The Time of Darkness, Sciatica, and Samuel L. Jackson

The Time of Darkness, Sciatica, and Samuel L. Jackson

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are now in that darkest time of year that runs between Halloween and St. Valentine’s Day. It’s bookended between holidays that are strongly connected to candy. It between we have Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all of the pumpkin spice and parties associated with each of them.  We eat to ward off depression, we eat to soften our fear of Death...and...

And I have gone on a diet.

There is a telephone app associated with it, but it’s basically counting calories.  I am currently on 2000 calories a day.  From the day that I started, November 3, until this writing, November 27, I have lost 15 pounds.

I feel better, my clothes fit better.

Those of you who follow this space know that I’ve been down this road before. 

I’d been having trouble with my back.  The cortisone shots weren’t working.  My back doctor said that we could get in there and “trim off that bone spur” and make my sciatica all better.  But another doctor had told me, “If you are having trouble with your back, look at your front.”

I can be dense sometimes, but I knew he was indicating my stomach.  I’d ignored his advice for a long time, but at that point--caught between sciatic and a surgeon’s knife--I chose to lose weight.  From that point in November 2019 until March 15, 2020, I lost 44 pounds.

That end date is very important.  Those of you who have been around during the last couple of years will recognize that as the first lockdown.  

At the time, I didn’t notice that I was putting weight back on.  It happened so slowly that I never caught on to the fact that I was sliding back (or back-sliding as Baptists are wont to call it) into bad habits.

So by November 3, 2021, I’d put back on 27 of the pounds I’d taken off before.

I’ve lost and regained hundreds of pounds over the course of my lifetime.  Quite frankly, even though I’ve always been fat (I was going to say “a bit on the husky side,” but I might as well own it), it’s always been easy for me to lose weight: I simply stop eating.  I just lock-in that crazy, obsessive-compulsive part of myself that I used to get my doctoral degree, and I pushed on through.  

In short, I made myself crazy.

Those who’ve been closest to me will testify to the truth of that last sentence.

My hope--and it is just a hope--that this time I will be able to avoid insanity.  I’ve got an app.  It has put me on a 2000 calorie a day budget.  I log everything I put into my mouth, and it has a nice library of foods with their calories that makes it easy to log.

On Thanksgiving, I was able to eat everything I wanted to, some of it in incredibly tiny amounts.

I weigh myself every day.  This might be the one lasting bit of knowledge that I brought out of my stint as chair of the university assessment committee: You have a target, you put your measures in place, and when you are off your target you do something.

I’m almost 60 years old.  I’ve been heavy my whole life.  I have no illusions.  By this time I know what my tendencies are.

The app asked me to set a goal.  Initially, it was to avoid surgery, and I think that’s a good one.  If the EMT folks ever come to get me, I’d like to make it easier on them.  And I suppose the final goal will be to make it easier on the pallbearers. 

But I have no illusions.  

Losing weight (and gaining weight for that matter) is easier than maintaining it. Statistically, you are either going up or coming down; there is no maintaining.

Anyway,if you offer me a cookie, and I start channelling Samuel L. Jackson, this is the reason.

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 Rose Window

The Rose Window

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are surrounded by beauty, both seen and unseen.

For the first time in the 32 years I’ve been in town, I visited the interior of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.  I’ve been walking by it almost every day since I started my walking discipline back in 1996.  During that time, every time I passed it, I’d created my own mental image of what it looked like inside.

I was totally wrong.  I’d even gotten the orientation of the sanctuary wrong, though in highsight I don’t know how.

The church faces the south and there is a circular stained glass rose window up toward the peak of the roof.  As beautiful as this window is from the outside, it is even more beautiful from the inside, at least on a bright, sunny day.

When the sun is shining, not only does the backlighting bring out the colors, but the window shapes the sun’s rays, bringing them down to an oval (an elliptical region to be precise) on the floor.  As the sun goes from east to west across the sky, the oval goes from west to east.  

Since the church faces south and the altar is on the north side of the sanctuary, the aisle that goes between the benches follows a north-south line.  Because of this, at one point of time during the day, the oval is centered exactly on that north-south line.  That moment of time is what astronomers refer to as Solar noon.

It’s called “Solar noon” rather than simply “noon” because it doesn’t always occur at 12 o’clock.  Indeed, it hardly ever does.  But it is our original noon. People were noticing when the sun was high in the sky long before anyone ever thought about inventing a clock. Solar noon is nature’s noon.  It is the noon that we learned the idea of noon from, the Mother of all Noons.  Then we mechanized time; calibrated it;redefined it; and have tried to give the impression it belongs to us altogether.

But the sun shining through the rose window, pouring its light in front of the altar bears witness to the fact it was there first.  Let the clock on the wall say what it will, the sun will continue along its ancient highway in heaven.

