Mortise and Tenon, Blood and Sweat

By Bobby Neal Winters

Thanksgiving Day is coming soon.  The blood of the turkey has no doubt already been shed.  The cans of cranberry sauce are sitting in the pantry waiting for their contents to be shaken free.  French onion, mushroom soup, and green beans wait to be combined into a casserole.

This is the nearest thing the increasingly secular culture of the United States has that corresponds to the ancient practice of blood sacrifice. Please bear with me as I expand on this.

Right now as I type this, I have a scab that is a 16th of an inch wide and one-and-a-quarter inches long on the index finger of my left hand. With any luck, it will make a nice scar to remind me how I got it.

I’d been cutting a tenon because I wanted to learn how to cut a mortise and tenon.  I’d done the mortise first, because that’s how you do it, and I was cutting my tenon to fit it.  I’d had my tenon in the vise as I’d cut it, but I’d taken it out to have a look at it.  I noticed that it needed to be trimmed a little along the edge.  Rather than put it back in the vise, a lazy voice in my brain told me I could just hold it with my hand as I trimmed it.

It was a lazy and not too smart voice.

My Japanese pull-saw slipped, and its cutting edge slipped along the top of my knuckle. There was a lot of blood, but I managed to staunch it with some paper towels. I went into the house with a bloody paper towel wrapped around my finger.  My wife looked at my finger and then looked at me with that expression she has when she questions her life-choices.

No stitches were required, but I will, as I said, have a nice scar, a memorial to my stupidity. 

You might well wonder what a mortise and tenon is.  It is a joint for holding two pieces of wood together.  These are words from Old French. A mortise is a hole that you cut into one piece of wood and a tenon is a peg that you carve from the other piece that goes into that hole.

Given that description and the fact that the words come from Old French, anyone who has ever been a 14-year-old boy might be forgiven for having certain hypotheses about what the words mean in the original French, but no, get that right out of your head.  Tenon actually came into French from the Latin tenere, which means to hold.  The origins of mortise are more mysterious, but some believe it came into Old French from an Arabic word that means to hold as well.

Those meanings work well with the application because this is a joint that does hold.

The fact that I cut myself and drew quite a bit of blood while learning who to make this joint works well with the idea that one must suffer to learn one’s art.  Though I will be the first to say that calling what I do art is to stretch that small word beyond all recognition.  I probably should have used the word craft instead, but there is some stretching going on there too.

In any case, it ties into that ancient idea of the blood sacrifice.  If we get something, we must give something.  The better the thing we are asking for, the higher the price we pay.  Something really good requires blood because blood is the stuff of life itself, and life is the most precious thing.

To give blood in exchange for knowledge and skill is appropriate.  Knowledge and skill are some of the most precious assets we can possess. They are more portable than diamonds; they can be stolen; and you keep them even if you give them.

As we come into Thanksgiving, we are participating in another sort of sacrifice.  I was reminded of this by one of my pastor’s sermons the other day on tithing. (It’s that time of year, folks.) While some tithes were to be given to the priests of the temple, others were given as feasts to be shared with one’s fellows.  God directed his people to take some of their “increase” and share it with their neighbors and family.

This sounds a great deal like Thanksgiving to me.  We offer the food as an offering in thanks to God and this is done in exchange for greater fellowship with our friends and family.

This fellowship joins us more tightly with each other.  We sacrifice food, time, a bit of conversation, and a bit of ourselves in exchange for bonds that will connect one to the other like mortise and tenon.

As you sit around the table on Thanksgiving, join hands and pray--if you do--and deepen than bond.  Join to your loved ones and hold on to them as tightly as you can.

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. )

 On Darkness, Death, and other Parts of Life

By Bobby Neal Winters

With the passing of Halloween, autumn is fully upon us.  There is no denying it now. My morning alarm goes off in the pitch black of night; we sit down to supper in darkness.  Leaves have fallen to cover the sidewalk and whatever dog poop that might be there.

Time to shift gears.

Death is a part of life.

The trees spent the summer growing their leaves out toward the sun, making them out of air, water, and a few other ingredients taken from the soil.  

The leaves have now fallen and will spend the winter in decay.  By decay, I mean they are themselves food for bacteria and various other microorganisms.

The poop under the leaves will decay as well.

It all goes back into the system of life.

The Indians, the indigenous peoples, understood.  They believed everything was living. They believed even the rocks were alive. And consider this: rocks are broken down by lichen and other organisms.  Their components are released into the soil and into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The rocks themselves are a part of the system.

The Indigenous Peoples thought the earth itself was alive. Some of them found the notion of plowing the earth to be as offensive as cutting a woman’s breast.  The earth was their Mother.

The Earth is our Mother. We--Life--springs forth from it.  Life on Earth is made from it just as each of us is made from our mother’s body.

That is a good paragraph.  Reread it. It will do you good.

But I digress.

We who live in the northern hemisphere are now going into our time of darkness; our time of death. We mark this with Halloween; with All Saint’s Day’; with El Dia de Los Muertos.

We think about those we love who have died. We think about our own death.  We think about the day when we ourselves will fall like leaves onto the Earth to be taken apart and put back into the system.  Even dead we are part of life; like the soil; like the rocks that become the soil.

But that is just a part of it.  There is a layer of human life that is above just eating and drinking; urinating and defecating. 

Satan tempted Jesus to turn the stones to bread. Jesus replied that “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

When we die, our lives are broken down by those who are left much like microorganisms break down the leaves.  By our lives, I mean our actions, the way we conducted ourselves, the way we treated others. This can begin at our funeral in the pastor’s homily as he lays our life out as an offering. That casts the pastor doing something analogous to what a vulture does to a fallen wildebeest, so I think I will not press that analogy too far.

In any case, our deeds become a part of others' lives as they choose to repeat them.

Talking about death, talking about the dead is a necessary and good part of life.  We honor them and we serve ourselves by emulating what was worthy in them.

They live again to the extent their lives were words from the mouth of God.

During the summer, we are turned outward into the world.  The World of Light and the World of Life is all around us. When the light recedes, we turn inward.  We examine ourselves.  We assess who we are, and we plan who we would like to be.

We sit in front of the hearth (usually tuned to Netflix or Amazon Prime) to contemplate who we are, to plan who we would like to be.  Can we make the actions of our lives to be words coming from the mouth of God?

We think such things when the darkness and cold are at our door like a pair of starving wolves.

The sun will come again. Life will begin anew.

Until then we wait.

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. )

A Metaphor made Manifest

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last Wednesday I was either teaching or in a meeting every hour from 9am until 4pm.  My 4pm meeting was a half-hour telephone call, and then as I drove home I got a call from someone who had missed my 2pm Zoom meeting.

My schedule was tight. There were no gaps, no cracks.  Every event flowed exactly into the next.

When I’d gotten the last of my schedule done, I went to my garage and I cut dovetails.

That’s what I’ve been working on lately: I am learning to cut dovetail joints by hand.  I will forgive you for not knowing what dovetails are because one year ago I didn’t know what they were myself.

I’d heard the word dovetail.  I have even used the phrase “that dovetails nicely,” but when I did so, I was a fraud.  I didn’t feel it. I didn’t have an appreciation for the phrase.  I didn’t know from whence it came.

Now I do.  I don’t know that makes me a better person, but I do feel a bit more...smug.  That’s it: Smug. Smugness is what I am feeling.

