Turning Bois D'arc

 Turning Bois D’Arc

By Bobby Neal Winters

My people call it Bois D’Arc.  Folks around here tend to call it Hedge.  There are some refined educated folks who call it Osage Orange, and they are welcome to do so.  

It is a free country.

But my people call it Bois D’Arc and pronounce it bow dark.  That is an example of a genuine folk etymology which is to say that knowing what something is influences the way you pronounce it.  You see, my people know that Indians (Native Americans, Indigenous people; pick one that makes you happy and push on) made bows from the wonderful wood of this tree.  

The French knew it too.  That’s why they called it bois d’arc.  But the bois is pronounced bwah and means “wood” and the d’arc means “of the bow.”  So it all makes sense and the folk who I call my people just don’t want anyone to forget that connection.  

It’s about history; it’s about reality.

I got a piece of bois d’arc from my brother some time back.  I want to say a year ago Thanksgiving. It might’ve been longer than that, but if so not too much.

I used some of it to make some woodworking mallets, but I still had some left.  I’d cut it from one of my brother’s trees. It’s about 3 or 4 inches through and it still has the bark on it.  

The Bois D’Arc is not a pretty tree.  Indeed, one might say without too much fear of contradiction that it’s ugly.  It’s got thorns on its limbs.  

It bears a fruit that not many animals find attractive, no matter how hungry they might be. The internet tells me that only the seeds are really edible and that the latex that permeates the fruit can irritate your skin.

But it is tough.  

It will grow in poor soil, in inhospitable places.

It is defiant. 

Yesterday, I took a piece of what my brother gave me and turned it on the lathe.

It is hard.

Very hard.

I had my doubts that I would be able to do much with it until I got past the bark, past the dry part of the wood.  When I got down to the wet part, the part that was still “green,” it turned easier.

I called it green, of course, just because it hadn’t dried out yet.  The wood beneath the bark was actually yellow, a beautiful, beautiful yellow.

I am just starting with the lathe, so I don’t know how to make much.  So far what I’ve done is make squarish objects into cylinders. Those things and a lot of saw dust.

But I’d seen a Russian guy on Youtube making whistles.

And I thought, “Hmm, whistles.”

That’s what grandpas do.

I made a couple from other wood: one from cedar and one from pine.

I thought to make one from bois d’arc.  The wood of my people.  The wood that exemplifies my people.

I turned it between centers to knock the bark off and to make it round.  I then stuck one end in a chuck while still having the other end held secure.  

I began taking off wood to take it down to the size of a whistle.

The yellow just got deeper and more beautiful.  But it’s still as hard as iron inside.

I was able to drill a hole down the axis without too much trouble, but cutting a wedge from the side with a chisel to make the whistle was just about as much as I could do.

With all the bark removed, it is revealed to be beautiful on the inside, but it’s still hard, still unrelenting, still something you don’t really want to mess with if you don’t have to.

The wood of my people.  

It is right.

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.

What is the Right Word?

 What is the Right Word?

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am trying to find the right word for something.  

It would be a word that would describe a situation or a mindset.  It strikes me as something that is basic to dealing effectively in and/or happily with the world.  Because of this, there must be some word in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew for what I am talking about.  Likely as not, I’ve heard it, but I didn’t recognize its importance.

Since I don’t have the One Word, let me now use a lot of them.

When I tell students how to study their math, I tell them to pick a spot and prepare it.  Get their paper, their calculator, their pen, their pencil, their protract, that is to say get everything that they are going to need and gather it around them.  Turn OFF the flipping TV (and I don’t mean flipping), music, social media. Urinate--maybe on the social media. Take a deep breath.  Let it out slowly, and then get started, doing what they are going to do.  To those who’ve had jobs, I tell them to go at it like a job.

This is one example of the situation/mindset I am talking about.

This was my only example for many, many years.  As I’ve gotten into woodworking, I’ve noticed that you need the same mindset to do good woodworking.

Consider how you cut dovetails. Get your workbench cleared off.  That means you need to actually have a workbench.  Have your chisels, saws, marking implements, squares, and dovetail jigs close at hand.  Make sure that your wood is square and properly sized.  Make sure you have a clamp at your workbench so that you can clamp your board to the bench when it comes time to chisel out your dovetails.  Maybe I should have begun with the notion that you should have thought the entire process through from beginning to end before you sat down to cut the dovetails, but it (almost) goes without saying.  That might mean it should be said more often.