I find that fact more beautiful than the colors from the stained glass.

We are surrounded by things like this.  Just as I’ve been walking past this beautiful church with its wonderful rose window for three decades, what else have I been walking past?

There is beauty, like the stained glass inside the church, that only requires us to step through the door to see, but there is another kind of beauty as well.  There is a beauty you have to prepare yourself to see.

A couple of decades ago, I attended a mathematical conference. A woman gave a research talk that was of such astounding beauty that it touched me.  It was a beautiful result in my area of specialization that she presented in a very clear way.  To a random person from the street it would’ve sounded like nonsense.  They would’ve understood the words as being English words; they would’ve understood that the sentences were grammatically correct; but the meaning of it would have escaped them.  And they certainly wouldn’t have seen the beauty of it.

I was left simply in awe.

I’d had to work for years and years to be able to appreciate the presentation. I’d walked through door after door, reading article upon article.  When the talk was finished, I thought, “If only for this, it was all worth it.”

We are surrounded by beauty.  Some of it is available to us just by walking through the right door.  Some of it requires an amazing amount of work to see.

It’s all grace.

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 Ties that Bind

 The Ties that Bind

By Bobby Neal Winters

That we continue to exist after we die--to me--is just a fact.  I’m not talking about ghosts--though I won’t rule those out at some suitable level of abstraction.  

Before I go on, let me warn the reader that this is going to be a mess because I am still working out my thoughts on this and I’m not nearly as smart as I think I am.  So be forewarned.

We like to think of ourselves as individuals.  Individuality is a problematic notion.  Human beings are born as naked, helpless creatures and remain that way for some time.  (For some, this is into their thirties.) We are born totally dependent and with the help of our parents, our teachers, and other people in our lives, we gradually reduce the bonds of dependency.

But it never quite disappears.

True, there are some people who give more help than they receive, but even they receive help.  And they receive the sort of help that can’t be repaid.  They can’t just cut themselves off from everyone else.  In the words of the song, “Everybody needs somebody sometime.”

By virtue of this, we have connection with others. (My grammar checker doesn’t like “connection” as a singular in the previous sentence, but the computers don’t rule us...yet.)  That connection is real.  They are in our heads even when they are not in our presence. 

We had our kitchen door replaced.  For years it squeaked, and we could live with that, but the cats had about ripped it to shreds so we had it replaced with a metal one and a storm door. (That will show the cats.) Now the squeak is gone.

For years, my wife’s dear mother would come in through that door, and the squeak would be a signal for us that she was coming into our home. Our minds would reorder themselves in anticipation of her visit.

Between the time she died and the time the door was replaced, the door would squeak, and I would think, “Janet is coming,” as an automatic reflex.  Then my conscious mind would kick in, and correct me, no that is not going to happen.

Yet, from time to time, something happens at that corner of the house that gives me the same reaction; this happens to my wife too.  Janet is still here, if only in our heads and hearts.

This is because we are not completely individuals.  Our existence is spread out through the herd, as it were.

It is as if we are tied to each other with rubber bands.  When we are in the process of dying, those rubber bands are stretched tighter and tighter.  When we die, the bands are cut at the point of connection.  They spring out and sting those to whom they are connected, but the connections are still there.  

They are still a part of us.

How we live our lives will determine what those who remain make of the connections when we die.

Whenever I have that fraction of a second when I feel that Janet is going to enter the room, it’s a happy moment.  The next moment is a realization of grief.  Perhaps, I simply need to learn to turn that grief into an appreciation for the continued relationship.

Like I said, I am still working it out.

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. )

Cain and Abel; Caf-Pow; and Lunch Ladies

 Cain and Abel; Caf-Pow; and Lunch Ladies

By Bobby Neal Winters

Human beings are incredibly strange.

I could just leave that first sentence there and never write anything truer.  It’s right up there with two plus two equals four.  But let me expand a bit.

Last week I mentioned the story of Cain and Abel.  Cain’s sacrifice was not accepted and it hurt his feelings.  He was jealous of Abel and you know the result of that.  Before everything went to pot, God told Cain not to worry about what anyone else was doing: Do better yourself, and that will be recognized.

We have a need to be recognized.

Eleven years ago, when I was still getting my feet wet in administration, I did something to ease tension in a particular situation and, as a result of this, I was given a “Caf-Pow.”  For those of you who don’t know, Caf-Pow is a fictional energy drink on the TV series NCIS that Gibbs gives to Abbie for a job well done.  As this is fictional, the Caf-Pow cup given me was handmade. It even came with a Pepsi.  It was a seemingly small thing, but I still have the cup.

Symbols of recognition are important.

