The Case for Standard Time

The Case for Standard Time

By Bobby Neal Winters

By the time this reaches the newspaper, we will have endured yet another brutal time change. I hate the time change.  I hate change, but let’s not digress. Many would agree with me on hating the time change and say that we should stay with daylight savings time year round. 

That is where we would part ways.

I’ve no illusion that what I write here will change anyone’s mind, but occasionally, in my role as a scholar, I must choose to die on a hill that no one cares about.  

This is that hill.

We switch between two time frames: Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time.  By the choice of nomenclature, clearly they want us to believe that Daylight Savings Time saves daylight.  It does not.  There is exactly the same amount of daylight regardless.

In contrast to this, Standard Time is standard.  I will now explain why that is. There was a time before clocks. When you got up when the light woke you, and you went to sleep after the dark had made you sleepy.  It was back in the days we were all red in tooth and claw, aka Hobb’s State of Nature.

In getting through the day, people would mark the path of the sun.  How high was it in the sky?  Was it at its high point, half way through the day yet?  If not, that was morning; if it had passed that it was afternoon; but the important part that helped divide it all up was noon.  

Noon was the basic standard.

At some point astronomers (or maybe astrologers, let’s not split that hair) split the day up into finer pieces.  We call them hours. Because the sun travels a semicircle (more or less) across the sky, they begin to think of the whole day/night cycle as a circle.  Because the math was easy, they cut each half of the cycle into twelve pieces.  These pieces are what come down to us as hours.

Before we got clocks, people dealt with time in a much looser way. I’ll get there at noon would mean some time in the middle of the day.

Then we got clocks, and the world got more rigid.  A town big enough to have a clock tower set its time so that it was 12 Noon when the sun was near its zenith.  If you had a watch, you would synchronize your watch with that clock.  Given that, when someone said to meet them at place x at time t, you could do that.  

This worked when the speed of travel and communication was slow. Then the railroad and the telegraph came in and ruined all that.

A system was created that allowed people to communicate around the world. This system went through a number of tweaks through the years.  The system we have now is called Coordinated Universal Time.  We abbreviate this as UTC.  

Shouldn’t that be CUT?

Okay.

The French name of the system is Temps Universel Coordonné and they were involved in the negotiation. I assume they wanted TUC to be the abbreviation. So nobody gets their own way.  

Humans, they make me laugh.

We measure our time in coordinated universal time.  We set up time zones around the world so that the sun is near its zenith at 12 Noon in each of those zones. 

The system is set up so that the base zone called UTC+0 is centered around the prime meridian which runs through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England. (Why that is the case is a whole different story.) Both England and France are in UTC+0, by the way, so they didn’t have to compromise on that.

We here, in God’s country, are on UTC-6.  We are 6 hours behind the folks in London and Paris.  In Seoul, South Korea (and Tokyo, Japan) they are at UTC+9.  So they are 10 hours ahead of us.

It’s all there right in the system.  

When we switch to Daylight Savings Time, we add an hour to our offset.  We will be UTC-5.  But most of the folks in the northern hemisphere do too, so the time differences will remain the same.

It becomes trickier when dealing with time differences between hemispheres because when one springs forward, the other falls back, but they don’t all do it at the same time.  

Brazil sticks to Standard Time all year round.  I imagine this is because the time change makes even less sense for them because they are in general nearer to the equator than we are, and it makes even less sense for them than for us.

So there is the case: Having Noon at the middle of the day.  If we are going to stay with one time--as we should--that should be Standard Time.

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. )

 Behind the Mask

By Bobby Neal Winters

Everybody is broken.

Everybody.

That is what I’ve learned.

We build a persona. A persona is a mask that we put on to deal with others. I said that we build a persona, and we do, but we often don’t realize it at the time.  A lot of people, maybe most, are not aware that’s what they are doing. They are not aware how important it is.  And their parents aren’t either.

Oh, our mothers are worried about what people will think.  They will make us comb our hair and brush our teeth.  They will tell us to wear clean underwear so that if we are in an accident we won’t shock the nurses. (The nurses with whom I am acquainted don’t shock that easily.)  But most moms are not consciously working to help their children create personas.

Regardless of that, some people are quite good at it, and those are the people who are running the world.  I looked at the previous sentence and thought about it a while.  It doesn’t quite get it: There are people who have carefully crafted personas who’ve been kicked to the curb as far as running the world is concerned; there may be a few folks turning the tiller of the world who are just naturals; but by at large the folks at the top are very careful about what they let people see.

Given that, let’s look back at the first part of this column: Everybody is broken.

This includes the people in power.  In my darker moments, I think maybe especially the people in power.  I should probably stop listening to the news.

Our brokenness can be an asset.

Pain is a path that goes to everyone’s house.

We can always connect through pain.

Everyone has lost a parent, has lost a sibling, has lost a pet.  Everyone has been fired, has failed a test, has lost a love.  We may speak different languages, but everyone can cry.

Many people craft personas that cover all that up.  They constantly radiate joy.  And God bless them for it, because they can spread joy.

For a moment.

I’m a fan of the movie “Inside Out.”  The girl in the movie has all these (joy, sadness, anger, disgust) emotions running around in her head, but joy dominates.  Joy will not let sadness hold the stage.

But there are times when sadness is appropriate.  There are times when sadness must hold the stage.

There are at least two points in the Bible where men who had very carefully created personas, let sadness take the stage.  When Joseph was testing his brothers, he let the mask slip and called out, “Is my father still alive?”  When David’s son Absalom had been trying to overthrow him but was killed, David let his mask slip and called out, “Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son.”

It makes people uncomfortable when authority figures do that.  The raw emotion is too much. It’s as if the emotion gets amplified by the mask itself.  It acts as a lens instead of a shade.

But the authority figures are broken too.  We forget that, but we shouldn’t. Ever.

Sometimes it is their brokenness that drives them to seek authority over others.  This usually isn’t good.

The best use their brokenness as a way to connect to others, as a way to serve others, as a way to serve God.

The brokenness serves as a way to connect with God.

Oscar Wilde was a brilliant man, famous for his wit.  He had a carefully crafted persona that came apart.  Of all the things he said, of all the things he wrote, one bit is fit for scripture:

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break

And peace of pardon win!

How else may man make straight his plan

And cleanse his soul from Sin?

How else but through a broken heart

May Lord Christ enter in?

We can connect with Christ, we can connect with each other through our brokenness. 

Everybody is connected, because everyone is broken.

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. )

 Isn’t She Lovely

By Bobby Neal Winters

I listen to the radio while I work in my shop. Actually, it’s not strictly the radio: It is a radio station on my Alexa.  In any case, it’s a classic rock station.  This is stuff I listened to in my twenties.  

It’s a good exercise to go back and listen with the years of a 60-year-old to what you heard when you were twenty.  At twenty, you may have just heard the chorus, and you may not have even understood that.

A week or so ago, I listened to Stevie Wonder singing, “Isn’t She Lovely?”, and I realized it’s a completely different song than what I thought I’d been listening to for the last forty years.

The difference hinges on the “she.”  If all you listen to is the hook in the chorus, you can be forgiven for thinking that “she” is the singer’s romantic interest.

No.  Far from it.

“She” is his newly born daughter.

Joy is rushing through his heart because of the birth of a daughter.  I’ve experienced this three times in my life, so I can connect.  Doubtless, this would’ve been part of my personal soundtrack at the birth of each of my daughters, but I didn’t understand the song.