Let me now transition from being smug to being pedantic. The two dovetail as it were.

A dovetail joint is a way to join two pieces of wood together. If you have an old chest of drawers, open one drawer a crack and look how the front of the drawer is connected with the sides. If you see the wood on the corners of the sides fan out into something that looks like birds’ tails (dovetail) the drawer has been made using dovetails.

The joint consists of two pieces.  One one piece, has the eponymous dovetails and the matching piece has the pins.  The idea is that you cut the pins so that they mesh so tightly with the dovetails that a thin layer of glue will barely fit between them and not much else. The flaring out of the dovetails helps hold the pieces together.

Tightness is the name of the game, so I cut them with a Japanese dovetail saw.  The saw is very thin so that it has a very small kerf (look it up). Japanese saws cut when you pull toward you rather than when you push so that they don’t bend in a tight kerf.

One marks the dovetails in a very particular way.  It is almost ritualized, and that word “almost” might not belong there.  There might just be different denominations of dovetail cutters.

You can measure with a ruler and divide the end of your board that way.  The folks on YouTube sometimes deride that as being too mathematical.  The alternative is to use dividers, which are similar to a compass, to mark the ends of the dovetails.  I find this much more satisfactory, and, ironically, much more mathematics.  It harkens back to Euclidean geometry and constructing geometric figures.

You learn this process by watching someone else do it, but you don’t really understand until you do it yourself.  Let me rework that last clause: “until you do it wrong yourself.”

When you do it wrong, thinking that detail didn’t matter, you get to the end and...ssss...there is a gap.  The joint still functions, but it’s not as beautiful as it was in your head. You see the reason it was done that particular way.

Your wife will look at it, and say that it’s beautiful. But you know what it’s supposed to look like.

This semester my Wednesday schedule at work fits together as tightly as a very finely crafted dovetail joint. It all consists of talking to people and listening to people.  Paying attention. Taking notes. Making promises. Trying not to make promises.

I begin to suffer from a malady I call “too many conversations.”

I’ve been a part of too many conversations during the day.  I start replaying some of the conversations in my head, and they are never the conversations that went well. Words swirl in my head like sawdust in a shop vac.

The ritual of marking, measuring, and cutting focuses me.  I am no longer in a world of words whirling in my head.  I am in a realm of things. The world of reality. It is a good world; a solid world; a world that is just better somehow.

In this world, I can see the mistakes I make and work to fix them.  An ugly gap? Fill it with epoxy resin. The wood is not even?  That is why God invented random orbital sanders.

The dovetails aren’t perfect.  Well, they are never going to be, but they will be better next time.

My central task these days is making a cabinet of drawers for my shop. I am using cedar pickets from the fencing section of Home Despot [sic] for the drawers.  They are cheap and they smell nice when you cut them.  Good for practice.

The wood is, however, horrible for this purpose.  By this I mean it is very soft.  It is very hard to get a tight fit and very easy to break and make it ugly. But it’s good for practice, and I am the only one who I need to please.

The stack of drawers in my cabinet is a history of my introduction to learning dovetails. The latest is better than the first. You can stack them from bottom to top and see the difference.

It all fits quite nicely.

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. )

So you want to live forever

 So you want to live forever

By Bobby Neal Winters

You can remember someone who is no longer living but whose life has had an effect on you. Their existence has continued after death. To me, this is just the plain truth.  I am sure there are those who are learned that could rip that logic apart, but I am just going to let them.

My mother’s family were town people.  They were small town people, but they were still town people.  My father’s family were not.  Town people come into contact with more people than country people do. Hence the name “town people.”  My mother’s family knew more of the little things that get you through the day.

My dad learned a lot of these things and he kept the ones he thought were smart.  My mother’s younger brother, Tommy, wore glasses.  He taught my dad that it’s not a good idea to put your glasses down lens first on any surface because they would get scratched.

My mother’s mother always said that when you are washing a sharp knife to never let it go.  You pick it up; hold it the whole time you are washing it; rinse it, again holding it the whole time.  You only put it down when you put it in the drainer.

Dad was fond of both my Uncle Tommy and my momma’s mother.  He learned those things, and whenever he taught them to me and my brother, he mentioned where he’d learned them.

Wearing glasses myself, I still lay them down face up religiously. On those rare occasions that I do dishes by hand [we will pause here for my wife to chuckle], I never let loose of a sharp knife. (I think that particular one could be raised to a higher level by a Mafia Don or some such, but let’s just let that one go.) 

But my point is what these people taught my dad still affects me. And, because I’ve shared this with you, they are still teaching.

This could be a point where I could digress into the value of teaching.  It would be handy to do because my Uncle Tommy was a grade school teacher who taught the Navajo in the Four-Corners region of New Mexico.  But my mom’s mom wasn’t, and in any case, Tommy didn’t tell my dad about how to handle glasses as a teacher but as a friend.

Dad learned from them because he liked them.

While as a teacher that is something I might like to keep in my mind, it is something everyone might do well to remember. It is not a crime to position yourself in such a way that people like you.  

And I don’t mean that you have to be a pushover. You can exercise kindness without letting people walk all over you.

There, I said the word: Kindness.

You can be kind.

You can be kind, but sometimes it’s quite an exercise.  Sometimes it requires capturing the flow of events and slowing them down so you can get a handle on them. There are times in conversations when you need to delay what you say so that you can understand what has just been said in order to edit what you are going to reply.  That was quite a long sentence; you might want to read it again.

And there are times when a good editor just marks a blue pencil through everything.

Kindness goes beyond niceness.  There are wicked, wicked people who are “nice.” Kindness has a spine of love in it.

Love: there, I’ve said it.

If you’ve only watched movies, you likely don’t know what love is.  Love is not a state you fall into.  Love is a choice. You can choose to love people.

We can’t always choose our feelings, but love is not a feeling. I was going to write that love is wanting the best for someone, but let me be more careful.  It is a consequence of love to want the best for someone. 

We are to love our neighbors; we are to love our enemies.  That is quite a spectrum there.

It was the love of my Uncle Tommy and my Grandma Byrd that caused them to want to teach my father these small things. He felt that love and returned it, so he was able to let himself learn from them and pass it on.

These were only two of the things he learned from them. There are other things we learn unconsciously.  We absorb things just by being with them.  And we pass them on as well.

We learn love; we pass on love; we live forever in love.

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 Bacon Grease Gospel

By Bobby Neal Winters

A short time ago, my wife made us some BLT sandwiches. Well, as I don’t eat iceberg lettuce, mine was a BT sandwich, but I digress. There was bacon grease leftover in the pan afterwards, and by morning it had cooled and congealed.

Every morning, I fry myself two eggs.  I usually use vegetable oil, but there--right on the stove top--was the congealed, nitrite-full fat of the bacon-beast.  I took a big spoon and ladled it out into the cast-iron skillet that I use to fry my morning eggs.  I was, of course, careful to miss the kitty footprints that were in it; there are always kitty footprints in it.

The results were delightful.  I was able to stretch out the bacon grease for a few mornings.  

Life is good.

Many of you are shocked. You are saying that he has fallen off the weight-control wagon. That I have backslidden.

No.  Not yet. Not because of that.

Whether you gain or lose weight depends upon the number of total calories you consume.  There might be other reasons you shouldn’t eat bacon fat, but this is not one of them.