This next bit is more complicated.  We human beings have some system of hierarchy that works on an unconscious level.  It is far from transparent.  I remember a story from forty years ago about a football player at my Alma Mater who let himself into a place in the cafeteria that had been roped off.  This was a big guy; a big man on campus; he eventually went on to play for the New York Jets.  A little lunch lady who barely came up to his belly-button read him the riot act and he moved back into the part of the cafeteria that was not roped off all the time apologizing, “Yes, ma’am. I am sorry ma’am.”

We have this invisible hierarchical structure that we all fit into, and sometimes, especially if you try to be modest and humble, it is hard to know where you fit into it.  Sometimes they hand out titles to help with this, but again, if you seek to be modest and humble, it is hard to recognize that you have status in the hierarchy.

I’ve spent some space explaining this, because I’m trying to get a handle on it myself.  The point is that if you are “higher in the hierarchy” people will count what you say more heavily than they would otherwise.  Your praises will raise them higher; your criticisms will take them lower.

If you are a person who still sees himself as a little Okie boy playing in the dirt, it can be kind of hard to get your head around, but there it is.

This tells me if we are to try to do better--even if we seek to be modest and humble--we need to have some knowledge of our place in this invisible hierarchy.  Our words can hurt; our words can heal; we must be aware.

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. )

Red on My Ledger

 Red on My Ledger

By Bobby Neal Winters

When my wife and I were married, it was in a Presbyterian Church.  The minister, knowing our plans to become Methodists when we joined a church together after our marriage, noted a difference between the way the Methodists and Presbyterians say the Lord’s Prayer.  

“The property-minded English Methodist pray for their trespasses to be forgiven, but a good Scottish Presbyterian would rather be forgiven his debts than his trespasses any day.”

Our sin is viewed as a debt, but as a debt owed to whom? 

Natasha Romanoff, aka “The Black Widow”, from the Marvel Avenger movies uses the phrase “red on my ledger” in referring to her past misdeeds.  She uses it to answer the question of why she is taking part in the Avengers’ activities.

A ledger is a place where we keep account of our business transactions.  Traditionally, profit is entered in black, but debts are entered in red.  For her the red takes on a second meaning as it is the color of blood, and she has had a very bloody past.  She has a deep sense--using a word the Avengers would never use--that she has sinned. 

But to whom is the debt owed?  Who can she repay?  The people she has sinned against are dead. 

By being part of the Avengers, being one of the good guys, she is trying to get that red off her ledger.  She is trying to atone. Her character progresses, but the red--in her heart at least--remains on her ledger.  She does not feel forgiven.  Whatever she’s done, it doesn’t feel like enough.

Blood is a part of our Christian tradition.

The first sacrifices mentioned in the Bible were those of Cain and Abel.  Abel’s was accepted but Cain’s was not, so Cain--in a fit of jealousy--killed Abel.

One question that always comes up is why didn’t God accept Cain’s offering?  This has been debated for literally thousands of years, but one answer is that Cain’s offering didn’t require the shedding of blood, it wasn’t a true sacrifice. 

It is more than somewhat perverse that while Cain did not shed the blood of an animal, in killing Abel out of jealousy, blood was shed, and Abel becomes Cain’s blood sacrifice as it were.  Because of this, in ancient Christian tradition, Abel is a type of Christ.  Christ’s blood wipes out all of our ledgers.

In Avengers: Endgame, Natasha sacrificed herself in place of her friend Clint Barton in order that they secure the “Soul Stone,” a McGuffin needed by their fellow Avengers. Ultimately none of her other actions--again, in her heart at least--were able to remove the red from her ledger. 

To put it in Christian language, the “red on her ledger” was a Cross to her.  Christ invited us to take up our crosses and follow him. When you take up your Cross,  you are giving your life.  For the overwhelming vast majority of us, we give our lives minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day over the course of our normal three-score and ten in service to our family, our loved-ones, and our neighbors.  A few are called to larger sacrifices, to martyrdom.

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. )

2020, 2021, 2022, Pogo, and Pittsburg

 2020, 2021, 2022, Pogo, and Pittsburg

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last year about this time we began looking forward to the New Year with a great deal of eagerness as if the changing of a digit from zero to one would magically make everything new.

I think we are all over that.

There were some who believed the election results would magically settle everything down.  This is an easy trap to fall into.  It’s like having a Judas goat we can put all of our sins into and chase out into the desert.

The trouble with elected officials is that we elect them.  They  get elected by getting their messages synchronised with what we want to hear.  The successful ones put together a montage image that is attractive to just enough of the electorate while their opponents are hideous to just enough of the electorate.  But in the end both sides come from the same place.

To quote Pogo one more time, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

That having been said about politics at the national level, I am much more sanguine about politics at the local level.  This I think is due to the place I live.  

It’s a pretty good place.

It was my pleasure to be present at a candidate forum at the Noon Rotary Club the other day.  All seven candidates were there.  As you undoubtedly know, we’ve got three open seats that will be filled by the top vote-getters from this slate of seven.  From these seven, I would be comfortable with a random draw of any three.