This is a song that is, shall we just use the word, religious, and it takes a theological stance.

We have been Heaven-blessed/

I can't believe what God has done/

Through us, He's given life to one/

But isn't she lovely made from love?

The singer here recognizes that couples partner with God in the creation of human life.  He firms it up, by pointing out that in a loving family, a child is created in an act of love.  That child is a walking symbol of that act of love.

The part about being a partner with God in the creation of life was uttered first by Eve when she said, “I’ve got me a man with the Lord.”  This was reinforced when Mary gave birth to Jesus, who Christians hold to be the Son of God.

God’s part in the procreation process was reinforced in Biblical passages where women petitioned God plaintively to give them a child: “And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her and opened her womb. And she conceived and bore a son...”

Whether you are religious or not, this represents the human understanding of the connection of sex with procreation and the continuation of the species.  God is Being Itself and we continue the Being of the human race by having children.

This point of view is deep within our culture.  It has to be or we wouldn’t still be around.

For those of us who grew up when the agrarian tradition was more prevalent, we learned that a bull was a “daddy” cow and the cow was the “mommy” cow.  A rooster was a “daddy” chicken and a hen was a “mommy” chicken.  Those are terms taken from a typical, traditional family that a child can understand. 

Bringing God into procreation is recognition that a child is not conceived every time a couple comes together.  The creation of the child was viewed as God’s blessing of the act.

As children have come to be viewed in some quarters as being an inconvenient byproduct of sex, it might be confusing to some why they were so sought after by the ancients.  Well, children were considered to be valuable in those days.  They could help tend the sheep, help tend the crops, and they could take care of you when you were old.

Beyond that, however, I do believe there is something primitive deep within us that yearns.  We have this collection of ancient voices within ourselves which speak below the threshold of hearing.  They attempt to direct us. Some have called it the collective unconscious, but I don’t know enough about it to go any further.  These voices are sometimes silenced by culture; sometimes they are redirected.  But they are always there.

Religion gives us language and context for this. It provides meaning where we might otherwise be faced with a reality that was just one damned thing after another.

So, I didn’t get “Isn’t She Lovely?” forty years ago.  I do now, and it is indeed lovely. A man, a woman, and if God wills, a new life.

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. )

 Looking at the Stars

By Bobby Neal Winters

The days are getting longer.  This has been so since before Christmas, but the daily changes have been so small as to avoid notice.  But around the middle of February--around Saint Valentine’s Day--the daily changes become larger.

Winter is not over, but we can see the end from here.

The calendar was a gift to us.  It enabled anyone who was able to read a little and to mark off days to know what season it was.  Before that you had to watch the sky. You had to know about the stars.

In the Bible, God creates Light, the Day, and the Night, a few days before he creates the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.  The Sun rules over the Day and the Moon rules over the Night, and the stars are just sort of thrown in.  Later the stars are identified with Angels, God’s messengers.

To say that stars are God’s messengers is quite a natural thing from my point of view.  They tell us of the coming seasons.  Let us consider my favorite stars, those in the constellation Orion.

Orion is the Hunter.  They say you can see his bow.  They will connect the dots and say it’s there, but I can only really see the three dots of his belt.  There have been times when I’ve been in the dry, clear air of the desert when I’ve seen a sword hanging down from his side, but in the thick air of southeast Kansas, I’ve not been able to see it.

The thing about Orion is that he disappears over the summer.  On the first of June, he rises at about a quarter to seven.  On the first of July, he rises at about a quarter to 5.  He backs his way across the night all summer long so that he will be able to hunt all night long in the winter.

Some ancient mind looked up at that random pattern of stars, named it, and remembered it; made up stories so as to remember it; and noted its behavior in connection with the seasons.

Then passed it on down.

There were doubtless those who asked, “Why are you wasting so much time staring up at the sky?  You could be chewing leather, making pots, or chipping flint.”

But those who carried the information, kept staring at the stars.

There is something about us that likes to do it.  The stars are pretty.  They become prettier when you know their names and their stories.  We get the reward of beauty when we look at them.

They do bring us God’s knowledge when we look up at them.

Since Galileo and the telescope, we’ve been bringing stronger instrumentation to looking at the stars.  We’ve created ever more sensitive instruments to measure their motions and the light they give off.  By doing this we’ve determined that there are planets that circle around those other stars.

We ask whether there is life on those other planets?  If so, is there intelligent life?  And if so, how is that intelligent life like us?

In my more cynical moments, I wonder if there is intelligent life here.

In science fiction, there is a trope of humans populating the galaxy by sending out colony ships.  Or perhaps the Earth is doomed, and they send out spaceships that are modeled on Noah’s Ark.

Maybe that will happen.  Who knows?

For my part, I think that we will ooze out into space.  First we will do mining, but the miners will need food.  To get the food, we will set up farms.  In setting up farms, we will begin the process of setting up an ecosystem.  The ecosystem will spread along with us.

We will step by step spread that ecosystem everywhere it can be spread: To the asteroids; to the moons of the gas giants; to the Kuyper belt; to the Oort cloud.

At some point in the far future, our nth-power great grandchildren will be hopping the rogue planets that travel among the stars like the ancient Polynesians hopped islands.

Then, after tens of thousands of years, they will come to other suns and start it all over.

Then--maybe--they will think back on the ancients and all of their whimsical thoughts and silly stories.

In the meantime, the days are getting longer.  Summer is coming. It will be here one day, I promise.

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. )

Communing with My Grandfathers

By Bobby Neal Winters

I want to make a wooden chair from two-by-fours, and I’ve started.  

I can see it in my head.  Getting from that mental picture and some eight foot long two by fours to the chairs is the task at hand.

The main barrier in the path is a process I’ve heard called, “Scooping out the butt.”

If you’ve ever sat for long on a perfectly flat piece of wood, you know that it becomes unpleasant after about five minutes.  I once attended a two-hour concert in the city of Irkutsk, Siberia at a Polish Catholic that had perfectly flat pews.  I have to believe that the God-hating communists were behind it.

In any case, in order to make a wooden seat comfortable, it is customary to make some sort of an accommodation for the tailbone.  If you look at a lot of wooden chairs, they have a pair of butt-cheeks carved right in them.

So, if I want to make a wooden chair, it follows that I am going to have to learn how “to scoop out the butt.”

My mother’s father, J.T. (not Knoll by the way), was a carpenter and my father’s father, Sam, carved.  

J.T. built houses.  He built the house I grew up in.  He did this when he was 70 years old.  I was always told that he never drew a thing, never put a thing on paper. He planned it all out in his head.  He ordered the wood, and, when he was done, he only had enough left over to make a picnic table.  It is arguable that he wanted to make the picnic table from the beginning.

As he lay dying in the nursing home, he was still building houses.  He was in that state into which the dying sometimes drift, reliving their past lives in a dream.  I remember having heard him call out, “Fourteen feet...you can’t sh*t me!”

And I am sure you couldn’t’ve.

Sam carved.  He whittled and he carved.  One whittles to pass the time.  One whittles to hone your skill.  One carves to make something.

Sam carved toys for my brother and me.  Whimsical creatures, dinosaurs, things that had only ever seen reality after he realized them in wood.  He would also carve himself fishing lures.

I used to whittle when I was a boy.  I had to stop because I was becoming a danger to myself.  I have a tendency to go off on reveries, to wander different places in my mind.  This is not a good trait in a whittler.