I am now learning how to use a lathe.  As with every other powertool I’ve learned about, a lathe is kind of scary.  I think that fear is left over from childhood.  Our parents didn’t want us to get hurt, so that created a general fear in us.

The cure to that fear is knowledge.  You can hurt yourself with a lathe. You can kill yourself with a lathe.  But you gain knowledge of how to deal with a lathe so as to minimize that possibility.  

You could say to just stay away from the lathe and you won’t get hurt.  The same philosophy will keep you safe from cars, dogs, cats, and the opposite sex.

While there are things that we leave alone because the learning curve of dealing with them safely overrides any benefit from dealing with them, we try to keep that set small.  I’ve got bungee jumping and skydiving in that set, but I know others who’ve crossed that line.

Somewhere within this notion is the idea that we become the despots of a small piece of spacetime.  We set aside a place where we are the absolute rulers of our environment for a carefully prescribed interval of time. For that time, in that space, whatever we say goes.

Many, many years ago--more than twenty--I had a class where one of the students thought he was smarter than me.  That doesn’t bother me. It happens all the time, and I enjoy it.  His thinking he was smarter wasn’t the problem.  The problem was that one day he tried to take over.  I came to class, and my desk at the front of the room was covered with boxes of donuts, a jug of milk, a jug of orange juice etc.  

He’d decided that we were going to have a party.

I didn’t say a word.

I sat down my books and began removing the accoutrements from the desk. After they were gone, I began to teach as if nothing had happened.

When you are the teacher, you are in charge. You decide what will be done that day.  Good teachers will read the room and take input from the students.  But if you let them take charge, why exactly are you getting a paycheck?

The student didn’t like me after that.

However agreeable you are, you must learn to draw the line, to be in charge, to take control:

“Hey, Eve, God told us not to eat that, and I won’t.”

“No, taking bribes is wrong, and I won’t do it.”

“No, I don’t think main-lining cocaine is a good idea, and I won’t do it.”

So, anyway, I’m trying to come up with the right word to describe this.  I know I will feel stupid when someone tells me, but I would like to know.

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.

 Invisible Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about making a frame for a cedar chest.  My intention was to segue off that and talk about frameworks in a more abstract way, but I got sucked into a vortex of writing about woodwork and ran out of space.

I could just leave it lay, but the topic won’t let me go. Frameworks just keep popping into my head.  My preference as a teacher is to put a good solid example in the student’s mind before going off on an abstraction, so if you didn’t read that article, you might want to get on the web and find it.

We’ve got frameworks everywhere around us.  Let’s start with math.  Say you are going to add 5 to 7.  You could just remember that 5 plus 7 is 12, but you don’t have to, because we’ve got a framework.  As you learn to count, you learn to count by fives. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, etc.  You are familiar enough with numbers to know that 7 is 5 plus 2.  So 5 plus 7 is 5 plus 5 plus 2.  Five plus five is ten, so 5 plus 5 plus 2 is 10 plus 2 which is 12.

That’s some trouble, and it’s easier to memorize it, but it will help you get by until you do.

You can do this sort of thing with bigger numbers.  Say you want to multiply 27 by 8.  Well, 25 times 8 is 200; that’s not so hard.  Now 27 is 2 more than 25 and 2 times 8 is 16, so 27 times 8 will be 216.  Here you are using a framework of multiples of 25.

You get your framework in place and you work from that.

For me teaching became a lot easier, when I learned how to use the calendar as my framework.  I sit down before the beginning of the semester and look at the university calendar.  I note where the breaks are; I note the times that I will have to be off campus; I pick the test days at roughly equal intervals.

After I have those test days picked, the rest of the time is just talking to intelligent young people and grading tests. I keep track of what I’ve done; I keep track of what has worked and what hasn’t; I refine my teaching.

The value of a calendar as a framework can’t be overstated.

As is my predilection, let’s go back to the first chapter of Genesis. In verse 14 it says, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years.’”