This is not just coming from what they said.  They said what most candidates running for office would say.  Just as you can put together what a football coach is going to say about the coming year (“We had a good year last year, but we lost some strong players.  The folks we are playing against this coming year have been under-rated...”) there are things all local candidates for office say.

This is coming from the fact I’ve known some of these people for many years in contexts where it matters.  The word that comes to mind is this: Solid. These are solid people with solid values, and I am kind of proud to see such a group drawn from our fine community.

How is such a fine community formed?

I don’t know for sure, but let me tell you about my best guess.  There are two pieces that have to be put together.  If you do the first without the second, you will wind up with what we have on the national level.

Step one: You need to learn how to take care of yourself.  Step two: You’ve got to help your neighbor to do the same.  Billions of people working for thousands of years have been working on the details of implementation with, shall we say, mixed results.

So next year is probably going to be a lot like this one, but I am optimistic nonetheless.  Here in our little town we have good people. 

I know I’ve become better by being among 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. )

Darkness, Cold, and Horror

 Darkness, Cold, and Horror

By Bobby Neal Winters

Halloween is a time for horror.

It is a dark time.  While the nights will be getting longer until just before Christmas, at Halloween it is just about as dark as it is going to get. Night is yet upon us when we leave for work in the morning as it is upon us again when we go home in the evening.  We wrap it around us like a cloak and hide within it. 

During the summer if we wanted to see the stars, we had to wait until very, very late, but around Halloween--provided the clouds don’t blacken even them out--they are there to see by the time supper rolls around.  While their beauty might provide comfort to some, if you think about it too much, they will help horror to descend upon you. They are reminders that the Earth is a mote of dust in space; we are fragile creatures protected from the many dangers of the universe by an ever so thin layer of atmosphere; one stray asteroid, and we are done for.

It has happened before.

The coming of darkness also brings horror because things happen in the darkness, things we cannot see coming, things we cannot defend against.  If we could see it, we could devise a plan; if we could see it, we could run from it; but we can’t. It’s there hidden in the darkness waiting for us, and there is nothing we can do. 

The name Halloween comes from All Hallow’s Eve. All Hallow’s Day was what we used to call All Saints Day.  From that nomenclature, one might think that All Saints Day came first, and Halloween followed.  The secular scholars will be quick to tell you that Christian missionaries co-opted the pagan holiday creating All Saints Day in reaction to it.  (“Bad missionaries. Go sit in the corner. No supper for you.”)  

For the sake of argument, we can grant that and note we’ve come from a point where we paid bribes to keep kids from over-turning outhouses to giving candy to children dressed as fairy princesses and ninja turtles.  (There are those who say it was human sacrifices in the beginning instead of tipping over outhouses, but that is another argument.)

Darkness is just a part of the horror.  The cold is coming.  We can’t grow our crops in the northerly latitudes, and unless we’ve prepared enough, starvation will come.

Halloween is a time after the harvest is done.  You’ve taken stock of your work and preparations from the previous year.  If you’ve not stored up enough food, death from hunger in the cold awaits.  Here the ignorant have an advantage: if you were just too stupid to plan, then you likely don’t know what lay ahead; if you were smart enough to plan, and the plan didn’t come together, you know the horror that awaits.  You can dread it as it comes.  If you are evil in addition to being smart, you start looking to see which of the neighborhood children is the fattest.

Trick or Treat indeed.

But surely this horror is all in the past?  Surely our knowledge will save us?

I think we’ve all seen these last couple of years that our knowledge is as thin as our atmosphere.  Unless we do a better job of teaching our children, here comes the darkness, here comes the cold, here comes the horror.

Halloween and All Saints Day are an inextricable pair. The Horror of Halloween is in tension against the Hope of the Saints.  Halloween is about the darkness of ignorance; All Saints Day is a witness to the Saints overcoming that darkness.

Now we stare into the darkness.  We know the light will come again. We pray that we will be strong enough to last until that happens.

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. )

 I am...Iron Man

By Bobby Neal Winters

The character Tony Stark is introduced to us in the movie Iron Man.  He is a billionaire, philanthropist, genius, and playboy.  And he is also a narcissist.  He is kidnapped and has to create his Iron Man suit in order to escape. These few sentences summarize the first two acts.  In the third act, he comes home and does some superhero stuff.

When he does the superhero stuff, he is doing it as Iron Man, and no one knows it's Tony Stark.  The folks at his company and the folks in the super-secret organization SHIELD want to keep his identity secret.  At the end of the movie he is doing a press conference from a script, when he impulsively decides to simply say it, “I am Iron Man.”

He’s still a billionaire, genius, playboy, narcissist at that point, but something else is born. Tony Stark begins the process of growing into Iron Man, but his uttering the sentence claiming the name was the act of creation.