On one occasion, I looked down and I had cut up the right thigh of my brand new dress jeans.  On another occasion, I’d done the same, but this time I’d cut an inch-long incision in my own right thigh.  I probably should’ve gotten stitches, but I didn’t.  It’s been fifty years, and I still have the scar.

As I continue on my way down the rabbit hole of woodworking, I learn there is a continuum of those who work with wood.  The carpenter and the carver are two points on that continuum. To me, it seems that the furniture maker is at a sweet spot between the two points, and the chair I am working on proves that point perfectly.

To scoop out the butt, I’ve had to get some different tools, some different sorts of knives.

When I was a boy, I used a pocket knife to do my whittling. That 10-dollar pocket knife cut up two 30-dollar pairs of jeans.  Sam had had a pocket knife too, but some of my older cousins had bought him a woodcarving set that consisted of scalpel-like, which he did use for some of his more delicate work.  (He castrated an overly amorous dog on one occasion.)

I’ve obtained a tool called a gouge.  Think of it as a thin chisel that is curved around its longitudinal axis.  It is sharp.  The one I bought was shipped with two Band-Aids. It is a knife in the same way a chisel is a knife.

I am also using a box plane.  A plane, if you think about it a certain way, is just a knife that is held at a fixed, controlled angle. And I have a spokeshave.  A spokeshave is a plane that has a short base.  I’d never heard of one before the new year, and now I own two of them.  If I’d had one when I was a boy, I’d never have given up whittling. 

I’ve worked on the seat a couple or three nights this week, and I’ve about got the butt scooped.  

In stages I will put the legs together and then the back.  Along the way, I will be communing with both of my grandfathers.  And I hope to have a chair when it is done.

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. )

Holy Joinery

 Holy Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is a ritual.  Take your wood and use a marking gauge to mark walls a distance from the end. Then make your marks on the endgrain.  Take your jig and mark slanting lines from the endgrain down to the wall.  Then you make your cut.

This is all done in silence until the saw begins cutting the dovetail.  It’s just you, your tools, and the wood.

This week, I made a box to put my drill bits and such in.  I made it out of two bed slats that were given to me.  I used neither nails nor screws. Just dovetail joints, rabbet joints, and glue.

My dovetails were noticeably better this time.  It’s something about practice, I suppose.

Sometimes while doing this, I find myself thinking about the Lord’s Supper, Communion, the Eucharist, or whatever you call it.  Maybe it’s because sometimes I cut myself, “This is my blood...,” but more seriously, I think it’s because there is a cadence to it.

I remember taking the Lord’s Supper when I was a Baptist, which was more than 30 years ago.  Well more than 30 if you count from when I stopped attending regularly, and I don’t remember the cadence of that ritual.  The cadence not in my heart is that of The Great Thanksgiving, which begins:

Pastor: The Lord be with you.

People: And also with you.

Pastor: Lift up your hearts. 

People: We lift them up to the Lord.

Pastor: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give our thanks and praise.

The words and the rhythm have a power to them and so does the fact that we do it the same every time with only minor variation.  The rhythm puts it in the realm of music which reaches the emotions.  The sameness makes it eternal. 

When I take part in it, I am connected with every time I’ve done it and every group I’ve done it with.  Clearing this reaches into the past, but my future self will be doing this as well, so my connection is with that which is, that which was, and that which shall be.

There are minor variation, here and there, but there is a consistent core that connects back to scripture:

On the night in which he gave himself up for us, he took bread,

gave thanks to you, broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: "Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me."

This connects everyone back to that original night two millenia past.

If you go through this often enough, you’ll even begin to pay attention to the words: “This is my body...”

And you begin to think, “If Jesus is God and so has the power of creation with the word, and if the celebrant is performing the ritual as an agent of Jesus, then that Bread is the Body of Christ.”

You begin to wonder what that means, and whether there is a means of understanding the world beyond simply the scientific, a metaphysics beyond the one that is commonly understood, a mystery to be comprehended.

Reveries like this may be the reason I usually am listening to Classic Hits 93.9 on my Alexa Echo dot while I am sawing away on my dovetails.  Sometimes it can get scary when it’s just you and eternity.

While I do have my dovetail cutting ritual which I am refining in a consistent, steady way, I am changing the way that I cut rabbets. For those who don’t know, which would probably be most of you, a rabbet [sic] is a cut made along the edge of a board to make it thinner there.  It gives you more surface to make for a stronger glue-up.

I used to cut my rabbets with a router.  This takes time, patience, and makes a lot of sawdust.  Now, I am cutting my rabbets with my table saw.  I can do this because I got a new DeWalt table saw for Christmas.  This is quicker, potentially more accurate, and puts a lot less sawdust in the air and on the floor.

The rabbet is still a rabbet even though I am cutting it a different way.  Before rabbets were cut with routers, they were cut with a special sort of plane. There were probably other ways before that.  And, quite frankly, all of those ways are still going on.

All of these ways connect us with the Wood, and connect us all with the others who are seeking that connection.

Similarly, at our Holy Rituals, we connect with God and with all others who are seeking that connection:

By your Spirit make us one with Christ,

one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world,

until Christ comes in final victory, and we feast at his heavenly banquet.

Through your Son Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in your holy Church,

all honor and glory is yours, almighty Father, now and for ever.

And so we are all connected. Our Lord was a carpenter 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. )

 What is Man?

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been hearing about ChatGPT since early December.  Someone I know well who works in the university writing center was very upset about it and wrote to me about it.  I’d never heard of it.  

For those of you who are in that blessed state, ChatGPT is an AI (artificial intelligence). There is a web portal that leads to it. You can type in questions for it to answer.  You can ask it to write essays for you on any subject you want, in multiple styles, in multiple moods.

Yesterday, I asked it to write an essay on the invention of the maritime chronometer and its importance in navigation from the point of view of a midwestern high school student.  And it did. And it was good, but not so good that a bright, studious high schooler couldn’t have written it.

You can see why the folks in the university writing center are concerned.

Earlier this week, I listened to a talk by a local businessman/computer science teacher on ChatGPT.  He has a different, broader perspective.  In his talk to a group of us who were meeting in the city library, he described how it could be used as a tool.

You can ask it to write code for you, and it will.  Good code, mostly.  Sometimes it’s buggy, but sometimes humans write buggy code too.  I know this shocks you.

Eventually, ChatGPT will be available for about $50 a month for use as a tool.  In his opinion, it will be worth every penny.  

As the audience was composed of computer scientists, he told them that their world would change, but they wouldn’t necessarily be eliminated. The way they approached their work would have to change.  They would have to learn to tell ChatGPT what to write.  They would have to learn how to problem-solve, to organize

I went back to my office after the talk, and after I got access--everyone is trying it out now--I asked ChatGPT to write a computer program in the Python language to produce a list of prime numbers, and it did.  And I looked at it, and saw it was good.

In thinking about this since early December, I’ve looked inward.  I’ve gotten religious; I’ve gotten philosophical.

When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the first thing they learned was that they were naked.  They were exiled from Eden and an angel with a flaming sword was put there to keep them from ever returning.

Yep.  There is no going back.

Businesses will subscribe to this service to write code, to write advertising copy.  It will have fewer mistakes; it won’t call in sick; it won’t gossip with its co-workers and decrease productivity; it won’t gossip about its co-workers and cause drama; and it’s cheaper.

But here’s the kicker: If no one is working and no one is making money, then no one is going to be buying the goods and services.

