Sins of Omission

By Bobby Neal Winters

I have lunch with my best friend on a regular basis.  He was waxing philosophical--which is a state he shares in common with me--and suggested I write about sins of omission.  

“Sins of commission are things we do when we are young and are more able; sins of omission are more common to the old.”

And he is right.  I don’t think I can add to that. When we are young, our bodies might lead easily into actions which aren’t so easy later on. Those of you who are wise are free to put some meat on those bones, as it were.

I do think we can have some sins of omission when we are young though. 

Let me slowly work my way into that subject like a vine into a potting shed...

Summer break has begun. I am not teaching summer school.  Rather, I am working on a list of honey does (doos, dues, dews?). The main honey-do is the residing of our potting shed.

We’ve had our potting shed for nigh on to three decades.  It has served us well during that extended period of benign neglect.  It has kept our mowers dry, and our tools out of the weather.

It was well-designed; it was well built.

It was NOT well-maintained.

Here’s the story.

While our yard doesn’t not produce vegetables well--anything that we grow on purpose is in a raised bed with dirt we buy at the store--it is amazingly capable at producing weeds.  Among these weeds are numerous plants that will produce vines if given half a chance.

Over the course of three decades, vines have gradually encroached on the potting shed.  They’ve snaked their sneaky little--and sometimes not so little--tendrils through imperceptible gaps between boards into the shed.  They have attached themselves to the siding of the shed, rooting their way into the wood, digesting it.

Vines have been eating my shed, consuming it, trying to remove it from the face of the earth, trying to reduce it to its constituent atoms.

Bad vines! Bad!

Being off this summer, without a paid assignment, I’ve been assigned the duties of 1) Reclaiming our shed from nature; 2) Repairing the damage that has occurred; 3) Putting in modifications to keep this from happening again...at least during the course of our lives. 

This has been, shall we say, educational to me.  

As I do the repair work, I am doing carpentry. Those of you who frequent this space may be aware of the fact that I am an avocational woodworker. Your minds may have blurred the distinction between carpentry and woodworking. 

Let me repair that.

Woodworking, as I practice it avocationally, is using mostly traditional tools to learn traditional practices to make small, sometimes useful, sometimes pretty, objects out of wood.

By way of contrast carpentry is actual hard work.

A few hours of carpentry--two or three--can make me ready to take an old man’s nap.  

This is not hyperbole. 

While carpentry is hard work, it allows for periods of light philosophical contemplation in the same way woodwork does.

For example, the following thoughts occurred to me. 

If I had done a better job of keeping the vines away, I wouldn’t have to be cutting them from the siding right now.  

If I had put gravel around the base of this shed when I had a young man’s body, I wouldn’t have to be horsing those bags of gravel around with my old man’s body.

If I had painted the shed, say, every ten years, I would’ve been ahead of the game, and I wouldn’t have to be putting new siding on now.

Building is creative; creation is enjoyable. 

Maintenance is hard.

My major sins of omission in my youth are failures in maintenance. 

I confess them and try to excuse them, because they were done out of ignorance.  I didn’t know any better.  I didn’t think about how relentless vines are.  I didn’t think about them eating my potting shed.

But now I know.

And now I have to fix it because failure to do so would be less forgivable than actions not taken because of the ignorance of youth.

Just thinking about it, and I already need a nap.

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 Love Song of B. N. Winters

 The Love Song of B. N. Winters

By Bobby Neal Winters

As we get older, living in the world, seeing the way of things, learning some uncomfortable truths, our eyes begin to open.

When the big picture, the capital “T” Truth clicks into place, there is a desire to explain it to someone else.  To explain it to someone so that they don’t have to learn it the same hard way that you did.  You want to tell your children and your grandchildren.

But there is a catch. 

A big one.

They won’t understand.  They don’t have the language.  And I don’t mean they don’t have the words.  The words are there, but the words are not connected to the same experiences.  It’s like in the old movie “Crocodile Dundee.”  

“That’s not a knife.  This is a knife.”

There has to be a moment of experiential enlightenment, a gestalt.

As I go walking through life, I can find myself understanding more of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”  (I think T. S. Eliot would appreciate that.  Maybe that is what he intended.)

Do I dare//

Disturb the universe?//

In a minute there is time//

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

I know what that means now.

Poetry sometimes serves as a map to the world, but unless you go out into that world its symbols will remain meaningless to you.  Even if the map has a helpful key down in the corner, you will never know what a river is until you’ve seen one.