Every group has its own type of fat.  Our Mediterranean brothers and sisters have olive oil; the dairy farmers in Wisconsin have butter; the Jewish community in New York City has chicken fat,schmaltz I think it’s called.

Bacon grease is the fat of my people, and we are a People who know about fat first hand.

On my mother’s stove there stood a Crisco can.  The one thing that I never saw in that Crisco can was Criso.  The store-bought Crisco was always quickly used up--for what I don’t know--and the can was then put to permanent use for storing bacon drippings.

You fry bacon; you eat it; you save the drippings in the can. After the grease was used, it was alway carefully retrieved.  At least as much as hadn’t soaked into the food was retrieved.  So some of it was used over, and over, and over. One might wonder whether it would eventually polymerise or develop into a living thing.  One might wonder, but one oughtn’t if one wants to sleep well.

You might have a nightmare about the contents of a Crisco can terrorizing and isolated Oklahoma town like the movie “Tremors” or something.

I submit that the saving of bacon grease is at the very least educational and at most a means of grace. 

We learn not to waste: the pig died for us to have the bacon, so it is a duty upon us to put it to as much use as possible. We learn the accumulation of small things builds up: a piece of bacon only has a small bit of grease in it, but over time you can fill a whole Crisco can. We learn to postpone a celebration: it takes a long time to save up enough to fry something big, so you’d better learn to wait.

My marriage is a mixed marriage.  I married out of the bacon and into the butter. Though her parents had lived in Oklahoma long enough to learn the good of bacon grease, they had not learned the discipline of saving it. Try as I might, I could not convince my wife to begin it on her own.  When I tried to do it, I was banished from the kitchen for “starting with frying four pieces of bacon.”

If we’d saved our bacon grease, I wouldn’t have had to.

Well, yes, I do get the point.  You can have bacon grease; you can eat fried foods.  But it is all in amounts: Portion size and frequency.

I can get away with two fried eggs, and even two fried eggs every day, but fried chicken--especially the chicken fried in bacon grease like Momma used to--one has to separate those occasions far from each other: Sundays? Birthdays? Humans setting foot on Mars?

We need to get beyond the superstitious thinking that some foods are magically good and some foods are cursed.

Bacon grease is not cursed.  It is blessed,but with a blessing that requires its controlled use.

The Catholics advise a controlled use of meat during lent. Perhaps there could be a similar but more stringent control of bacon grease: Only between 6 and 7am on weekdays and 7 and 8am on weekends.  (If that seems a little specific, it’s only your imagination.)

It’s something to think about.

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. )

 Sugar and Attention

By Bobby Neal Winters

I will be turning 60 soon.  Very soon. I’ve learned a few things. Among these is that there are some things--and maybe most things-where it is not about all or nothing.  It is about finding the right measure. Right measure is not even right.  It is about finding the right path.  As examples, let’s take sugar and attention.

Sugar and attention are a lot alike.  They both should be treated like controlled substances.  They are addictive and once you get hooked...

Well, trouble can follow.

I will begin with a confession that I am a sugar addict.  I have a sweet tooth as big as Texas.  The simile would be better if Texas were made of chocolate, but then I would probably have been found dead a long time ago with Fort Worth dribbling down my cheek.

Nutritionally, sugar is complicated.  You don’t actually have to eat sugar to live.  It does occur naturally in some foods, like fruit, for instance, but you don’t have to eat sugar.

But--and here is where the word complicated is justified--your body has to have it.  That may confuse you because I just said you don’t have to EAT it.  You do have to HAVE it. Sugar is your source of energy.  Your body makes sugar.  Your liver does it. Your liver makes it for you from the other foods you eat.

But you don’t have to eat it directly.  When you do eat it directly, you get a quick boost.  I don’t need science to tell me this.  I learned it on my own. Eating candy while I drive will keep me awake better than caffeine. Caramel M&Ms are perfect for this.  They are like crack cocaine to me, though I don’t know that for sure.

Since I began my weight loss program last year, my consumption of sugar has gone way, way down.  I don’t remember the last time I even put sugar in my tea. I’ve begun to use it more like medicine.  Last week I was falling to sleep at the wheel as I drove back from Oklahoma, so I stopped for Caramel M&Ms and they perked me right up.

But this is a slippery slope because the addition is real. It’s been a week and the Caramel M&Ms have been calling to me ever since.

As I said above, attention is a lot like sugar: We have to HAVE it, but the way we receive it is important.

This following example may sound brutal, so consider this as a trigger warning.  When I was a little kid, I was with a group where there was a group of younger children playing along with the adults looking on.  One of the kids fell down and did the equivalent of scraping his knee.  My grandfather, my dear Grampa Sam, told the rest of the adults present: “Don’t pay attention to him or he will cry.”  They didn’t pay attention to him, and he didn’t cry. 

I’ve been in similar situations where the child has begun to cry and the adults pretended not to see, and the child quieted himself.

This might not be strange to you, but I’ve been living in a social circle where every boo-boo is immediately kissed and every tear is immediately dried. This has an effect, and time will tell us what it is.

Clearly there are times when we must immediately pay attention to our children’s pain--a bone sticking out of a leg is a pretty good clue--but if you give more attention than a “boo-boo” is worth, then that is a net reward. We get more of whatever we reward.  

One could call the amount of crying that is beyond what is warranted by the name “drama.”  If you reward drama, you get drama.

There are things we should reward with attention. When my daughters were younger, they took part in music for a short time. (They were fired by their teacher, but let’s not go there.) We went to music contests.  The children played their pieces; stood and took their bows; received their applause.

It occurred to me that for a talented young person, this would become an entitlement. It then occurred to me that the same thing happens to academics. Work hard, do good on a test: Get rewarded with attention. Work hard, write a good essay: Get rewarded with attention.

Work hard and perform well: Get attention.  

In the right measure, this is good.  You should be rewarded in the learning process...in the beginning.  But there has to be a time of transition to something more mature. You have to transition from working hard to become excellent so you can receive the reward for the excellence to the point where the excellence is the reward itself.

My model for this comes from the movie “Babe.”  After a remarkable performance, the trainer says, “That’ll do, Pig.”

Addiction to sugar can lead to obesity and diabetes.  Addiction to attention can lead to narcissism and all other weird quirks of human behavior that I don’t have space to go into.  Those of us in academic administration like to call it “job security.”

I am dealing with my own sugar addiction by giving myself rules for when I can eat sugar.  I can eat one cookie in the church parlor right after church, for example.  I can eat one regular-sized bag of Caramel M&Ms if I am falling asleep at the wheel while driving.

The attention thing is harder.  The “that’ll do, Pig” level of attention is not for everyone.  It is an area where I’ve more questions than answers, but I can at least share my ignorance with you.

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. )

My Trip to the Nations

 My Trip to the Nations 

Or

Of Rivers and Indians

The sun has burnt the ground and bleached the earth. Since mid-June, the rain we’ve received has reminded me of the water mother used to sprinkle on her ironing.  It’s only been enough to provide steam.

I got the call on Friday.  My brother, who has been ill this week and tested for COVID twice, was taken to the ER by an old neighbor, a friend, a spirit-sister. Not COVID. 

It’s an infection of the foot.  In his bones.

I was to have gone to a choir dinner with a 70s theme that evening, but it was not to be. We made our apologies; saddled up the Honda Ridgeline; headed south.

Jean and I have been making this trip for more than thirty years.  Three decades.  We’ve done it with a single small child; with two small children; with two children and their kid sister.