Besides, the purpose of Man is not to make money. The purpose of Man is to take care of the Earth.  A necessary part of that task is taking care of Man.

We’ve gotten lost.  While Capitalism is undeniably successful, it is a tool that works for Man; Man is not a tool that works for Capitalism.  It’s like a tablesaw.  It’s incredibly useful, but if you don’t take care, it’ll take off some fingers for you.

We--as a people--need to set our eyes on the goal of increasing human flourishing rather than on increasing corporate profit.  The two are not mutually exclusive, but there are many potential conflicts between them. 

Having mentioned the tablesaw, a paragraph or so back, this gives me the opportunity to talk about woodworking.  You knew it was coming.

On YouTube, I watch the videos of a man named Steve Ramsey.  He has said more than once that you can buy furniture that is better and cheaper than handmade furniture.  So why make your own furniture?  Why do woodworking?

Because pieces of furniture made by hand are special because they were made by human beings.  Their very imperfections make them human. They tie us to a person.  In the end, connecting person to person is a big part of what life is about.

I would add that learning to do things makes us better people.  We are better able to take care of ourselves; we are better able to help take care of others.  We live better lives by virtue of knowing how to do things.

For Christmas, I made some presents for a few of my co-workers and family members.  As Steven Ramsey said, I could’ve bought presents better and cheaper that were made in a factory. I like to think these meant more.

I wrote this myself. I am sure there are grammar errors in it. But you know there is a human back here. You’ve seen me walking around town.  Maybe you’ve even spoken to me. If you haven’t, please do.

While there ain’t no goin’ back, we can choose how we go forward. (I used “their” instead of “there” but the computer corrected 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. )

 Bubba: The Chicken or the Egg

By Bobby Neal Winters

It had been a while since I’d spoken with my old friend Bubba from back home.  You might remember him because he lives just on the other side of Wapanucka, down in that neck of the woods.  

I dialed his number and was reminded immediately why I hadn’t called him. When he answered the phone, it wasn’t with “Hello” or any standard answer. It was with a burst of conversation that might’ve been coming from a fire hose.

I have a stutter that I’ve come to cope with by speaking slowly with many long pauses.  It keeps me from stuttering, but the price for this is in talking with some people--the name Bubba comes to mind--I don’t get to speak much at all.

Anyway, after he picked up the phone, some interval of time was spent with him clearing the buffers, bringing me up-to-date with the goings-on at the local churches, the fortunes of the local ball teams, and the fates of mutual acquaintances.  Finally, he made a statement followed by a pause that was long enough for me to become a more active part of the conversation.

“I have an idea,” he said, “that will change the whole country for the better.”

And there he paused.  Instead of using that interval to say what I’d called him to say, I stupidly took the bait.

“Oh, what’s that?”

He leapt.

“Well, you know we’ve got three big problems in the country right now. One, marijuana is becoming legal in more and more places; two, we’ve got a bunch of sorry people sitting on their couches, watching the tube and smoking weed; three, the price of eggs is going through the roof.”

“Well, uh...” I tried to break in not not necessarily seeing eye to eye with him on these issues, but during the time it had taken me to speak my lone sentence, he’d miraculously replenished his body’s oxygen supply.  He tore through my attempt to speak like a reciprocating saw through scrap wood.

“The price of eggs is up because the bird flu got into a bunch of the factory chicken farms.  Those farms are crowded.  If one chicken is infected, they are all infected.  They are just nasty, nasty places. You wouldn’t treat the dog the way they treat those chickens.”

There, he paused a bit.  I could have broken in, but my mind got confused by not wanting to treat a dog the way you treat a chicken.  While I was still stuck there, he gathered his resources and moved on.

“The answer to that,” he said, “is to have smaller chicken farms like back in the day.  Didn’t your family raise chickens when you were growing up?”

Under the mistaken inference that he wanted a response, I began, “Well, yes, we raised, bant...”

“Everybody’s family around here did,” he cut me off. “There’s not all that much to it. It’s not rocket science.  You just need a little spot of land, some fencing, and a chicken house.  That’s about it.

“Well, that’s about what you need to grow marijuana as well. What I think they ought to do is say, fine, you can sit around watching the tube all day and smoke dope, but you are also going to have to raise chickens.  We will let you sell some weed to pay for necessities, but you are going to have to sell eggs too.

“This will at least get them off their backsides [Bubba never said the word backsides in his life, but the gentle reader can supply the appropriate noun] and breathing some outside air.  They’ll see how the sun and rain makes plants grow, and in taking care of the chickens, they might learn to care for somebody besides themselves.”

It was then that he paused with the expectation that I would reply.  How ironic that at that very moment I was struck speechless.  

“What do you think?” he asked into the silence.

I replied truthfully, “I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s brilliant, ain’t it?” from the tone, it wasn’t a question.

“It’s something all right.”

“You bet, it’s something. It might just save the country.  Not so many sorry, pale people walking around, better eggs, not treating chickens like dogs any more.  I should run for president.”

With that, I shuddered, and took the pause to say, “Goodbye, Bubba.”

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. )

Jesus' Student Ratings

 Jesus’ student ratings

By Bobby Neal Winters

Every once in a while, a meme comes around regarding Jesus’ student ratings.  “The Algorithm” (blessed be its name) brings it around to me perhaps more often than it does you because It knows I am a teacher. This is something that I appreciate because it emphasizes that Jesus was a teacher too.

But it also highlights the fact that he may have very well gotten some--at least one--bad student rating from his disciples.  Those of us who read student ratings know they sometimes say more about the student than the teacher, but all of this being said, those of us who strive to be Jesus’ students might wish on occasion that he’d gone more into detail.

Jesus said to love your enemy.

“Jesus,” I might ask, “have you met some of my enemies?” (Read that with an ! after the first word, and it’s something I may have actually said out loud.)

But he said it.  We have a choice either to dismiss it as nonsense or to believe it and press it until we find the answer: How, how do I love my enemies?

The first objection to this teaching is to say that emotions are not something we can control.  We can’t just press a button and feel love.

If we cling to Jesus’ command, we might come to the conclusion that Love, as he was speaking of it, is not an emotion, it is something else, and having it for someone implies that we desire what is best for them.  We desire good things to happen to them.

If they are our enemies because they are vile people, we certainly wish they cease being vile people.  

We not only desire that good things happen for them, but we act so that good things happen for them.  We don’t respond to their vile behavior with vile behavior, but we model behavior as to how people should be treated.

Now, I have met some vile people.  And I know that what I’ve said can be really really hard.  There are some people so vile that we don’t want to spend any time around them.  In that case, we can still do something.  We can pray for them.

Praying is a good thing.  Praying can be done anywhere, any time: it can be done before, during, and after exams.  It can be done silently in the presence of other people.  It can be done alone.

And--this is very important--it can be done at a distance.  One need not be in the line-of-sight or even within earshot of someone to pray for them. It can be done at a distance. One can even pray for someone when there is an entire planet between you.

And they don’t even have to know you are doing it.  Indeed, it is better--if they are your enemy--that they don’t know it.  We are only human, and it is so easy to get the tone wrong when you say, “I am praying for you,” to an enemy.  You know that thing Jesus said about putting your pearls before swine?  Apply it here.

Pray for them.

Not only can it have an effect on them, it can have an effect on you.

You can begin to see that he is a child of God just as you are.  He is struggling to find his way, just as you are.  Just as a wounded animal slashes away at everyone, he does the same.

