in its own way.  

I’d made the carcass, but I needed to make the drawers, and there the carcass was right where I needed to be to glue-up my drawers.  

I cleaned a spot on the floor; heaved the carcass off the work table; did the drawers.

Then I needed a top, but where to put the drawers then?  

Okay, I could slide the drawers into the carcass which I did.

When I made the top--again trying to match the piece that my brother had--I put a frame around a piece of plywood and then used mortar to attach porcelain tiles to it.  Then I grouted between the tiles.

At this point, I’d kissed trying to make this table lighter good-bye a long time ago.

Every step of the construction was hindered by its bulk and weight.

I slapped some shellac on it and declared it finished on February 8.

When the shellac dried, I could take it out of my shop.  But I needed help.  With the Ark, Noah had the waters of the flood there to move it.  All of his neighbors are dead, but the thing is moving, right? With the Ark of the Covenant, there were pairs of rings on each side to help them move it with poles.  

I didn’t have any of that, but I do have a loving and helpful wife who lovingly helped me.

The Ark of the End-Table now awaits my next trip to my brother's house, and I’ve got a lot of workspace back.  

Life is good.

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.

Fire and Rain

By Bobby Neal Winters

Her name was Teresa Massa, but I called her Mother Teresa, and she thought that it was funny.

There are people on Earth whose job it is to clean up messes that other people have made.  They go by different names in different places. The mob calls them “cleaners”; many businesses call them HR.  When I was president of the university chapter of the KNEA, I called them the “Men in Black.”  This in spite of the fact that the one in charge was a woman.

I called them the “Men in Black” after the movie.  According to the movie, there are a lot of things going on in the world that need to be taken care of that the vast bulk of the people of the world are better off not knowing.  The same is true at any big organization including the university.

Mother Teresa was in charge of the “Men in Black” back in the day and that day was almost 20 years ago.

Mother Teresa took a shine to me. 

I am a person who does not like conflict.  I have an accommodating personality type.  I like to make people happy.  I will twist myself into a pretzel to make people happy. (Until I get to my breaking point, and then I am DONE. But that is a story for another day.) As I said, I got to know Mother Teresa as union president during a time of conflict.  When I went to the “dark side” in administration afterwards, she took me under her wing and taught me some administrative basics.

We would meet in her office, drink our respective hot beverages, and talk.  She told stories of her time at the university.  She talked about the characters she had known.  She talked about personalities she had met.

She knew the people from the Age of Giants.  Perhaps she was a giant herself.  Though the Greeks spoke of an age of giants--the Titans--this was followed by an age of gods.  Perhaps Mother Teresa belonged to that latter age.  Time will tell.

From her I learned there are two sides--at least two sides--to history.  I’ve come to call them the PR side and the HR side.

The PR side is what you see in the papers. It is glossy and smells like perfume.  Events progress neatly from A to B to C and all the way to a glorious Z without any friction.  The PR side is boring.

Then there is the HR side. There is not a bit of gloss to the HR side. I’m not going to say what it smells like, but it’s not perfume. Earthier than that. Let’s say it smells like un-painted reality.

The HR side is Truth, and I meant that capital “T”.

Mother Teresa had seen the dirt and smelled the smells, and she still loved the university.  

She loved learning.

She loved history and art.  She loved conversation about cultures and religions.  She reached out an open and helpful hand to our teachers from foreign countries and learned about them.

She was an Okie, just like me. She was of the first generation in her family to go to college, just like me.  In her retirement, she and her husband Richard established a scholarship for First Generation students. 

She was particularly interested in the students who were barely making it.  They were financially on the edge and they needed the help.  When she and Richard first established the scholarship, there would be a luncheon where she gathered the recipients together to meet them.  It made them feel special.

Time took a toll.

Richard’s health began to fail, and he wouldn’t be able to attend.  Then he passed.  Time exacted a toll on Mother Teresa as well.