People have wasted a lot of time arguing about Genesis, what I will say is that when I read this, I can see that the author of Genesis knew that that constellations were connected to the seasons of the year. Even now, you can tell when winter is coming or summer is coming by where Orion the Hunter is in the night sky.

Put that together with the phases of the moon, and you’ve got the start of a calendar.

I’ve pointed out one way I use the calendar, but it’s everywhere. We schedule everything.  Everything from 7th grade B-teams playing basketball in Frontenac to the Superbowl is on the calendar.  

The days, months, and years are all framed out, and we can put our events on them.

There was a time when we paid more attention to the week.  We recalled that the story in Genesis set aside one day a week to rest. Don’t work; don’t let your servant work; don’t let your wife work. Don’t work.  Restaurants would be closed; stores would be closed.

But someone came along and said, “Don’t let those religious fanatics tell you what to do. You can work every day. That’ll show ‘em.”

So we now get to work everyday if we want to.  And sometimes even if we don’t want to because if we don’t someone else will.

We showed ‘em, all right.

But I digress.

To return to my point, we’ve got these invisible frameworks around us that work like the frame I made for my cedar chest.  You can attach other things to them and they will hold it together. They make our lives easier but are invisible.

Since the 1960s, there has been a reexamination of some of the frameworks that keep our society together.  We don’t trust institutions any more.  Membership has gone down in service clubs and churches.

These invisible structures, invisible frameworks of civilization are being lost, and it’s not clear what is replacing them. 

If anything.

I suppose time will tell. It might be quite a show.

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 Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

By Bobby Neal Winters

The Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote a poem entitled “To a Mouse.” Therein he sympathizes with a mouse whose nest he has turned up while plowing.  However, at the end of the poem he reflects:

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!//

The present only toucheth thee://

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,//

          On prospects drear!//

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,//

          I guess an’ fear!//

One might say he’s being a bit disingenuous by saying we can’t see forward. Maybe we can’t in specific terms, but we can in general terms.

As the engineer in the movie Titanic shared, the ship can and will sink, “It’s a mathematical certainty.”  As Jim Morrison from the Doors sang, “No one here gets out alive.”

That’s not very cheerful, is it? We are bothered by it.  It’s hard for us to think about, and I suppose that’s why some of the preachers when I grew up preached on the Rapture so much. Somehow the prospect of flying out of your car while you are raptured is easier to think about than the mundane--and certain--fact of your inevitable demise.

Thoughtful people throughout the ages wondered about this and discussed what the best pay to spend these finite hours of our lives.  They came up with a rainbow of solutions from grabbing as much pleasure on one end to serving others on the other.

Many of those who seek to live a good life, to make the best use of those too-small number of days we are given, gather with other like-minded individuals. Such were those who became the Disciples of Jesus.

They were looking for someone who knew something, someone to teach them. Many (most, all?) of them had been associated with John the Baptist as his students, disciples, and John directed them to Jesus as a better option.

Jesus didn’t knock on their door; he didn’t put out flyers; he didn’t have a huge building.

He had something they wanted.  

For some, it was something they wanted to learn. Others transferred their own hopes and desires onto him and were disappointed when he didn’t live up to them.  (I am thinking specifically about Judas here.)

For any of these people, he wasn’t hard-sell.  He just said, “Come and see.”

No doubt many came, saw, and then went again. And we know what Judas did.

But some remained.

It’s still the same. People who think about...life...still wonder what is the best way to spend the time we have? What are the best things to do?

The same range of answers are still out there that always were. For all the passage of time, the basic choices have remained the same.

We are living in a time when we are born into institutions, into churches, into synagogues. Most people don’t really think about “it” much.  

But thoughtful people will continue to think and continue to seek answers.

These thoughtful people are of all stripes. Some are scholars, sure. Not as many as you would think. It’s just that scholars are the ones who write and writing tends to get around.

Thoughtful people can be artists and artisans; waiters and waitresses; bartenders and baristas; beekeepers and bookkeepers.

Fishermen, tax collectors, and tent-makers.

They come to the Teacher because they want to be taught. How do I live a good life? What do I need to do with my shrinking number of days?  I don’t want to bury my gold coin, where should I invest it?

You will have to find someone who can help you.  He might just say, “Come and see.”

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.