And now by ourselves.

I’ve long been cognisant that Baxter Springs, Kansas was the first cowtown, so my mind shifts to cattle drive mode about the time we cross into Oklahoma. What would it’ve been like to drive a herd of cattle up this way?  In the movies, it’s all about crossing rivers and Indians.

My brother texted me as we made our way down.  He first says they are going to amputate his leg.  Then his foot.  

We cross the Arkansas in Tulsa.  It is a shallow creek compared to its normal self.  

At about the same time we would’ve been at the choir dinner, we stopped for provender in Stroud, getting corn nuts, peanut butter crackers, and iced tea.  We pass the Sauk-Fox Casino south of there without undue interference: they only make us slow to 55 for a couple of miles.

We pass the Seminole casinos as we enter and leave their territory as well, crossing the North Canadian and South Canadian respectively.  Like the Arkansas, they are a tiny fraction of their normal flow.

We arrive at the hospital at 8:30pm and make our way through the halls to my brother’s room.  The signs say masks are required, but I don’t put one on.  They still let me in.  Things are lawless down in the Nations.

My brother is not alone.

Friends are there with him. More than friends: a sister and a brother from another mother.  

We’d all been neighbors 40, 50, 60 years ago.  We know things about each other that only siblings know. We know them; our parents knew their parents; our grandparents knew their grandparents.  And before that, the place we lived was not a place.

Some things are stronger than blood.

My spirit sister had taken my brother to the ER when his “COVID” turned out not to be COVID.  

They are going to have to amputate.  We don’t know where.  Still don’t.

When bones get infected, it’s difficult to cure the infection even when the patient is not diabetic which my brother is.  Where they make the amputation will depend on where the infection ends.

My brother lives alone.  Well, alone with his dog.  

Whatever happens, brother will not be able to take care of his dog for quite a while.

In the room the doctors come and go, but nobody is talking about Michaelangelo.  They are talking about pockets of infection in the metatarsals.  Options of mid-foot amputation versus below the knee amputation. General surgeons versus orthopedic surgeons.

It is becoming more and more apparent that nothing will happen until Monday.

We need to drive our herd north.

We go to brother’s house.  It used to be my house, my parents’ house.  It was the last house built by my mother’s father. He was 72 when he did it.

We retrieve my brother’s dog, Billy.  He is a clinically insane Boston terrier, but maybe they all are.

We then drive our herd north.

Before we cross the North Canadian, we stop for chicken fried steak--one of the local delicacies--at a place called The Catfish Roundup. It’s within spitting distance of the Seminole Casino, but we are not molested.

We arrive home at 6:30pm with our new charge and find a place to put him after letting him run around in the sunburnt grass and the baked earth.

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. )

 Take up and Read

By Bobby Neal Winters

The words of the Bible--the biblical idiom--are the glue that holds good literature together. This is true even in popular music.

This article started taking shape when my youngest daughter got a dog and named him “Cowboy.”  It planted an earworm in my brain that has been coming and going ever since.  There is a song by the Oak Ridge boys that begins:

She played tambourine with a silver jingle /

And she must have known the words to at least a million tunes /

But the one most requested by the man she knew as Cowboy /

Was the late night benediction at the Y'all Come Back Saloon

It has been my frequent companion for months.  As earworms go, I could have done worse, but I don’t want to speculate about that too long for obvious reasons.

When a song like this goes through my mind like this unbidden for such a long time, I start thinking about how it’s put together. What toolbox of words is the writer pulling from?

One thing I noticed right there in the beginning is that the author of this song assumes a certain familiarity with church services.  You need to know that a benediction consists of words of comfort said at the close of a service that is meant to send the congregants into the world with hope.

The songwriter is telling us that the Y’all Come Back Saloon is a church for the people who go there.  This theme is returned to later in the song when 

“...all the fallen angels and pinball playing rounders /

Stopped the games that they'd been playing for the losers’ evening prayer”

It is not uncommon for writers to pull from a religious or biblical idiom to construct their texts.  And it is not always used to propound an overtly pious theme.

Leonard Cohen did this all the time:  “I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord”; 

“And everybody knows that you're in trouble /

Everybody knows what you've been through /

From the bloody cross on top of Calvary /

To the beach of Malibu /

Everybody knows it's coming apart /

Take one last look at this Sacred Heart /

Before it blows /

And everybody knows”

He was absolutely brilliant at it.

Once you start listening for it, you hear it in surprising places. In Bob Seger’s night moves, for instance:

We weren't in love, oh no far from it /

We weren't searchin’ for some pie in the sky summit/

We were just young and restless and bored/

Living by the sword.

One artist who has gone beyond drawing from biblical idiom into writing new books of the Bible is Bob Dylan. In his time, he has been a prophet. To me, “The Times they are a-changin’” reads like a chapter of Jeremiah;“Masters of War” is an imprecatory psalm; “Like a Rolling Stone” reads as if written to a latter-day Jezebel.

He could write like that because at some point he’d absorbed the Bible. He went from using it as a flavor to something much more powerful than that.  In his best work, even when the language isn’t explicitly there, the Bible still is.

The Beatles used explicitly religious in “Let it Be”:

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me /

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be /

And in my hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of me /

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

And let’s not forget the Rolling Stones:

Please allow me to introduce myself/

I'm a man of wealth and taste/

I've been around for a long, long year/

Stole many a man's soul and faith/

I was 'round when Jesus Christ/

Had his moment of doubt and pain/

Made damn sure that Pilate/

Washed his hands and sealed his fate

The language of religion and the Bible provide a common pool that can be drawn from.  As a writer you can use it to speak to a broad audience. It talks about important things in powerful ways.  

But as we grow ever more atomized as a people we are losing that common core, that common language.  People are not going to church; they are not going to Sunday school; we are having a second Tower of Babel, and we will get to a time when they will not understand what I just said there.

I do have hope. If nothing else, maybe our grandchildren will discover our music, and in order to understand it, will pick up a Bible.  They might hear the little voice tell them, “Take and read.”

Sorry about all the earworms.

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. )

 Electricity, Insulation, and Psalm 91

By Bobby Neal Winters

Our biggest barriers are in our own minds.

Fear is our most powerful enemy.

Fear of failure is the tallest wall we have to climb.

My attention was directed to Psalm 91 when I was poking through social media last night.  I looked it up, and the following portion spoke to me:

You will not fear the terror of night, /

    nor the arrow that flies by day, /

nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,/

    nor the plague that destroys at midday. /

A thousand may fall at your side, /

    ten thousand at your right hand,/

    but it will not come near you.

At the time, I felt the need to “do something with this.”  This is the result.

I am insulating my garage.  I am turning it into a workshop.  This was Jean’s idea.  She looked upon me with pity as I worked until my hands were red and numb last winter in my former workshop while her car was safe and dry in the garage, so she yielded the garage to my use.

This meant the garage had to be heated or I would be back to where I was before.

When I was director of the general studies program on campus, giving advice to the students who entered that program, I would tell them to look at where they wanted to go and to set up a plan that would get them to that end.

I took my own advice.  I wanted a warm workshop, so I looked at some YouTube videos: How do you heat a workshop? There were a lot of options, but I settled on electrical heat. 

My endpoint was a garage heated with electrical heat, but if I didn’t insulate it first it would (1) cost a fortune and (2) still be cold.  It was also clear that the electrical heater I needed would have to run off of 240 volts. (I grew up calling this “220” but it’s actually 240.) 