And before anyone gets the wrong impression, I’ve not yet got the perfect grip on this.  Loving your enemy is like cutting dovetails: You can try really hard and still get it wrong.  You deal with it using the spiritual equivalent of sandpaper and glue, whatever those are for you.  That might just be asking a friend to pray for you.

Being a great teacher, Jesus taught in more ways than just telling.  His life was a lesson.  While those who walked the earth with him got to see the example directly, we, in our age, are not as lucky.  We must use other means.

One way is to read the Gospels.  It is tried and true.

Another way is to look for Jesus in those who seek to follow Him.

This might very well be a terrifying and sobering thought for anyone who attempts to be a Christian.  I know that it terrifies me to put it in writing.

Because I am going to make mistakes.

That does not mean that I shouldn’t try.

Another meme I saw, “We didn’t do this because it was easy: We did this because we thought it would be easy.”

No, don’t think that.  Love your neighbor.  Love your enemy. Pray.

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. )

Life after 60

By Bobby Neal Winters

Death is an odd thing. Or, I should say, the knowledge of Death is an odd thing.  Death comes to all of us with mathematical certainty. I know that I am going to die. But the time of our demise is a mystery until it is a done thing. Even those who are known to be terminally ill will not know the moment of their death, but only a probable interval in which it will occur.

I turned 60 last year.

I’m feeling pretty good.  I am alert.  I still have my good mind.  While my energy isn’t as good as it was when I was 20, my thoughts are clearer and more grounded in reality.  That is to say, I am not nearly as stupid as I was then. I take better care of myself now than I did then. 

I have lost the sense of immortality that I had at that tender age.

I now *know* that one day I *will* die.

But...

But I also watch the news.  As I write this, Barbara Walters passed away a few days ago at the age of 93.  Benedict XVI passed away at the age of 95.  Queen Elizabeth and her husband both lived into their 90s. 

Clint Eastwood is still making movies at age 92.  He may be riding the High Plains in the sky by the time this hits print, but today he is still working.

Closer to home, I have friends who are in their 70s, 80s, and beyond who are still active. It is not unreasonable for me to be making plans for the next 10, 20, or even 30 years.  I begin to hear my old companion that poem by Tennyson in my head:

“Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.”

While I’ve not striven with Gods in the strictest sense, I’ve done my share of striving one way or the other.  Some of the folks I strove with thought they were Gods or knew as much.

Poetics aside, I am still productive and I still have an interval of time ahead of me in which I can be productive.   While I could have a stroke, be diagnosed with cancer, or even have a snowplow fall on me, it is not unreasonable to think that I have 10 productive years left. Given the examples above maybe more, though we all have our list of people who were taken from us before their time.

How to spend those years, eh?

There are numerous permutations to consider. I know retirees who wished they’d retired earlier; I know retirees who wish they’d stayed at work.  I know people working who I wish would retire; I know retired people I wish were still working.  (And there are those who have combined the two by retiring, but not letting anybody in HR know about it, but I best not put too fine a point on it.)

I’ve spent most of my life following the path of least resistance.  I’ve been blown like a leaf in the wind. In the spring, a thunderstorm can blow at a leaf and it will just flap in the gale, but in the autumn the gentlest breeze can take a leaf to the ground.

The leaf needs to become more intentional if it's not to spend the end of the year in a puddle of muddy slush in the street getting run over by snow plows going back and forth.

Just sayin’.

There have been times when I have been intentional. I remember vividly the day I walked over to ask the girl who later became my wife out on our first date.  I had to screw my courage to the sticking place.

I think that turned out well.

This leads to thinking about a couple of great Americans: Robert Frost and Yogi Berra.  Frost wrote his famous poem “The Road not Taken.”  In it, he says, 

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

This is interpreted by some to mean, the choice of road really didn’t make any difference.  

Yogi, no less poetically said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  Who could argue with that?  On my own, I interpret it to mean, to make a decision and own it. There ain’t no going back.

Whether you die at 27, 44, 60, or 95, life is too short to waste a minute of it.  Try to do something that makes you love every day.  Embrace life and the living of it.  And there is some living left to do even at 60.

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. )

 Happy New Year

By Bobby Winters

There is nothing particular about January 1 that it should be the start of a New Year. The solstice is more than a week before; Earth being at perihelion is a few days after.  January 1 is just a day on the calendar, but the decision was made to start the new year then.

So here we are.  The last digit of the year changes; we have our black-eyed peas; we start uttering “oh crap” when we write the wrong date on something.  I will get that right by November if past experience is a guide.  

But on this day, we started the New Year.  It is traditional to look forward and to look back.  Looking back is easier.  On the whole, it has been a good year.  I’ve had challenges; I’ve made mistakes.  Oh.My.Goodness. Have I ever made mistakes. 

But I’ve learned.  I am a stronger (almost typed ‘stranger’ there--that might be true too) person than I was.  I am a lighter person than I was, by about 80 pounds.  I’ve got more energy than I had.

I’ve learned a lot this year. I've got a good start on the craft of woodworking. I’ve turned my garage into a workshop. I’ve learned about wiring; I’ve learned to hang drywall; I’ve learned that I really don’t like to hang drywall on ceilings.  I really, really don’t like to hang drywall on ceilings.  God bless those who do.

I’ve stuck with learning languages on Duolingo. I started on Korean because of the work-related trip I took to South Korea. I’ve learned the Korean alphabet which is brilliant; I’ve learned to say “ant” and “crow”; and I am fairly sure I can break wind in Korean, but that’s about it. Korean is hard for English speakers, and I have to think that English is hard for Koreans too, so those Koreans who can speak it are pretty remarkable. 

Most of my family has been healthy this year.  I think we’ve all had COVID. I had a hernia repaired.  There have been some knee replacements among the extended family.  The biggest issue was with my brother’s infected foot.  We thought it was going to have to be amputated, but it wasn’t.

While it has come with struggle, work, and the help of his friends and family, he now has his diabetes under control and is following the example of Hezekiah.

The year that is coming is an unmarked piece of wood. There are possibilities, but no cuts have been made.  I can look at it and say what things might be, but I don’t know what it will be.  As Isak Dinesen said,“God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.”  

At this time last year, very little of what I said above existed even at the level of thought.  I was on a diet; I had lost some weight. I had started woodworking.  

That was it.

The seeds had been planted; the roots were growing; but nothing had broken ground, and certainly nothing had borne fruit.

I’ve been planting seeds all during this last year.  I’ve been planting seeds even when I didn’t know it, and even though I don’t know what kind of seeds they are.

You have too.

As we go forward, we will continue to plant seeds.  Whatever seeds they are, they will yield a better crop if we water them with love and fertilize them with kindness.

Do I have any resolutions for the New Year?

I’ve made some in the past, and those hardly ever made it beyond the first frost of January.  But I saw a meme on the internet that caught my attention.  It was a Susan Sontag quote, and while I can’t remember it exactly, I do remember the gist of it.  She didn’t have a New Year’s resolution.  She had a New Year’s prayer.  It was a prayer for courage.

That doesn’t seem like a bad idea.  I’m not sure you could go wrong with that.  Pray, not necessarily for courage, though courage isn’t a bad thing.  Pray.  Pray for courage; pray for wisdom; pray for patience; pray for whatever personal virtue you are short of.

Pray.

And have a happy, happy New Year.