Elliot’s poem is about aging at the very least.  I know this because I and all of my friends are aging. The scenes from the poem I can first see in my older friends and later in myself. One way to put this is that I find myself inhabiting the poem.

Literature, poetry, and history can provide a map for us.  But contact with reality provides meaning.  We find meaning in the text to the extent we can inhabit it.

Consider Jesus and His Disciples.

Jesus and His Disciples studied the scriptures. Indeed they were immersed in it. They didn’t have a Bible the way we understand it.  They didn’t have many books at all.  They had scrolls.  Or, more precisely, they had access to scrolls.

Some of these scrolls were similar to what we would call history; some were collections of rules; some were stories; some were poetry.  

Some were collections of prophecy.

This last part is interesting. Jesus and his Disciples seem to have been steeped in the books of prophecy. Peter quoted from Joel in the book of Acts, for example, but he and Jesus' other Disciples were also into Daniel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. 

In Daniel, there is a section wherein is featured a series of terrifying beasts. These beasts are described in symbolic dream-language.  These can be and have been interpreted as a series of empires that had ruled over that part of the world, extracting income from it and oppressing the people there.  

There is value in using the image of “beasts” rather than simply saying “empires” because this image transcends time. We are now in a time where there are forces, where there are industries, where there are entities that transcend mere nations or empires: Drug cartels; human traffickers; HMOs.  Those who view human beings as a means of profit and nothing else.

Yep, “beasts” works fine.

The passage about beasts is followed by a vision: “one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”

Jesus identified himself with this “Son of Man” and referred to himself in that way. He was a son of man, a human being whose kingdom treated people in a humanly (humanely, kindly), not a beastly, way. Jesus inhabited the prophecy: He gave it life; he gave it meaning.

Jesus created an organization which exists in opposition to the worldly kingdoms that seek to oppress the people.  He called it the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven.  His early disciples called it “The Way.” 

We call it the Church.

It exists; it is real; we can see it; we can feel it.  There may be one near you.

I am inhabiting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It’s against my will but gives me meaning. You are inhabiting your own story. Make it a happy one.

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.

 Abraham and Ramanajan

By Bobby Neal Winters

About a year ago, I taught a Bible Study on the book of Genesis. I did a survey of some of my favorite stories from that book--from any book. One night after our meeting one of the participants asked a question.  It was so honest, so simple, and I had never thought to ask.

What was Abraham’s religion?

This is not an exact restating of the question, so I will ask for forgiveness, but I think in answering it fully I will answer the original question and probably more.

The short answer: He didn’t have one.

This might be a surprise.  You might expect Judaism as an answer.  If a Rabbi or a Jew who cares disagrees with me, I would yield.  Saying who is or is not a Jew is not my business.

But until that happens, let me continue. For most of what I have to say, it won’t matter.

Abraham didn’t have a place of worship.  He didn’t have a priest he could go to.  He didn’t have a holy book.  Heck, he was going to be a central character in the Bible, the holy book of Judaism and Christianity.

It was just him and God.  God would stop by and have a talk with him every once in a while.

That sounds great, right? Just you and God.

It sounds like a lot of people I’ve met: “It’s just me and God” or, alternately, “Just me and Jesus.”

I’m open-minded enough to give these people a listen.  The power of the Holy Spirit is strong.  God will deal with each person not on my terms but on His terms.

That having been said, to claim a one on one relationship with God is not something to be done lightly.

To say what I want to say now, let me put on my hat as math teacher. There was a time when there were no math teachers.  There was a time when there were just people and the numbers. Well, the numbers and the geometric diagrams.  People just wrestled with the math and figured it out for themselves.  After a while, people wrote things down so that it could be shared at a distance and through the passage of time.  If you have to figure out that XXV times XXV is DCXXV a few times, you write it down and pass it on.

People save this sort of stuff; they recopy it when it gets a bit ragged; then they pass it on when they die.  Not that they have much choice.  You don’t get to take anything with you, not even math books. Darn it.

As time passes, the practice of mathematics arises. You don’t have to figure it out all by yourself. You don’t even have to figure it out yourself with the aid of books.  You have people who’ve struggled through it before to help you learn it yourself.

You have God’s Gift of math teachers.

Do you want to learn math yourself, with just you and the numbers?

Well, you can.  It’s been done.  There was this gentleman from India by the name of Ramanajan who taught himself math on his own.