The electrical had to be done before the drywall and the insulation was put up. It’s just easier that way.

But here’s the thing: I am terrified of “220.” I have a cemetery in my mind of people--good, kind, smart people--who have been killed by 220.  Most of them are imaginary people, true, but that mental cemetery is there.  It is not irrational to be afraid of electricity.

Fear is a manifestation of something that God has given us to protect us.  It comes from a good place.  But like a fierce, wild mustang, it must be captured, understood, and domesticated before it can be a useful racehorse for us.

We should capture our Fear and domesticate it to Respect.

Electricity has the power to kill me, but if I respect it, it will be my ally. 

So I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on how to install a 240 volt outlet.  All of them showed how to do it, and then said it was for entertainment purposes and said to hire an electrician.  Darned good advice.  If you can get one to come out, please let me know how you did it.

After preparing myself, turning off the power main to the whole house and checking at the breaker box that the electricity was indeed off, I installed the “220” breaker and hooked it to the outlet.  It took 20 minutes wall-to-wall if you don’t count the hours of YouTube videos I watched.

Since having done that, I’ve been putting up roll after roll of fiberglass insulation and screwing panels of osb to my garage walls.  I’ve got about an hour’s worth of work to finish the walls, and I will do that after I finish this column. (The ceiling still needs to be done and if any of you have a drywall jack they can loan me, let me know.)

I was as afraid of doing the insulation as I was doing the 220.  This wasn’t because I was afraid of being killed.  It was simply because I had never done it.  It was filed away in my brain as something only experts could do. I had erected barriers in my own brain.

The barriers were taken down in the same way as before: I watched a lot of YouTube videos on insulation. (Watching YouTube videos is dangerous too; their algorithm will start bringing you a lot of ads for Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Menards.)

Just as God has given us the gift of Fear which we need to tame into Respect, He wants us to use the Respect to gain the knowledge we need in order to overcome the barriers we meet.

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. )

 Of Weathermen and Queen Elizabeth II

By Bobby Neal Winters

I liked going to Safeway when I was a little boy because they had automatic doors. They were like magic. They open even though you don’t touch them.  I still think they were pretty cool.

Once I had just stepped through those magical doors and looked up to see the weatherman from KTEN-TV (channel 10 in Ada, Oklahoma) right there in front of me.  Had it been Jesus Christ himself, the shock could not have been greater.

Looking back, I consider myself lucky that I didn’t wet my pants.  As it was, I just ran off crying at the top of my lungs. There wasn’t a puddle for anyone to mop up, but just a story my big brother could hold over my head for YEARS.

Now things are different. Until he moved, I walked past the house of the KOAM morning weather guy every day. When he was out in his front yard we would pass and repass. If he was on his phone, he’d nod his head and wave. Occasionally, I would thank him for the good weather we’d been having. 

So I now, as a grownup man, know that these folks we see on TV every day are just people, just human beings, like us.  No, not like us, they are us.

But there is something there, some special quality that the folks that “everyone knows” have. This is a place where I am running out of words. I am pretty sure someone knows them and that I will be told them--perhaps even nicely.  I want to say they have a power, but that’s not precise enough.  Would one use either the word charisma or charism here?

I’ve run out of words, so as I am a teacher, let’s do some examples.

As I write this, Queen Elizabeth II has just passed away at the age of 96.  She arose to her position not out of merit, but out of birth because that’s the way such things are done. That position gave her this quality I am talking about. Just because she was who she was being in her presence would have a certain effect on you depending who you are.

I wouldn’t run crying from her presence now like I did for the KTEN weatherman. I would stand there like a grown up and wet my pants.  Of this, I have no doubt.  There would be a custodian there with a mop as the EMTs rolled my unconscious body off to the ER.

Others would be affected differently I’m sure.

While I said that Queen Elizabeth didn’t rise to her position because of merit, she did fill that position as well as any could in this modern day.  Others will speak of different things, but I most respected her quiet, but unapologetic, Christian faith. She expressed this faith not as a theologian nor a preacher, but as a simple professing member of the faith.  This is something of a trick when you are the titular head of the Church of England.

Pastors have this quality to a lesser degree within the scope of their churches.  Bosses at work have this quality. Politicians have it, God help us.

A word from them one way or the other can affect the way we feel.  Recognition from them can make our spirits soar; retribution from them can crush us.

People who go to church will skip church on days when the pastor is on vacation--even if they don’t like the pastor.  People who are often absent from Rotary will show up when a politician is there--even if they don’t like the politician.

Not everyone who has this (quality/power/charism) acquits themselves well.  The Kardasians who are famous for being famous use it as a cash cow.  There are people who would swoon in their presence.  They are like insects which the wind has lofted to a great height. Everyone can see them and there is money to be made as long as people keep looking.

Queen Elizabeth was wise in the sense that she allowed tradition to protect her.  She guarded her gift so that it could be a boon to her people. When she bestowed an honor upon someone, it meant something to the person who received it.  It lifted them up.  It buoyed their spirit.  

Those who share this quality would do well to follow her example.

Those who know sociology or psychology will understand this all better than I do.  I am just a child, a child walking through magic doors looking in wonder upon it all.

You weathermen out there, you with all your power and charism.  Be careful. And when you send a child screaming from your presence, be kind.

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. )

A Grain of Sand Held at Arm’s Length

 A Grain of Sand Held at Arm’s Length

By Bobby Neal Winters

How do you love God?

Christians are taught to love God with all your might and to love your neighbor as yourself.  And it’s not just us, it’s there in Judaism too. 

The older I get, the more I think about it, the harder it becomes.  I suppose that’s why we are told to come to Jesus like little children.

God, we are taught, created the Heavens and the Earth.  The Earth we’ve had a lot of direct experience with, but for so long, the heavens were just up there completely out of reach. Now, there are those who will say that in this context the heavens are symbolic.  They represent something that is completely out of our reach, something that is completely beyond our understanding. I will grant that.

Let me make that symbolic value a bit more powerful by--ironically--making it more concrete.

In contemplating the heavens, we’ve created instruments to help us:  First simple telescopes; then more sophisticated ones;  then radio telescopes; then telescopes in space. 

Right now we’ve got the James Webb space telescope that is positioned in space at a place called the L2 point, which is out beyond the orbit of the earth, out beyond the moon.

One of the first things the James Webb space telescope did was to take a “Deep Field” picture.  This was inspired by the Hubble Deep Field picture which had garnered a lot of attention. In each case, a picture was taken of what to the naked eye was just a tiny piece of empty sky.  In the case of the James Webb space telescope it was a piece of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length.

A grain of sand...at arm’s length.  Do this yourself to see what it’s like.  It won’t matter if you drop the grain of sand because you won’t be able to tell.

What they saw was like what they saw in the Hubble Deep field. Galaxies. Thousands of them.  In an empty spot. Behind a grain of sand. At arm’s length.

This does nothing to diminish the value of “the heavens” as a symbol of the unknowable.

Each of those thousands of galaxies contains something like a hundred billion stars. Most of those stars have planets around them just as big as Earth.

And that is just the stuff we see.

So it’s big.

For the religious person, you can roll that into wherever you keep your idea of the Majesty of God stored.  Even if you are an atheist, you should experience something like awe.  I know of a few who do.