Those of us who follow the MCU (the Marvel Cinematic Universe) know there are many interwoven stories with many villains, but the prime villain these stories are working toward is Thanos. (This is the Greek word for Death, so it’s all there in the name.) 

At the climax of this part of the saga, Thanos gathered together the so-called Infinity Stones and embedded them in a gauntlet.  Doing so gives him the power to rid the universe of intelligent life with the snap of his fingers.  Those who’ve seen the movies will realize I am leaving a lot of details out for the sake of brevity.

After a huge battle, Thanos, wearing the gauntlet, with all appearances of victory, snaps his fingers while uttering the line, “I am inevitable.”

However, Stark has taken the stones by subterfuge and has embedded them in his own gauntlet. The use of the gauntlet releases gamma rays which are fatal to normal human beings, and Tony in spite of being a billionaire, genius, etc. is a normal human being and knows that using it will be the end of him. 

Nonetheless, Stark snaps his fingers to defeat Thanos’ alien army and save the world while answering Thanos with the phrase, “I am Iron Man.”  

The world is saved, but not for him. He dies a billionaire, philanthropist, genius, but not a narcissist or playboy.

The process begun when he first uttered that phrase has come to completion.  He’s become the ideal set forward in the words.

There is power in the word.

God spoke the universe into existence.

In his epistle, James warns us that the tongue is like the rudder of a ship; Jesus warns us that we are made unclean by what comes out of us.  The things we say affect us. Can we even create ourselves out of our own utterances?

Being who I am, when I hear Stark say, “I am Iron Man,” I also hear, “I am that I am,”; “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light”; “I am the Vine and you are the branches.” Is that something real or is it just philosophical tinnitus?

I listened to a long YouTube video the other day explaining that chairs don’t exist.  As I was sitting in a chair as I listened, I wasn’t too worried about it; maybe I should’ve been.  It did highlight the difficulty of capturing concrete objects in words.  At a certain level, a thing is a chair because I say it is, because a human says it is. That introductory phrase “At a certain level” is probably carrying a lot of weight, but let's let that go. 

But there is also a process involved.  One day some caveman was tired of sitting on the ground, cobbled some rocks together, and said, “This is a chair.”  The folks around him were confused because they’d never heard of such a thing, but as time passed people figured it out. Now I can put a box up against the wall and call it a chair and people will get it.  The idea of “chair” has propagated itself through the collective conscience. But a human calling it a chair was what got it started. While chairs might be made out of wood, plastic, or naugahyde, they were created with a word.

If we declare an identity and hold ourselves accountable, we will grow toward that identity.

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 Beat of the Drum

 The Beat of the Drum

By Bobby Neal Winters

Listen to the wind blow,

Watch the Sun rise.

--Fleetwood Mac

I am not a musician.  When I talk about it, it is like a eunuch discussing sex: ever the observer. But here goes.  One day while listening to Fleetwood Mac’s song The Chain.  The music is all about that drum beat.  There is a single rhythmic pounding.  I guess the drummer has a pedal that he uses to create a rhythm on his bass drum.

The rest of the musicians come in and play their parts around that. They have to be in time with each other or they might step on each other's notes as it were.  In this way they are like dancers, they don’t want to bump into each other or it is disaster. 

Building an active life is something like that.  There has to be a bass drum beating somewhere to create the rhythm, to create a structure to build everything else around.  We all benefit to a certain degree from the 7-day cycle we call the week, but I do more so because church provides my bass drum. Even in the days when I only did Sunday School, even during the lockdown when I only did online Bible study, the weekly visit with others who seek God helped me keep it all together, helped me keep a calibration on time.

Others have different ways.  They’ve got their own bass drums.

Once you’ve got that established, you can start working-in other things.  You can set up a daily routine.  Just as they play the notes on the banjo between the beats of the drum, you can run through your days.

These days I am up early with stretching, shaving, making hot tea, eating breakfast, studying Spanish (and French), and then off to work.  Work is less predictable.  Ten years ago I thought of myself as being like Christopher Robin in a Winnie the Pooh book; these days I am more like Liz Lemon in 30 Rock. Then I come home, take a walk, eat dinner, watch some TV, stretch, and to bed.

Thus we cycle: “Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”  But that is okay. Every day is part of the song; every day is a note vibrating on a string.

The weeks stack up and the song changes.  We progress through the year: winter yields to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall. We complete a circle. So I look back to that previous sentence and as if “progress” is the right word if we just circle back to where we were before.  And I have to say yes.  Just like singing a new hymn.  On the first verse, we might be tentative; on the second verse we are stronger; by the third verse, we’ve got it, especially if it is a good chorus.

“I can still hear you saying you would never break the Chain.” (Not a hymn I admit, but thanks for your forbearance.)