Well, sort of.

He had some teaching from others.  He had some books.  But, by and large, he taught himself to be a mathematician from nothing.  Like so many before him, he died at an early age. Like so many before him, he died from tuberculosis. (What is it with tuberculosis and geniuses?)  

Mathematicians are still going through his notebooks more than a century after his death and getting discoveries from them.

So, yeah, you can do it on your own.

But--and I want you to pay attention to this part--you know what Ramanajan did?  Even after having done it all on his own, this transcendental genius reached out to the mathematical community.

This was much to the benefit of the mathematical community to be sure, but--the other side of the coin--had he not he would have died in obscurity without anyone ever having heard of him.

One might consider the notion that our relationship with God and God’s Creation is like our struggle with numbers and geometry. You can struggle with it on your own; you can reach out and use the ancient collected writings as your guide; you can go to the bookstore (or the library--let’s not forget the library) for help in your struggle.

Or you can seek out the help of others who’ve been through the struggle themselves, those who are part of a practice that goes back thousands of years.

There you will meet people who--I hope--teach you that two plus two is four. It’s not three, and it’s darn sure not five. It’s four.

Good luck on your journey.

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.

As Good as I Once Was

 As Good as I Once Was

By Bobby Neal Winters

I mowed for the third time this week. It was a good mow, a satisfying mow, one of those mows that keeps you coming back.

These days, I spread the mowing of my lawn over three days.  We have the lawn at our house, which has a moderately large lot.  In addition, we have a lot next door.  I do the front yard of the two houses one day; I do the backyard of our house the next chance I get; finally, when weather permits, I do the backyard of the lot next door.

It organizes my life during the summer: It is good to have purpose.

As I look back on my life, I remember there was a time when I could’ve mowed it all in one day. There was a time when I did indeed mow most of it in one day.  Then the time came when after doing it in one day, I sat down in my recliner and became one with it, a cartoon cloud of Zs floating above my head.

Pacing the mowing came as my answer to the reality of being older. For me, mowing is a way to measure the aging process. 

Unfortunately, there are other measures.

When I was in graduate school, I used to get up in the morning early enough to eat breakfast and teach a class at 7:30am.  I would then take my classes, study, and stay up studying until 10pm.

The next day it would all repeat again.

Ah, those were the days.  But I graduated, got a real job, and time passed.

By the time my middle daughter was in algebra, she learned that it was useless to ask me for help after 8pm.

These days I try not to do even elementary arithmetic too late in the day.

Early in the day, I can still do as much as I ever did.  Indeed, I think because of experience and broadened insight, I can do more. I understand more; I can think more clearly; I can boil a problem down to its essentials.  I can do more on the back of a Home Depot receipt than my younger self could’ve done on a yellow pad.

But as the clock ticks forward on the day, my energy level goes down.  I become like an LED operating on a battery that has been drained: the light blinks more and more erratically until it flickers out entirely, the voltage having fallen below the LED’s threshold. 

As is so often the case, I find my situation summed up nicely by a line from country music.  The late, great poet Toby Keith put it this way:

I’m not as good as I once was, but I am as good once as I ever was.

Salacious interpretations aside, of course. 

I’d been having trouble with plantars fasciitis. The pain in my right heel was excruciating whenever I first got up to walk. I was afraid that I would have to give up walking and working in my shop.  Switching to Skechers and generally babying my feet has taken care of it, but in the meantime--rightly or wrongly--I thought that the way I stood at my lathe might be contributing to my problem.  

To fix this, I made myself a new lathe stand.  This took six 8-foot two-by-sixes.  Think about that. It was heavy.  I glued together pieces first, but after I joined all of the pieces together, I couldn’t lift it.  Luckily for me, my daughter and her fiance came to visit, so I asked him to help. I thought I’d get one end and he’d get the other, but while I was busy sweeping up a spot of floor to put it on, he put it under one arm and carried it over.

I am okay with that.  My body has “matured” enough that it can’t perform such feats of strength; my ego has matured enough to appreciate another man’s strength.

He’ll be able to open those pickle jars when the time comes.

He is in the spring of his life, just as we are in the spring of the year.  The days are pleasant now, with the cool mornings and the warm afternoons.  The smell of freshly mown grass is in the air.

But the days on the calendar will soon begin to whip by like in one of those passing time sequences in the old movies.  It will be summer, then fall, and then winter again.

Let’s enjoy it now.  Let’s enjoy every 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.