For the Christian, it presents a question. We are to love God.  How can we express that love to the creator of something that is enormous and complex beyond our imagining?

I will be turning 60 next month.  Don’t send me any presents...please.  Last April I was asked three times in a 24-hour period by three people independently of each other whether I had retired yet.  Not if I was thinking of retiring, but whether I’d done it yet.

I am getting old.

Experience is one of the few fruits of old age.  Indeed, it might be an only child. You get older and you get more stuff.  Anything you want, you’ve bought it yourself. What can anyone get you to show you that they love you?

Well, they can give their love to your children or grandchildren.

Seeing that is a gift.  We can see something of God in ourselves even if it is the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length.

Loving your neighbor is loving God. Loving God’s other children is loving Him.

This brings us to potentially a harder question. How do you love your neighbor?  Have you seen some of them? 

Well, you work on that.  They are not hidden behind a grain of sand held at arm’s length.  They are right there.

You’ve got your homework now. Work on it.

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. )

Our Purpose

 Our Purpose

By Bobby Neal Winters

What are we here for?

That’s an old question.  There are those who say we have no purpose.  We are here as worm food.  I would say they lack imagination.

The author of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis had a different idea.  He lays out the construction of the Cosmos. God made a place; got that place organized; put life in it; then God made Man to rule the whole thing.

The first chapter flows into the second chapter, but we start getting another story at verse four of chapter 2.  Some would say that it’s a completely disconnected creation story, but others might note that the folks who edited the Bible together were very, very smart and not only knew that but wanted us to see the two accounts together but in close proximity to each other.  The account in the second chapter has details missing from that of chapter one to the creation of Adam and Eve, man and woman.

We also see God giving Adam a tour of the place. Adam gets introduced to all the animals and gets to name them.  He is also given an order not to eat from a particular tree.  That sets a boundary and makes us look back at what it might mean “to rule.”

Man is not to be a despot; Man is accountable to God.  One might say “to rule” might be interpreted in modern parlance to be closer to meaning “to manage.”

Man is in charge, but Man is accountable.

And just to be sure there isn’t any misunderstanding, “Man” here is being used to mean “the species homo sapiens sapiens.” (Yes, that double sapiens belongs there.)

We are here to take care of Life.  The Way of Life is to be our purpose.

Adam was introduced by God to every animal.  This is still happening as the biologists delve into every nook and cranny of the planet and keep discovering new species and giving them names.

As of this writing, Life is still something of a mystery.  There are some who have quite boldly said that Life is just complicated chemistry.  To this I would reply two things: “You don’t know that” and “Just?”

The first reply is dangerous.  While on one hand, scientists have never created artificial life in the lab, they might’ve done that last night and it just hasn’t made the news yet. Some would call it a “God of the Gaps” argument. So yes, that reply could have a timestamp on it.

The second reply, though it is only one word, I’ll stand by. Life is wonderous.  Life goes on around us.  Bacteria can make other bacteria by splitting in two.  A woman’s body can make a baby out of dill pickles and ice cream.  Life is in every nook and cranny of this wonderful globe of ours and exists in places that are fearful to us.  

“Just” complicated chemistry. Bah! It is wondrous chemistry.

We are managers of Life.  We are to take care of Life.  God has trusted other of His children to us and we are to take care of them.

It is not a Boon; it is a Responsibility. 

In the current spectrum, there are those who would say we should delve into the world’s resources; get all we can; can all we can; sit on the lid; and poison the rest.

There are also those who say, homo sapiens sapiens is the problem, not the solution, and that we should work to eliminate ourselves in short order.  They are out there and they’ve made more headway than you might think.

I don’t aim to change the minds of the folks at either of those extremes. While each would deny any connection with the others, both are followers of the Way of Death.

For the rest, let me suggest another Way:  The Way of Life.

“Man,” the human race, homo sapiens sapiens, is still becoming what it will be.  We are still waking up in our surroundings.  We are still naming the animals and plants and every living thing. We are still figuring it all out.

Let us figure it out in a way that values the world around us, values beauty, values living things. 

Values Life.

Thinking about the big picture of Life, the Universe, and Everything is really hard.  The Universe goes out for at least 13 billion light years as far as we know.

That’s a bit too far for me.

I have to start at Me.  To manage Life, I must first manage myself. I must be mindful of my actions as that becomes possible. 

You can swirl into a black hole here if you aren’t careful. The fact is that some animals can’t eat without other animals dying.  But, as you see in the account in Genesis, Man is given explicit permission to eat plants.  After the Flood, Noah is given permission to eat animals too.  (There is a Biblical argument for vegetarianism sitting right there, but I am going to let it go.  It is a hard teaching.)

Before I swirl into that black hole, I will simply leave you with a question: What does it mean to value Life?  How do we pursue our purpose?

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. )

Summer is over

 Summer is over

By Bobby Neal Winters

During the second week of August, the thought came to my mind: You are not happy; you are in fact becoming depressed; something is the matter. One of my favorite passages of scripture began rolling around in my head, “The Harvest is over, summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

One wouldn’t have far to look for possible causes.  We’ve had one of the hottest, driest summers we’ve had in a long, long time. Even if you grew up in southern Oklahoma where summers like this one weren’t all that unusual, this sort of thing can get under your skin after a while.

From another angle, I’ve had minor issues with my health.  I discovered that I had a hernia and had the surgery to repair it.  Right on the heels of that, my wife and I got COVID.

And the two events above combined to knock us out of any recreational travel.  As much as I love this town, sometimes you just have to run to the literal fleshpots of Kansas City and have a little barbecue.

Whatever the cause, I was feeling grumpy. I was feeling very ill-used that school was about to start and I’d not been able to “sharpen the saw” over the summer.  Visions of disaster during the coming semester were beginning to loom before me.

Then something happened: The faculty came back.

We have a professional development day at PSU. It is organized by our Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. They provide a framework, and the faculty and staff of the university provide the talks.

When I arrived at the east end of the first floor of Grubbs Hall where we were to pick up our schedules and saw my fellow teachers and members of university staff, it was like a trickle of electricity began to flow into my body.  Somewhere up in my brain, there was the sound of sparks flying and a voice that shouted: It’s alive.

I almost just wrote the sentence: “We human beings have a disease.” And that might be true, but I am not quite prepared to defend it. Let me roll it back and restart: “Those of us who live in the West have a disease.”

That disease is individuality.

And the word disease might be too strong. I am still thinking about that, but I thought I would toss it out there to give you the idea of the direction of my thinking. I will calibrate the magnitude in time.

In any case, we in the United States, Western Europe, and those within our sphere of influence labor under the misunderstanding, “Everybody ought to take care of himself.” And, “What I do is my business.”

Like all of the very best lies, these are partial truths.  They are part of a tightly woven tapestry that when you start pulling the threads out it all comes apart.

So it would be truer to say, “Everybody ought to take care of himself as much as possible, but we all need help from time to time and we need to take care of each other too.”  

And, “What I do is my business, but it ceases to be my business when it starts affecting others adversely.  Indeed, that can even happen when it starts hurting me because there are people who love me and count on me.”

As a Christian, I would say, “We are all brothers.” Some might not like the gender of that sentence.  “We are all family,” might work better. Pick the one of these that pleases you best.  Maybe I should just go with, “We are all God’s children.”  

The scientists would say, “We are a social animal.”  It’s simpler but very clinical. It lacks poetry.