Our life is a song we sing.  Gordon Lightfoot would say, “The song that you sing should not be too sad and be sure not to sing it too slow.”

But you have to have the beat of the drum to tie it all together, to pace it all out.  You have to have something to weave your melody around.  What is your foundation?

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. )

Requiem for the Peacemaker

 Requiem for the Peacemaker

They dress the wound of my people

    as though it were not serious.

‘Peace, peace,’ they say,   

 when there is no peace.

--Jeremiah 6:14

My tendency is to be a peacemaker.  I think this is because my father and my big brother were both hard of hearing when I was a boy. We would be working in the garden or in the yard, and one would say something, and the other would misunderstand it, and there would be an argument.

As I was the only one present with two good ears, I saw it as my responsibility to try to make peace between them.

Somewhere along the way, it became part of my self-image.

More than ten years ago when I was president of the union on campus, there was a disagreement between a member of the union and one of the administrators.  I thought I could mediate a peace between the two.  It was then that the late Dr. Robert Ratzlaff, who was the academic vice president at the time, passed on a very simple, very useful bit of wisdom, “Sometimes people just aren’t going to get along.”

I took it to heart then, and the wisdom of it has become more and more apparent as my experience of the world has increased.  As for the two people I was trying to mediate, they never got along.  I think one of them is dead now. The chance for rapprochement is over.

So what do you do when you have two individuals that don’t get along with each other and you can’t fire or kill either of them? (Killing: It’s not only wrong, it is against the law. This is my mantra.) I go to the Bible for guidance.  There I find a pair of my favorite characters: Jacob and Laban.  After a while, they didn’t even want to try to get along.  They were tied together by Leah and Rachel.  Laban loved them as his daughters and Jacob loved them as his wives.

They piled up a big pile of rocks and used it to divide up the world: You stay on that side; I will stay on this; Leah and Rachel can pass back and forth between.

And since there was no Facebook, Twitter, or anything else like that for them to snipe at each other, that settled it.

This brings us to an important distinction: Solving a problem versus managing a problem.

We like to solve problems because then they...solved.  We don’t have to think about it anymore.  It is all over.

Right now, by all indications, smallpox is solved. We vaccinated everybody and the smallpox virus has gone extinct. (Except for the labs where they keep it around for some reason.) We need not deal with smallpox.

COVID is not solved. It is being managed.  How successfully? Listen to the debate around you and make up your own mind.  Nothing illustrates the wisdom of Dr. Ratzlaff’s words like the hatred filled debate that is swirling around us now.

If we could make a pile of rocks and keep one group on one side and one on the other, that would be quite helpful, but because of social media we can’t.  And in any case, there isn’t just one side. Oh, and it’s been politicized, so we have two political parties which have no incentive to turn down the heat on it.

It can’t be solved; it can’t be managed.  What is a peacemaker to do?

Move out from the position in the middle, take the rocks you were going to use to separate the combatants, and hide under one of them. Or I guess you could get some popcorn and watch the donnybrook. 

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. )

Dread, T-wrenches, and Courage

 Dread, T-wrenches, and Courage

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was lecturing to my class the other day, and I made the statement, “Everything is easier the second time you do it.”  Almost by the time it was out of my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true.  But it still carries a useful truth. Let me explain this contradiction.

We’ve all faced things we dreaded.  I hate the word dread, but there it is.  Dread is an unprofitable emotion.  It takes something that is unpleasant and spreads that unpleasantness over time without lessening its intensity.  There are, nevertheless, things we dread, but so often once we do them they are not quite so back.  We can become more skilled at them and make them less onerous. We discover they were entirely different than what we expected.

So in that sense many, many things can be easier the second time you do them.

But in class I had flash through my mind something that had happened many years ago.  It had come a winter storm. There was four inch of snow on the ground, and it was 20 degrees outside.  The plumbing for our kitchen sink comes up parallel to an outside wall.  You guessed it: It froze and burst.  

At that time I had no inside cut off, so I ran out to cut it off at the meter. I had to get a shovel to pry off the lid to the meter well and I had with me a crescent wrench to turn off the valve.  When the lid came off, I discovered why they call it a meter well: It was filled with water well above the valve.

I plunged my arm into the water up to the elbow to turn it off.  I was having trouble getting it done the first time, so I removed my wrench from the water, readjusted it, and went in again.  

It was more difficult to do the second time.

Knowledge is one piece of understanding this.  On one hand, learning how to do something makes the mechanics of doing it easier. On the other hand, knowing how painful something is makes it more difficult to repeat.

What came out of that experience was I spent $7 to buy a T-Wrench that you can use so you don’t have to plunge your arm into the water.  They cost $21 now, so you can see this was all some time ago.  I wrote about this experience at the time, so the more dedicated among you might remember it.  