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 Act of Creation

By Bobby Neal Winters

My house doesn’t have a basement; it has a well that you can walk around in. Down the middle of it is a wall that used to separate part of it off as a furnace room, but at some point the water that regularly bubbles up from below rotted it off at the bottom. Now it is not so much a wall as a curtain of wooden planks.On one end of the planks was a beautifully weathered 3-by-4. 

A month or two ago, I’d gone down there to do some electrical work and saw it anew.  The new woodworking mania that lives in my head now said to me in a voice like Gollum, “We wants it. We wants our precious wood.”

I brought it up and began thinking of what to do with it. My brain--on its own behest and operating under the influence of old-school British woodworkers on YouTube--formed a plan. 

Cut the 3 by 4 into 4 equal pieces and divide the pieces into pairs. Connect each pair together with a stretcher, joining them with mortise and tenon. Then connected those two stretchers together with another stretcher using mortise and tenon.

Rabbet the corners of the top so they fit into a frame at the top, and join the frame to the legs below with dowel pegs.  Then put a top on it.

I saw this all in my head all at once.  It was quite a rush. I knew exactly the design and the materials.  What I didn’t know was what it was.

Given the description and any sketch made from that, it could be an end table, a stool, a step-stool, or a table.

I didn’t know what it was, and I was the one making it.

I was in the process of making the top from one of the planks retrieved from the basement, and my wife Jean looked at it and said, “A game table to put puzzles on.”

And that is what it immediately became.

This is an example of the Act of Creation with the Word. She pronounced it, and so it was.

God spoke the world into existence. After Adam was created, God took him on a tour of the Garden of Eden, and Adam named all of the animals.  Man takes part in creation too, but is somewhat limited. God spoke the animals into existence, but Adam took it from there.

There’s a fellow I know who likes to tell a joke: “If you say that a dog’s tail is a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” His answer is: “Four. Saying that a tail is a leg, doesn’t make it so.”

That is a good, common sense rhetorical argument. A dog’s tail clearly differs from its legs in any number of ways.  But we could call it a leg.  We would then have the linguistic burden of distinguishing it from the other four legs. This leg does not support the animal; it is attached differently; it has a different form.  It differs from the others in so many important ways that picking a separate name for it is just more efficient. 

God has given humankind the power to name things, and over the course of millennia, we have.  It has been a dynamic, iterative process, and we’ve done it in multiple cultures and innumerable languages.

But it is even more complicated than that.

There are layers of naming. (And it is at times like this when I wish I knew more philosophy because those guys can really shell the corn when it comes to stuff like this.) Let’s look at a “human”.  That is one layer of naming.  When we get into another area, I can look at a human, and say that is a “friend” or that is an “enemy.”  There is still another layer when I would look at the same human and say, “That is my brother.”

The last of these is God’s language.  God has names for things as well: “That human that you call ‘enemy’ is your brother because you are both my children.”

Names affect the way we think. We often switch codes when we are trying to make a political point.  The word “slave” is not used in the original U.S. Constitution.  Slaves are there, but the writers twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid using that word. 

When you call someone a slave, that is a step toward separating them from being human.  Think about this when you see illegal immigrants being referred to as “illegals” or pre-born babies being referred to as “fetuses.” 

We have God-given power.  We create with our use of language; or we can destroy. We can bind and we can loose.

This is all rather heavy going for me.  I need to get back out to the shop and glue some more pieces together.  I’ve got a game table to finish.

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. )

Frozen Acorn-Jelly Soup

 Frozen Acorn-Jelly Soup

By Bobby Neal Winters

We can travel in space, but we can also travel in time.  And as has been observed by Einstein and Tennessee Williams, “Time is the farthest distance between two places.”

My group had been visiting Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea.  We were in a (Korean) Barbecue restaurant when I saw something that made me think of a beautiful girl I’d met in graduate school 40 years ago and on the other side of the planet from where I was then.

She was a beautiful latina, though no one I knew used the word “latina” in those days. In the words of Bob Seger, she was born with a face that let her get her way. Her parents were college professors. There was a conversation going on and she mentioned that she had some gazpacho in the refrigerator. 

Being ignorant and wanting to repair that I asked, “What’s gazpacho?”

“Oh,” she said, in a tone that only years later would I be sensitive enough to recognize as condescending, “it is a cold soup from Spain and Portugal...you wouldn’t like it if you were raised on Campbell’s.” 

In hindsight, I can see certain things. One, she had me pegged right off. Not only Campbells, but Campbell's Chicken Noodle if you please. Two, even the beautiful, refined daughters of college professors are works in progress. Three, when a beautiful girl says anything to a twenty-year-old boy, he will remember it even 40 years later, 8000 miles away.

What caused my reverie was the soup I saw on the table in front of me.  There was ice in it, so one could argue that it was a cold soup, like gazpacho.  I looked it over and the only ingredient I recognized was shredded seaweed.  It had the remnants of a thin layer of ice on it like a mud-puddle that was in the process of thawing.

I sampled some.  It was absolutely delicious. 

I looked it up later, and the soup is called muksabal.  I prefer to think of it as frozen acorn-jelly soup.  The acorn jelly is called dotori-muk, and acorn jelly doesn’t quite capture it in my opinion. It is made from acorns--yes the ones from oak trees--and it has a consistency somewhere between that of jello and that of tofu.

The soup was spicy and sour and freezing cold, obviously.  And, to repeat myself, it was absolutely delicious.

The last forty years have had quite an effect on me.  When I was twenty, I thought I was the smartest person in any room I was in.  I’ve learned differently now and am reminded of it on a regular basis. But I have at least been smart enough to cure some of my ignorance.

Our time on Planet Earth is the best university there is...if we want to learn. In our youths we can be ignorant and arrogant.  We can be privileged and insensitive. That is par for the course.  Forgiving ourselves, forgiving others, and even coming to the realization that there is nothing to be forgiven because that’s just life happening.

Everything we encounter is precious.  Even a bowl of soup can remind us of a beautiful girl from 40 years ago and a planet away.

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. )

Angels in Seoul

 Angels in Seoul

By Bobby Neal Winters

As I write this, I am in my hotel room on a Saturday morning in Seoul, South Korea.  I’ve been here as part of a small group which is cultivating partnerships with several South Korean universities.  We look at programs that we have in common.  We examine their similarities and their differences.  If they are too different, we cannot form a partnership; if they are too similar, there is really little point in forming a partnership.  The trick is finding that magical window where the differences add up to value-added for both sides of the partnership.

This is exhausting.

When I’ve not been meeting with university officials or going to and from meeting them on the Seoul Metropolitan subway system, I’ve been exploring downtown Seoul.

By exploring, I mean wandering out of sight of my hotel and getting lost.  Getting lost is one of my favorite things to do in a strange city.  In Seoul it doesn’t require much effort.  There are two factors that make getting lost in Seoul easy.  The first of these is there is a large number of very tall buildings.  Cross a street, walk half a block, and you are out of sight of your hotel.

The second factor is what I like to think of as the Underground City.  As I mentioned before, we used the subway.  There is a tunnel system attached to the subway system that connects it all up.  Attached to that tunnel system is an underground shopping mall.

There are tons and tons of little shops.  Hardly any of those are shops that are part of any franchise that is recognizable to an American, or at least to a Kansan.  Korean has a different alphabet than we do, but some of the signs are in Korean and English and Chinese and Japanese.  And none of that makes it any easier to pick out a landmark. 

So getting lost is easy.  The irony is that I was not lost when I first encountered the Red Angels.

