You should’ve seen it in color

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’m into woodturning now as I go ever deeper down the rabbit hole of woodwork.  I’ve learned it from YouTube and the world of hard knocks.  This is not necessarily something I would recommend to everyone. You need to be a responsible adult; have some disposable income; be far enough into your life that if you are severely crippled by an injury your family can go on.

But it is an interesting experience.  

For example, the folks who teach woodturning on YouTube aren’t there because they are articulate.  Some of them are, don’t get me wrong.  My point is that they were woodturners first. Their focus is toward the wood.  They know how to do things with it. They understand what is happening with the wood. Having the language to communicate that to someone else is a different matter entirely.

Some of them are very loquacious. Very.  You’d hate to be caught with them between you and a bathroom. But there is a continuum of folks who talk less and less all the way down to some you just show their hands, their lathes, and the wood turning, either in silence or music in the background.

Sometimes those silent ones work, but having a word now and then would be helpful.

Having the words to communicate is a key thing. Getting meaning into those words is another.  This is hard to do, so let me come into it sideways.

One of the songs that the Algorithm brings me is “In Color”, written by James Otto, Jamey Johnson, and Lee Thomas Miller, and sung by Jamey Johnson.  For those of you who haven’t heard it, I do suggest that you get out on the old Internet and find it, but a bit of it goes like this:

If it looks like we were scared to death//

Like a couple of kids just tryna save each other//

You should've seen it in color//

A picture's worth a thousand words//

But you can't see what those shades of gray keep covered//

You should've seen it in color

This is only the chorus, but if you have the right experience base, it will tell you more than 1000 philosophers typing on 1000 typewriters for 1000 years.  No offense to philosophers here; they would be the first to say so.

For those of us of a certain age who’ve sat by our elders looking at old black and white photos this takes us back in time. The symbols conveyed in the photograph can connect with the base of common shared experience and help us to remember them with such force as to evoke emotion.

I’ve not made it through the song with dry eyes yet.

The songwriters do some amazing things here.  They convey that these black and white photographs do carry a message.  But, while pointing out that the deficiency of the media, i.e. it’s only black and white, they use this as a metaphor to illustrate that any form of communication will fall short of actual experience. “You should’ve seen it in color,” does not mean that a colored photograph would be better.  It means you need to live through it.

Saint Paul said that “we see through a glass, darkly.”  Some scientists say we don’t see at all, but they are writing philosophical checks they can’t cash.  What they mean is seeing is different than we thought it was.  

Light comes into our eyes and activates receptors.  Some of these are rods: They manifest as seeing black and white. Others are cones: They manifest as seeing in color.  There are three different types of cones, so every color we see is a combination of three basic colors.  What our brain interprets as color is just a combination of the electrochemical signals that the eye sends through the optic nerve.  There would be those who say because of this that there is really no such thing as color.

You can see why not many scientists could make a living writing country songs, but why Saint Paul probably could.

I know a bit of what Saint Paul meant when he wrote that.  Every day that I live and experience the world, I know a little more.  This is not to belittle, not to poo-poo the work of scientists. Far from it.  Nor do I mean to deprecate the value of words.

But we absolutely cannot overvalue experience nor shared experience.

That's the story of my life // Right there in black and white.

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.

Hindsight Smells like Regret

 Hindsight Smells like Regret

By Bobby Neal Winters

I went out to my truck one morning--which was parked parallel facing east as it almost always is when I’m home--and I looked west down the street.  About fifty feet away, there was in the middle of the street an armadillo perfectly balanced on his back facing up.

This was an armadillo in mint condition.  He was perfect, every scale in place.  

The only thing wrong with him was that he was dead.

Standing to his side, getting ready for a meal, was a crow.  The crow had not yet breached the carcass.  He just stood there.

There were many things I could’ve done, should’ve done at that point, most of which I will get into later. What I did do was take a picture and post it to Facebook.  I put up some witty remark about the crow having knocked out the armadillo. 

I thought it was funny.

Then I just drove off.

What happened over the next several weeks could be classified in a number of ways.  The game theoretic way would be “The Tragedy of the Commons”; the religious way would be “Sins of Omission”; the psychological way would be “the Bystander Effect.”

Take your pick.

When an armadillo is killed on a country road, it really doesn’t last too long.  First of all, there would be more than just a crow there to belly-up to the bar.  There would be buzzards, coyotes, and all sorts of other critters, and there would be a lot more of them.

In town--even though we do have a wide variety of fauna wandering around within our city limits--there aren’t quite as many animals hanging around.  In addition, those who are hanging around aren’t here because they like to feed on the road.  Natural selection has taken those out of the system.  