Recently, I wonder that in addition to knowledge, there might be something else involved: Courage.  In my case, the baby-courage of sticking my arm into the freezing water to get that valve turned off.  The grownup courage it takes for a woman to have a child, and even a second one.

I talked about dread earlier.  I do consider it unprofitable at best and destructive at worst, but dread is often overcome by courage. Courage overcoming dread can lead us to go through unpleasant things and master them.  At the very least, we may be able to find ways to cope--our own personal T-wrenches.

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. )

Drama and Ice Cream

 Drama and Ice Cream

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last night we went to Braums to pick up supper and bring it home.  We’d turned in our order and were waiting when an Indian couple came with their ice cream cones and sat down at one of the booths by us.

For the sake of my readers in Oklahoma, let me say, yes, Indian.  These were not descendants of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of our continent.  They were from India or from some region in ethnic continuity with it.  And they were speaking a language that was not English.  It had the tonal quality of Hindi, but the specifics don’t matter.

I said they were speaking, but it would be more precise to say she was speaking.  A lot.  She was speaking in a tone that the males of the species had better learn to listen to should they wish to lead simple, happy lives.  

They were each dressed like they were out on a date, and she was dressed in a very classy manner.

As I said, she was talking to him as they both sat on the same bench of the booth.

Were I to guess--and please allow me that liberty--I would say she was giving him an unsolicited assessment of his character.  It sounded thorough. I don’t think she missed too many spots.

Then, at one point, he gently plopped his ice cream cone down on its side in front of her, and walked quietly out the door of Braums.  I think that my wife and I may have been the only ones to notice. 

For her part, she sat there in the booth for a small space as if nothing had happened.  Then she carefully gathered her accoutrements, both ice creams included, as if nothing happened, and left quietly out the door of Braums as well.

I couldn’t see if she departed in the car with him or she went home by Shank’s Mare. It will remain a mystery.

Again, I think that my wife and I were the only ones who noticed this as it was done in such a quiet, classy fashion.

I was going to say I hope they work it all out, but I think it’s better to say, I hope they both find their way.

Culture--which includes art, literature, religion, and so many other things--is a collection of ways we develop for living in a fallen world.  Things don’t always work out the way we would like or the way we would expect.  As human beings, we learn ways of dealing.

Their cultural way of dealing with a disagreement in a public place was quiet and classy.  That makes them different from many of us.  However, they are united with the rest of us in the challenges that come with being men and women.  Our feelings are deep and strong. They are often difficult to contain.

But I have now seen this can be done with dignity and class.

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. )

Mowing and Yellowjackets

 Mowing and Yellowjackets

By Bobby Neal Winters

As those of you who labor behind the mechanical beasts known as lawn mowers are fully aware, this season has been more strenuous than average.  For those who don’t, let me explain.  All God-fearing mowers--and I am more afraid with each passing day--begin the season on a weekly rotation. (I say weekly rotation, and most of us mean seven days, but there are those who mow every eighth day and eliminate a whole mowing after seven repetitions by this numerical sleight of hand, but let’s not go too far out into the weeds.)

After a while, as the spring rains subside, we can make the shift to mowing every other week. (I tried to write bi-weekly, but does that mean every two weeks or twice a week. God forbid!) That took longer than normal this year.  Typically the last time we have to mow every two weeks is around the first of July, when rain becomes a fable.  This year, by way of contrast, I remained in my two-week cycle until August.  

Quite frankly, I was only able to go from early August until early September without mowing because I simply didn’t have time to. In any case, it has been an unusual mowing year.

And then came the Yellowjackets.

No, I haven’t been stung, and I shall endeavor not to be, but my sweet wife has.  She has been painting some trim on the exterior of the house.  At one moment, she noted some Yellowjackets keeping her company; in the next moment she’d been stung five times.

She is the sturdy one from our family.  Five stings would’ve put any of the rest of us in the hospital.

The Yellowjackets are a particularly nasty member of the order hymenoptera.  I’ve seen them referred to as [redacted] with wings, where the redacted word is the plural of a rude term for the anal sphincter. They are very territorial. Bees will only bother you if you bother them; I’ve actually seen my wife pet a bumblebee.  Yellowjackets are proactive.  If they think that you might eventually think about bothering them, they are on you.  Bees make honey; Yellowjackets make misery.

You may have noticed I am capitalizing Yellowjacket.  I am afraid not to.  I am afraid of not showing them sufficient respect.

My wife went into defense mode because she wanted to finish her painting.  She put together a Yellowjacket trap that she found online.  It consisted of a milk jug, soapy water, and a strip of salami on a string.  Yellowjackets perished in it by the thousands...and still they came.  It was like watching one of the more over-the-top zombie movies.

This is my wife, the butterfly lady.  She has a butterfly larva she is fostering right now. She loves living creatures, and they love her.