When I first encountered the Red Angels, I was about 100 feet from the Plaza Boulangerie, the bakery near where our hotel connects with the tunnel system.  They were not difficult to see.  They were dressed in red--and when I say red I mean Nebraska Cornhusker red as opposed to Oklahoma Sooner red--quasi military-style attire. As the design-types say, their uniforms popped.

Given the connotation for red I grew up with, my first thought was, “Those have got to be the worst North Korean spies ever.”

But as I approached, we made eye contact and the man (there was one male and one female) asked, “May I help you?”

I declined his offer because I was not lost.

I walked a distance further and found a map of the subway system and a map of the underground shopping market, and paused to study them. I’d been there a minute or two when the earnest young man offered again.  This time he gave me a map and pointed to where I was on it.

I accepted the map, and walked off in another direction, out of their sight.  I was grateful to the Red Angels for the gift of the map.  I opened it and began to try to find where I was on it.  Because, as you know, a map is useless unless you know where you are on it.  As I was looking the map over, I was approached by someone else in a uniform.  

I don’t know if it was a policeman or a mall rent-a-cop, but he saw I had a map open and assumed that I was lost.  In uncertain English he asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’m exploring,” I said. But this was beyond his English.

“Where are you going?” he asked again.

I did a quick mental calculation with regard to how likely it would be to get him to understand that I was not lost, but just exploring.  

I told him the name of my hotel.

He led me up a long flight of stairs and pointed to my hotel which was exactly where I knew it would be.

I put away my map the minute he was out of sight.  I was then able to get lost and, after a satisfying length of time, to find my way back.  It was a time well spent. 

“I once was lost, but now I am found/ Was blind but now I see.”

I will see you all on the other side.

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. )

 

 Jesus in Seoul

By Bobby Neal Winters

We went to church in Seoul this morning.  We went to the Myeyongdong Catholic Cathedral, though none of us is Catholic.  It was within walking distance; it had a service in English; so we went there.

One of our party had never been to a Catholic service before, so I offered my advice.  Sit toward the back.  Stand when they stand, though they won’t stand all at once because they are doing the same.  They stand when they pray just like Methodists stand when they sing.

And you’ve got to watch out, because the priest will say, “The Lord be with you,” and you will want to reply with, “And also with you,”(because why wouldn’t you), but the congregation will say, “And with your spirit.”

That worked out pretty well.

Though it was an English language service, virtually everyone there was Asian.  The exceptions were the priest and the readers.  There were four readers, none of whom were Korean, but only one of which was a native English speaker.

One of our party who had been to a Catholic service before noted that there were no kneelers.  During the times when Catholics at home would’ve been kneeling, the Koreans bowed.

The Psalm was read by an African man, who had a strong but very understandable accent.  He read, 

“Kindness and truth shall meet;/

justice and peace shall kiss./

Truth shall spring out of the earth,/

and justice shall look down from heaven.”

And we responded, “Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.”

The priest gave his homily on John the Baptist.  If I were to guess from his accent, I would say he was Spanish--the priest, not John the Baptist.

It was wonderful. There we were more than 7000 miles away from home but united with Christian brothers not only from Korea, but from all around the world.  

Christ told his disciples to take the good news to the whole world and make disciples of every nation.  He also wanted us to remain united.  One is tempted to say that two out of three ain’t bad. The truth is that the first two are wonderful, but the lack of the third is shameful.

When time came for the people to receive the eucharist, the priest pointed out that only baptized catholics could partake, so my little group of protestants remained in our pew.  Then one priest can and looked at us--looked at me in particular--and invited me to come and receive.  Rather than refuse and stay in my pew, I stepped out and when I came to the priest I crossed my arms on my chest as I’ve been taught to do to signify that what God has created to be One has been broken by Man. 

The priest blessed me--which is never a bad thing--and I returned to my pew.

In my heart, that hymn from the 1960s plays,

“We are One in The Spirit,/

We are One in The Lord./

We are One in The Spirit,/

We are One in The Lord. /

And we pray that all unity may one day be restored. /

And they'll know we are Christians by our love, /

By our Love, /

Yes they'll know we are Christians by our love.”

I am on the opposite side of the world from my loved ones, but Jesus has preceded me here, and it’s okay.

A Matter of Interpretation

A Matter of Interpretation

By Bobby Neal Winters

Interpretation is a craft that mostly goes unnoticed, but if there is no interpretation, art can’t be art.

Recently Jean and I went out to a production of Fiddler on the Roof put on by a Broadway touring company.  I’ve seen the movie before, but this was the first time I’d seen it on stage. If there was one word different between the movie and the stage play, I didn’t notice it.  All the songs were there; all of the dialog was there.

But the two productions were different.  It wasn’t just the difference between a movie and a play.  It was bigger than that. The actors interpreted the characters differently.  

In the movie, Topol interprets Tevye as being someone who is very intelligent, but simply uneducated but who desires learning above all else. The Tevye in this stage production took it a different way.  Tevye is not an idiot, but he’s not as smart as the one portrayed by Topol in the movie. This is not due to one actor being better than the other; it’s simply a choice.

A play is just words on a page.  To have meaning, it must be interpreted.  In something like a play, the actors, possibly with the help of a director, do the interpretation.  It goes in through the eyes, is processed in the soul, and comes out on the stage.

I am listening to an audiobook with the title “The Philosophy of Modern Song.”  Don’t let the word “philosophy” in the title turn you off.  The book is written by Bob Dylan and is a collection of essays each of which focuses on a particular song by a particular artist. (If you do a search for the book title on YouTube, you will find a list of the songs.)  I am about a third of the way through now, and I’ve found no particular order, grouping, or commonality among the songs.  Perhaps there will be a summary at the end.

What we do get, however, is Dylan’s interpretation of these songs.  Dylan provides a lens with which we can examine this art.  I say lens, but as a whole, it is a telescope.  There is the lens of the songwriter who looks at reality and interprets; then there is the singer who interprets the words on the page; then there is Dylan interpreting the singer.

The abstract mathematical model for communication has three parts. The first part is the sender who sends the message. The final part is the receiver who receives the message.  That is straightforward and self-explanatory. Between them is the channel.

Mathematically we often talk about a noiseless channel or a noisy channel, but when we bring in an interpreter it is something different.

The interpreter fits where the channel does, between the sender and the receiver.  Technically speaking, the interpreter does add noise, but depending upon the skill of the interpreter, the so-called noise might be added-value.

In reference to “Fiddler on the Roof,” the interpretation of the actors can either amplify or mute.  In the flat words on the page, the conflict between Tevye and Golde is there.  In the movie we see that somewhat, but it is muted to a certain extent.  In the stage production, we see Tevye and Golde are in fact at war.  Ironically, this is made most clear in the song “Do you love me?” at the very climax of the song. 

Tevye: Do you love me?

Golde: I suppose I do.

Tevye: Then I suppose I love you too.

One might not realize the infinity of ways “suppose” can be pronounced nor the effect on the meaning until one hears the actors say the word.  They love each other, but they are at war.

There is the interpretation of the writer, the interpretation of the actor, the interpretation of the painter, but there is also the interpretation of the critic.

Each of these is a lens and the quality they bring to the coloring of the lens might be given the name “Soul.” Soul is the cumulative effect of the miles one has walked, the shoes worn, and the quality of the road.