Regardless, we need each other.

There is the common saying, “We are born alone and we die alone.”  Well, the first clause of that sentence is just an out and out lie. I don’t care who you are, your mother was there when you were born, and if you didn’t have quite a bit of attention for the first few years of your life, you wouldn’t be here.

Born alone, my saggy backside.

The dying alone bit is largely up to you. It can happen.

But dying alone isn’t being by yourself.  When Jean’s mother passedaway, the chaplain told us that sometimes people waited until they were physically by themselves to die.  It was something they prefered to do in private.  This was the way with Jean’s mom. Jean was with her to the wee hours; she seemed stable; so Jean came home. No sooner had she laid down than the phone call came from the hospital.

Dying alone is dying without anyone who cares about your passing.  To get a picture of what that looks like, read the Ghost of Christmas Future section of “A Christmas Carol.” 

So, yeah, this summer was like getting an ice cream cone slapped out of my hand.  The summer is over; the harvest is ended;  we are not saved.

But my siblings in arms are back at the university. We are all strapped back into the harness and working at the best job in the whole world: teaching.  

We bring each other energy; we bring each other life.

It’s going to be alright.

It is.

Really.

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. )

 Wood glue and Metaphors

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am a teacher at base.  I’ve woven some interesting activities around this: woodworking, for example.

Before I started woodworking late last year, I never dreamed what a big part glue would play.

Sure, I knew the wood had to be held together somehow, but I thought nails or screws.  I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

For one thing, I’ve used precious few nails. In fact, if your definition of nail is too narrow, I haven’t used any.  I’ve used “pins.”  These pins aren’t exactly like the one’s used to hold pieces of cloth together.  

I bought myself a Ryobi pin nailer which shoots slender pieces of metal into wood (or you hand if you aren’t careful).  The metal of the pin (or brad) is about as thick as a thick staple.  

It turns out that for what I am doing, glue is foundational.

Now, as I said above, I have used pins.  I have also used more screws in the last six months than I had in the previous almost six decades of life.  However, the pins and the screws are pretty much there to keep the wood in place until the glue dries.

Here I would like to observe that I hadn’t worked much with glue since kindergarten or maybe first grade in art projects.  Now I find myself learning something that some use to earn a living.  Let us not poo-poo the commercial value of the arts, eh?

Another thing I have learned--first by hearing it in YouTube videos and then by seeing it with my own eyes--glue is stronger than wood. 

As I am a math teacher at base, and, as such, have the psychological need to make things overly precise, let me amplify that last point.  Wood consists of cellulose fibers that are held together by a natural substance called lignin.  Modern wood glue is stronger than lignin.  To see this, you can glue a couple of boards together properly and then break them apart.  When you do this, the wood will break before the glue does.

I’ve made myself a work table.  I made each leg by putting a pair of two-by-fours into an ell-shape; that is to say, the cross-section is an ell. I put my glue on the “two-inch” lateral side of one piece and laid it against the “four-inch” lateral side of the other.  Then I nailed them together with pins.  If it had been the pins alone, I would’ve been able to pull the pieces apart with my hands, but I clamped them and let them dry.  Now they are holding up a work table.

Wood-glue: It is great stuff.

I see my woodworking as being another creative outlet that runs parallel to my writing.  I have observed in this space before that I find them similar.  Each requires putting pieces together.  You work with each piece and you then put the pieces together.

My wife actually taught me that I needed to put pieces together.  She accomplished this in her own gentle way by saying, “I think you have a rough transition here.”  

So I needed something to hold it together.

There are lots of ways of doing this.  My favorite way is metaphor.  To my way of looking at things, metaphors are to writing as glue is to woodworking: they are stronger than the wood itself.

Often when we write, we do so to present what we perceive as a truth.  One way to do it is to use an extended metaphor which seems to be parallel to the truth we are trying to convey. Those who disagree with us can criticize our writing and tear it apart.

In cases such as this, often the metaphor will stand, but the rest of our writing will break.

For example, there might be some who would argue that writing is not like woodworking at all and give good, convincing reasons for it, thereby breaking this essay.  However, woodworking/wood glue are still good metaphors.

As with woodworking, there are some who are better at writing than others.  Some writers are better at using metaphors; some woodworkers are better at applying glue.

There is something to know.

When writers use metaphors, we are reaching out into the real world, the world of common shared experience.  We want something concrete that the reader can understand, so that they can use it as a guide to understanding what we are trying to actually tell them.

In a case like today, I thought I needed to do a little exposition on wood glue.  As I didn’t know anything about it before late last year, I thought many of my readers might not either.

This has the value that even if something breaks the essay, at least you’ve learned something.  And that’s what it’s all about for me in the end.

I am a teacher at base, after all.

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. )

Long, Hot, Dry Summer and the Great Brown Spot

 Long, Hot, Dry Summer and the Great Brown Spot

By Bobby Neal Winters

Yesterday I mowed for the first time since mid-June. 

If you follow this space, you know I’ve had kind of an interesting summer. I had surgery to repair a hernia just after the 4th of July.  A little over two weeks later, I came down with COVID.

While either of those events could’ve affected my mowing schedule, neither of them actually did.  As those of you who work under the auspices of NALM (the National Association of Lawn Mowers) and seek to improve themselves and improve the world one lawn at a time, the weather this summer has been the overriding concern.

It simply stopped raining at some point.

Those of you who are absolute sticklers for the literal truth will note that there has been some scattered rain.

Well, yeah, there has.  Scattered be the key modifier there.  I remember one morning I got up to walk and experienced an 8-inch rain.  Eight-inch in the sense that the drops were falling 8 inches apart. 

The lack of rain affects mowing in two ways.  The first of these is that the grass simply doesn’t grow.  It gets to a certain point and says, “No, I am done.”

But there is also the dust.  The lack of rain causes dust;  Mowing stirs up the dust; and if you mow, you are walking around in a cloud of dust like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown. I once caught pneumonia from doing that when I was a teenager.

Yesterday, I caught things just right.  We had received just enough rain to settle the dust.  The backyard had begun to look a little scraggly. 

For those of you who are not familiar with the word “scraggly,” it is used by my people in the following way.  There comes a time in a young man’s life when he begins to shave.  At a certain point, he says to himself that he will try to grow a beard so he stops shaving.  The result of this is a beard described by the adjective “scraggly.” 

Just as the cure for a scraggly beard is to shave it, the cure to a scraggly lawn is to mow it.  The light, dust-settling rain we received gave me the window I needed.

Having been almost two months since I’d mowed, I was tuned into the whole experience.  I was attentive to even the most minute detail.  I gained some insights.

During normal times, my lawn suffers from--among other things--being shaded by a lot of trees.  The shade keeps the grass from getting all of the sunlight the rest of the grass gets. During times when we are actually getting rain, this is a bad thing, but when we have had weeks upon weeks of hot, dry, sunny weather, something else happens.

The shade has protected the grass beneath it.  It reduced the evaporation of what little moisture there was in the soil.

This was made clear to me when it came time to mow around the “Great Brown Spot.”

You have probably heard of the “Great Red Spot” on Jupiter.  It is a storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere that has been going on for hundreds of years.  Our astronomers have been observing it since almost the time of Galileo and wondered what it was for a long, long time. 

If there are astronomers on Jupiter who are looking our way, they have no doubt seen the “Great Brown Spot” in my backyard and are wondering what causes it.