She had treated my wife and me to a nice lunch at the 609 Club in Joplin a few years ago.  She’d had her 7&7.  I’d always intended to reciprocate, but time, events, life didn’t cooperate.

Then I got an email from our mutual friends in Advancement: Mother Teresa was ill and wasn’t going to make it.

Then word came that she had passed.

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain

I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end

I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend

But I always thought that I'd see you again.

May I be as good a help to others as she was to me.

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.

 

Arduino and Nicodemus

 Arduino and Nicodemus

By Bobby Neal Winters

When we are making big changes in our lives we ask ourselves, am I doing the right thing? After we’ve made the big changes in our lives and it’s too late to go back, we ask ourselves, have I done the right thing?

Sometimes we get an answer, oh yes, and not a moment too soon.

First off, I am not retiring; I am leaving administration.  It will feel like I am retiring.  During my dad’s later years, when he was working as a truck driver, whenever someone asked him about retiring, he would say, “I retired when I stopped pushing that rod and tubing.”

This was his way of saying that his transition from oilfield construction to hauling bulk cement was a happy one.

As of the day I am writing this, I have 126 more days in my administrative position.  I will then transition to teaching full time. As our new Computer Science major is growing by leaps and bounds, I am preparing myself to teach courses within it.  I mentioned in a previous column that I am learning assembly language programming as a part of that.

I am using an Arduino Uno microcontroller to do this. 

Here I want to shout out to all of my friends in the Republic of Frontenac.  Yes, you read that correctly: Arduino.  It is Italian.  Get on the internet and google Arduino, and you will find a whole new world.  The Italians have done an excellent job designing a support network for learning how to use this particular family of microcontrollers. Leonardo da Vinci would be proud of them.

I’ve been tinkering around with Arduinos for a while, but always at home, never at the office.  Home is home; work is work, except when I take work home. 

I have a table in my office that I’ve used to keep magazines off.  This week I went in, and put all of the “Physics Today” magazines on it into the recycle bin; I moved the hot pot that I use to heat water for tea to a spot on the floor beside my bookshelf; I then started putting my tools--wire snippers, wire strippers, LEDs, breadboards, copper wire--onto the table.

I began working on a little machine. I am starting small because at the end I want something that I will be able to teach to beginners. I want something that will be able to display numbers sent to it by the Arduino.  I am using something called a 7-segment LED.  You’ve seen one even if you don’t know what it is.  Remember the old-style calculators where everything came out in red squares.  We used to amuse ourselves by making them spell “b00biES.”  Each of those digits was on a 7-segment LED.

One of those requires 8 wires to control, and I will be wanting to display more than one digit, so I am figuring out a way to toggle through one digit at a time.  I’ve figured out a way to display the digits; I’ve figured out a way to toggle through some choices; I will now be moving on to a way to do it all at the same time.

When I am done, I not only will need to know how to do it myself, I will need to know how to explain it to 19 and 20-year-olds.

I have purchased quite a few books at this point.  Let me just say that I can tell that some of these folks have never been in front of a classroom.  Let me continue to say that some of those who have, well, I know what their student rating forms look like.

Nevertheless, I am having a ball.

Any moment that is not occupied by listening to students complain about faculty, listening to staff complain about faculty, listening to faculty complain about each other (and it’s not even noon yet, folks!) I steal the opportunity to work on my wiring, to work on my code, to learn about the software tools so that I can teach them to my students.

Nicodemus asked Jesus, “How can a man be born again when he is old?”

I feel like I’ve been born again.  I feel like I am living the computer science version of John 3:16.  The pianist was playing “Just as I am,” the preacher was urging sinners to walk the aisle, to “listen to that little voice in your heart.”

And I stepped out and walked toward the front.

I am looking forward to the rest of my career, to the rest of my life.  Everything I’ve done is a part of me and has made me who I am, and I regret nothing.

But it’s time to turn the page.  

Only 126 more days.

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.