A book like “The Philosophy of Modern Song” written by someone like Dylan has a whole different weight and quality than one written by someone without his experience, without his point of view. He’s a poet, a songwriter, and a singer who is acting in the capacity of a critic.  He’s been an interpreter in multiple capacities (remember, he’s been an actor too) who is now sitting in a critic’s chair.  He brings with him credibility in interpreting these songs to us; he brings weight with his point of view.

He’s got enough city-miles on him to make us think he knows what he’s talking about.

The actors in “Fiddler” doubtless have their own preparation in terms of their lives, their experiences, their history, and their beliefs. They bring that in with them, and they offer us the results.

Blessings to them.

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. )

 Learning to Write Like a First Grade Teacher

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve always been a clutz.  I’ve had poor hand eye coordination. My handwriting is horrible and my printing is hardly  better. Over the last year, however, I’ve made a discovery: I can put a Phillips screwdriver into the top of a screw without thinking about it.

That last prepositional phrase, “without thinking about it,” is a necessary part of the sentence.  If I think about it too much, my conscious mind gets in the way, and I miss.  My hands have an intelligence guiding them that is separate from my conscious mind.

When I first noticed this, my mind popped to a phrase from the 137th Psalm: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.”

The Psalmist recognized the hands as having a separate intelligence of their own.

I’ve also discovered that I can print like a first grade teacher if I take my time. That’s what my teachers always told me: I should take my time.  

I think this is all happening now--long after it would have helped any of the teachers who’ve suffered through my handwriting--because I’ve taken up woodworking.

In learning, I’ve always been an adventurer, from the very beginning.  I didn’t listen to my teachers when they told me there was a right way to form my letters.  I figured out how to do it on my own and did it my way. (Queue up Sinatra on the background music.)  My way “worked” but there were better ways that I didn’t even look at because I already “knew” how to do it.

I’ve been a fool.

By the Grace of God, I am what I am, and by His Grace, I’ve lived long enough to see it.

I started woodworking almost exactly one year ago.  I’d found my father-in-law’s old, old Harbor Freight table saw.  By old, old I mean pre-OSHA.  It terrified me.

It terrified me, but I set myself to learn how to use it.  In doing so, I began the habit of study.  YouTube, which I’d found to be useful in other learning endeavors, became my best friend.  In learning how to use this table saw, I became hooked on woodworking.

I’ve learned the skills that my Kindergarten teachers, my grade school teachers, and all the rest had tried in vain to teach me: Take your time; follow the steps; don’t work ahead of the class.

If you want to make a groove in a board, you can do it.  There are a lot of ways to do it, but most of them will put you at risk of getting your fingers cut off, so maybe use the method you are being taught, at least until you know what you are doing.

When you build things with wood, you start with basic shapes, basic joints then you build up from there.  The short way of saying this is that everything is a box.  In this way, woodworking is very mathematical.  The difference between woodworking and mathematics is that in math, when you make a mistake, you can just erase it.  

In woodworking, there are things you can do to fix it, but it’s more expensive than an eraser. You learn to think further ahead; to take care; to take time.

You slow down.

I can now print like a first grade teacher, but I do it very slowly.  I suppose that I would learn to be faster if I practiced at it more.  Maybe I will, because it calms me.  I slow down and think about each word, each letter, breaking the letters into their pieces. 

Letters can be broken into separate pieces just like chairs and cabinets. It only took me sixty years to learn this.

While I don’t use my new skill in printing much, I am using my ability to “stab a screw” because I’ve been transforming my garage into a workshop.  As I write this, I’ve almost finished installing sheetrock onto the ceiling.  I’ve got chalk dust in my hair to prove it. I’ve gained a respect for another line of work and have no regret for missing out on that particular career.

If I were to die today, there would be people who would look at my age in the obituary and say, “Well, he had a good run.”

I would refute that with a line from Tennyson: “Life piled on life \ Were all too little, and of one to me \ Little remains: but every hour is saved \ From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things...”

If God, in His Grace, gives me the time, I will build my shop.  My hands will learn their cunning.

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. )

 Some meandering thoughts on the passage of time and getting older

By Bobby Neal Winters

If the time of year made a sound, right now it would be making the sound of a spinning quarter on a table top. The quarter would be about to tip over and do its final flops before coming to a rest.

We still have the month of December ahead.  On one hand, that is one-twelfth of the year; on the other hand, it disappears like a snowflake in an October snow.  Soon we will find it is New Year’s Eve and we will be wondering where the Old Year went.

Even though I draw the bulk of my pay for the service of administration, I still teach a class.  This is in part because of the advice the academic vice president who originally hired me gave when he learned I was interested in administration. “Never stop teaching,” he said.

And I haven’t.  It was good advice. Rest in peace, Dr. Ratzalf.

I am teaching a small, upper-division class this semester.  The students in it are younger than my youngest child, the daughter we had when we were pushing forty. Time passes differently for them than it does for me.  To me, this semester has disappeared, well, like a snowflake in an October snow. 

In my mind, we’ve just started.  Today, I met them and gave them their last lecture before their last regular exam.  I taught the material, and my feeling was that they couldn’t’ve had the time to absorb the material that led up to this point.

But they seem okay about it.  To them, this semester has lasted months and not just moments.

If only they knew how quickly they would be sixty.

As this is an upper division class, some of them are going to graduate this semester, and some of them are going to graduate school to work on their masters degree.  I still have dreams of that time in my life.  My professors and my fellow students are still a part of my unconscious mind.

They are still with me, but, as I said, it was just an eyeblink ago.  That is, if it takes 40 years to blink an eye.

I spend more time trying to remember words and names than I used to.  It used to be “pop,” and there it was.  Now it sometimes takes seconds, minutes, or even weeks.  I suppose that I should feel good that I remember for weeks that I’d forgotten a word a few weeks ago, but it doesn’t really work like that.

Today, I was telling my students something that had happened in 1995, and it occurred to me to ask, “Were you even born then?”

No. No they were not.

Never ask a question you don’t want to hear the answer to.

My hair is almost totally white now.  I put that word almost in there just in case someone with a magnifying glass calls me on it.

As those of you who follow this space or who are acquainted with me in real life know, I’ve lost a lot of weight recently.  This is good; I feel better than I have in years.  Those who watch me walk by now as I walk downtown will see that I go at quite a bit faster clip than I did even a year ago.

There is a down side though.  Whereas the subcutaneous fat used to push my skin with enough tension to make it smooth, this is no longer the case.  I have wrinkles where they didn’t used to be. And worse, I have waddles in diverse places.

What’s more, these waddles are larger than they might otherwise be because I’ve lost so much weight.

I wonder if I would look younger if I got my waddles pierced and put earrings through them.

Probably not.

I am not as worried about getting old as I may have made it sound.  I had a friend who died of cancer in his forties who was denied this experience.  I think I should choose to glory in it as much as possible.

I’ve never been vain about my appearance--you only need to look at me to know--so the white hair, the wrinkles, and the waddles don’t bother me.

No, if I were to worry, it would be about taking so long to remember words, to remember names.  As my mother had dementia, that might be actually a legitimate thing to worry about.  But I don’t think it’s that.

I think that once you reach a certain age you’ve had so many experiences, have met so many people, have learned so many things, that it just takes time to pick your way through all of them.

I still remember the things I need to know: the number of the director of HR, the number of the University Attorney, and the number of the Title IX office.  Anything beside that, you can take the time to look up.

And I can still solve more problems with one two-minute phone call than most junior faculty could in a month of Sundays.  And NO, I have not retired. Not hardly.

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. )