The “Great Brown Spot” is the part of my lawn that gets the most direct sunlight.  In the spring, it is very healthy because of this.  It is not so much of an advantage in the midst of a hot, dry summer.

(As a side note, I got to thinking about what the astronomers on Jupiter would be like.  In science fiction, it has been speculated that the inhabitants of gas giants like Jupiter would have to be like dirigibles or blimps.  That is to say, they would be giant bags of gas.  This would make them ideal candidates for a life of politics or maybe even positions at the university, but I digress.)

In contrast to this, there are parts of the backyard that are positively verdant. I noticed that this required a combination of factors: 1) As noted earlier, shade; 2) being near the water spouts of the gutters from the house; 3) being near one of the flower beds that my wife waters.

Indeed, there is one spot that almost caused my mower to drown out.  We have a little inflatable pool for our grandsons to use.  It is filled with a garden hose which leaks.  The place where the hose leaks may be the nicest square-foot of lawn in town.

If it doesn’t rain, I won’t have to mow again this year, but quite frankly, I felt like a better human being once the job was done.  Maybe we should work in prayers for rain whenever we have the Lord’s attention.

Just sayin’.

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. )

 On taking a more active part in the Pandemic

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last Saturday morning at 5AM, I awoke to the sounds of my better half throwing up.  Only someone who had been married to this particular woman would’ve recognized it for what it was.  It sounded like tablespoons of gravel being thrown into the toilet.  When I throw up, it sounds like a tyrannosaurus rex is trying to mate with an electrical transformer.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine. Nothing wrong with me,” came the reply.

By 9AM our daughters had convinced her to take the COVID test.

POSITIVE.

She moved into a spare bedroom to try to save me, but it was to no avail.

I was okay on Sunday.  I woke up fine on Monday.  I took my walk before it got hot. I stopped and talked to people while maintaining social distance. But before I had finished my two-mile round, I noticed a tickling in my bronchial tubes.

I returned home.  Ate my breakfast.  Took a COVID test.

POSITIVE.

Well, I am healthy, I say to myself.  I’ve been inoculated and I was boosted only seven months ago.  I will be fine.

No.

I have a superpower when it comes to detecting whether I have a virus.  It is my spine.  Whenever I have a virus or am vaccinated against one, I have aches between every single vertebrae in my spine.

That started coming on in the afternoon.  It was unmistakable from the very beginning and it increased throughout the day.

Monday night was bad.

Not only every vertebrae of my spine, but every joint in my body, every part of my body that had ever encountered anything harder than a blade of grass, ached.

I was wracked with chills even though we were in the middle of a heat-wave.

Then, in the dead of the night, our cat Mischief came and put her nose against mine.

She was checking whether or not I was still breathing.  She wanted to know if I was dead or not.  I very consciously, with whatever life was still in me, exhaled into her nostrils.  I wanted her to know that I was alive so that she wouldn’t begin to feed on the soft parts of my body.

I knew I couldn’t fight her off.

That same night, she had performed the same proof-of-life test with my wife.

Mischief must’ve been hungry.

Monday night was the worst night.  

Things got rapidly better after that.  

We had been given the advice from a family friend to get paxlovid, which is an antiviral.  I’d tried to do this on Saturday, but you need a prescription.  Well, we got prescriptions on Monday.  After the night of hell, we turned the corner.  It’s been a week and we don’t feel any worse than is consistent with six decades of life.

I would like to give the credit to paxlovid, but scientifically I can’t.  I am pretty sure it was part of it, but we are both quite healthy to begin with; we’ve both been inoculated and boosted (probably should’ve gotten that second booster).

So our quick bounce back was probably from a combination of things.  

But I am going to give at least some credit to paxlovid.

That having been said, let it be known that paxlovid imparts a characteristic taste to your mouth.  I cannot describe it accurately using vocabulary consistent with the standards of a family newspaper, but you get the idea.

Nothing is free in this world but the grace of God.

So for us COVID was like a bad case of the flu.  We will still be getting vaccinated as recommended.  We will still wear the masks when needed.

Getting out of bed is a privilege; health is a privilege; life is a privilege.

AMEN.

And, Mischief, I’ve got an eye on you.

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. )

Journey to the Seventh Planet

By Bobby Neal Winters

Interstate 44 claws its way through the state of Missouri. You really have to experience it to understand.  It’s not that it's not pretty.  The scenery is quite pretty.  One would have to have a heart made of stone to not be affected by the scenic beauty...at first.

As you drive along after first entering Missouri, you say, “What a pretty little hollow nestled among the scenic hills.”

But something happens to you after you do that twenty times over the course of an hour.  Hearts made of flesh do turn to stone; hearts already of stone turn to diamond.

And depending upon how far you go and how fast you drive, you might be doing that for six hours.

The way they put it in Latin is: “Iter facimus.” The word “iter” means journey and “facimus” means we make. So a journey is like breakfast or a house.  It is something that you put together.

Driving across Missouri, there is the piece from Joplin to Springfield; then Springfield to Rolla; then Rolla to Saint Louis.

The Romans were onto something.  Chopping a trip into pieces gives you hope. Hope will keep you alive.  The folks in Missouri have caught onto that.  The way they have done it, makes me proud to be an American.

As you penetrate more deeply into Missouri and the density of the pretty hills that separate the gorgeous hollows numbs the beauty-perceiving portions of your brain, your eyes begin to wander to the billboards.  The billboards highlight roadside attractions: There are scenic wonders and shopping opportunities ahead.  These billboards are more densely packed than even the hills and hollows.

The scenic wonders are understandable. Given the beauty of the hills and hollows that you can see for free from the interstate itself, you might wonder about the beauty of whatever they are trying to lure you off the beaten path to pay money to see.

However, there is something beyond that.  It is something that highlights the economic genius of the people of Missouri: The Uranus Fudge Factory.

If you’ve not gotten the joke, maybe it’s because it’s been a long time since you were 12. Maybe you’ve always been emotionally mature. Maybe you don’t pronounce “Uranus” with the stress on the second syllable. You really need that long “a” sound there.

The first time you see a billboard for the Uranus Fudge Factory, you think: Seriously, that’s pretty tacky.  You think: I would never stop there. What’s wrong with people who stop at a place like that?  

Then you think, people who are traveling with children who are old enough to read but still immature enough to think this is funny probably do.

Then the miles pass.  The hills and hollows add up.  They blunt your aesthetic senses. Your mind becomes as numb as your back, as backside, as...Uranus. 

You become curious.

I do want credit for waiting until our return journey before yielding to my curiosity and taking the exit to Uranus, Missouri in order to visit “The Uranus Fudge Factory.”

I will admit one thing.  I only thought that what I read on the billboards was tacky.  For true tackiness, one must enter the Fudge Factory.  The tackiness is palpable.  The tackiness has been monetized.

It’s for this last bit that I am going to tip my hat to those entrepreneurs in Uranus, Missouri.  Nature didn’t give them anything much to distinguish them from any other exit on Interstate 44. (Though I would say they probably go back to the heyday of Route 66.) 

The only distinguishing asset they had was someone naming their community with a moniker that can be pronounced in such a way as to make a middle-schooler snicker.  If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If it gives you a goofy-sounding name, you go around the corner to where fudge is made.

We stopped.  We bought fudge.  It’s a done thing that we now won’t have to do again.  But that’s what we’d said before.

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. )