In the country, on a country road, there would be faster traffic that would not take the time to dodge the armadillo and would grind it to bits.  This would allow the bacteria and the rain to dispose of the organic remains in relatively short order.

Neither of these things happened.

What I should’ve done--instead of taking the damned picture and making the witty remark on Facebook--was to stop; turn around; go to my workshop; get a trash bag and a shovel; put the armadillo into the bag; put the bag into the trash bin.

But I didn’t have that plan worked-out in my head.

This armadillo was not on my property.  He was not even directly in front of my house.

I thought that maybe a Policeman would drive by and take care of it.  They often do nice things like that.

I thought that one of my neighbors who was nearer to it would do something. Sometimes that happens.

I thought nature would deal with it in the manner described above.

And, clearly as I am writing this, none of that happened.

What did happen was much slower.

The only living creatures numerous enough and willing enough to deal with the corpse were bacteria.  The bacteria feasted, but slowly.  

You can always count on bacteria.

But bacteria exact a price.

Whenever I mowed--and I mowed several times during this time period--the stench was thick in the air.

Thick.

And while there wasn’t enough traffic driving over the armadillo to grind it away, there was enough to break it apart and spread it.  I purposefully left in the last “it” there. Pronouns are blunt, but I don’t want to make this too sharp.

Some of you might have had the thought that we’ve gotten a lot of rain this spring and that would help.  I thought that.  

No.

There is only a certain amount of sin that rain will wash away, at least quickly.

Everytime I smelled “it” was a reminder. Everytime the stench breached my nostrils and my gorge rose was a reminder that I could’ve fixed this in less than five minutes with hardly any effort. 

I can still smell it.  Maybe only in my head.  But it smells like regret.

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.

 Broken Halos

By Bobby Neal Winters

I grew up as a Southern Baptist; I am currently a United Methodist. Once, very, very many years ago. In another decade, in another century, I was having a discussion with a Methodist pastor. I forget the context, I forget the topic being discussed.  That pastor, at that time, made the remark that Southern Baptist theology encouraged co-dependence.

I was a lot younger then.  I passed in on to my Baptist brother who, in turn, passed it on to his pastor.

Among themselves they agreed it was accurate and took it as a complement.

If I were teaching an upper-level class right now, I would assign the students to write an essay, a chapter, or perhaps an encyclopedia on those three paragraphs.  As I am not, let me expand a little.

Lately, I’ve found myself in conversations with people who’d recently made difficult decisions. Even though the decisions were made and were irreversible, they were feeling just a tinge of guilt.

I looked them in the eye and said these words, “You have to take care of yourself first.”

In isolation, without context, that sounds harsh and even Machiavellian. I didn’t mean it that way.  Let me unpack that.

When you are on a commercial jet, and the flight attendants are taking you through their spiel about how to buckle your safety belt and other things that could provide a filter for natural selection, they do say something helpful.

“In the unlikely event the oxygen mask drops down, put on your own first before assisting others.”

It doesn’t take all that long to lose consciousness, but it takes about 3 minutes or so to die. Get your mask on, and then you can help other people.

If you help someone with their mask before you get your own on, even if you are successful, they--a small child for instance--might not be able to help you. You die; they live with the regret of not being able to save that adult who saved them.

Now, there are people to whom the idea to help others first would not have occurred.  There are people who would pull their seatmate’s oxygen mask out of the ceiling and smile at them behind the mask. 

This advice is not for them.

This advice is for the people that Chris Stapelton is singing about in “Broken Halos”:

Seen my share of broken halos //

Folded wings that used to fly //

They've all gone wherever they go //

Broken halos that used to shine.

Stapelton, having seen the world through the dim light of honkey tonks, is aware of a type of person who helps without boundaries, who works without a safety net, who doesn’t necessarily put on their own mask before helping someone else with theirs. 

He imagines them as angels.

And it's beautiful.

One is tempted to imagine the angels as breaking their halos during the course of helping, of folding up their wings out of burnout, and this does happen.

But there is another point of view. 

Another Methodist pastor, on another day in that other decade, that other century, told me about a Roman Catholic Priest by the name of Henri Nouwen.  Nouwen wrote a somewhat famous book with the title “The Wounded Healer.”

If you get on the internet and search for quotes--which I encourage you to do--you may find this one that gels the idea I am trying to get at: “The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”

Maybe the angels can help because their halos are broken.  Maybe they’ve ceased their flying because you can’t help from way up there.

Burnout is a problem.  Helping can devolve into codependency. You can get your halo broken.

You can also decide to try to understand.

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.