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.