But the Yellowjackets.

She escalated her effort through several levels of chemical warfare, until she thought the numbers were sufficiently diminished for her to continue painting in peace.

No.

They got her again.

This time on her arm.  From one side, she looks like Popeye. 

The territory was yielded to the Yellowjackets.  

What does this have to do with mowing?  If you walk by my house, and look into the back yard, you will be able to see approximately where the Yellowjackets are.  Their territory is unmown. We’ve yielded them 100 square feet of the state of Kansas as theirs until the winter freeze takes them. 

We are told they will not use the same nests next year.

We shall see.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

From Time to Time

 From Time to Time

By Bobby Neal Winters

From time to time, it is good to think of some of the good things that were done for us by those who came before us.  Some of them saw problems and came up with simple, long-term solutions to those problems.  Consider the calendar.

The year--and by year I mean Solar year--is 365.24217 days long.  The Solar year is the length of time it takes to pass from the first day of spring in one year to the next. (It is to be compared to the Sidereal year, but just let it go.)  We lay out our calendar to try to fit the calendar year, but we’ve got a problem, that fraction.  

We have to divide the calendar into an integral number of years and that fraction gets in the way.  We like to have the first day of spring to hit around March 20, but if we set the calendar year as having 365 days, the first day of spring starts moving away from that.  In about four years, it’ll be March 21.  In forty years it will be March 30.  In 80 years, it will be April 10.  

Do you begin to see the problem?  You’d have to start tracking spring in a way separate from the calendar, and it’s quite reasonable to think that knowing when the first day of spring is was the original purpose of the calendar.

This problem was fiddled with for a while, but someone, and I will say Julius Caesar--and I know people who will correct me--decided to add a “leap day” to the calendar every four years and call those years leap years.  If you do the math--or even if you don’t--that works out to having a calendar year that is 365.25 days long.  This is closer to 365.24217, but it’s not dead on.  You are off by 0.00783 of a day in the other direction.

That difference is a lot smaller.  That should solve the problem, but--as the Steve Miller Band said, “Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future....” After 15 hundred years, you are off by 11 days. Spring is starting much earlier in the year.

This time the powers that be fiddled with more sophistication.  They noticed that if you skipped adding a leap year every 100 year you would get a calendar year that was 365.24 years long on the average.  This is a little better but not all that much.  After 1500 years, you will still be 3 days off. This particular reform was being promoted by Pope Gregory of the Roman Catholic Church, and they believe in eternity.  Someone figured out that if you skipped adding a leap year in years divisible by 100 unless that year was divisible by 400 then you got a year that was 365.2425 days long.  This differs from the true value by 0.00033.

In 1500 years, you will be off by less than 12 hours. In 10,000 years you will be off by 3 days.  This is what we like to call someone else’s problem.

And all we have to do is follow a rule that says add a year to the calendar in years divisible by 4. However, when the century turns, you can skip adding the day. Unless the year is divisible by 400 hundred, then add it anyway. Most of us remember the “divisible by 4” part.  The fact that we have a presidential election that year helps.

We only have to remember not to add the day every 100 years.  Although I’ve never had to deal with that because, the only turn of the century I’ve experienced was the year 2000 which was divisible by 400, so it was a leap year as usual. 

One of the beautiful things about this solution is that it requires only a tiny amount of effort and even that small amount of effort is spread across years, centuries, or nearly a half a millennium. Very few of you reading this will have to remember that we get to skip a leap year in 2100, and we’re clear on remembering not to skip it until 2400.

Actually, “we” don’t have to remember.  The people who make the calendars do.  If we had to do anything, there would be people against it just as there are people against the time change. 

Maybe I shouldn’t’ve said anything. 

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. )

No Good Deed

 No Good Deed

By Bobby Neal Winters

Oscar Wilde said, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

This is an axiom of administrative work.  

I would like to explore it a little, but I will need to go back more than forty years to do it.

My first car was a 1965 Chevy II Nova.  I’ve mentioned it before.  In Spanish its name was more honest: No va.  It translates as “it doesn’t go.”  And mine didn’t go.  It had a maximum speed of about 60.  My dad had bought it for me for $75 and had his friend get it running for $300 more.  It had four doors and it’s windows rolled up and down. 

I drove it to school. 

My school was two miles from my house.  Between my school and my house was the town of Harden City.  Let me describe Harden City to you.  A gravel road crossed a blacktop road and there were a handful of buildings there.

In one of those buildings, there lived a poor family.  I am going to call them the Cunninghams because it suits me.  There are levels of poor and ways of being poor.  The Cunninghams were poor in money, but not poor in spirit. 

I say they weren’t poor in spirit because they asked me for rides to and from school.  They were in grade school and I was in high school. I could’ve said no and made it stick, but I didn’t.  It was nothing to me.  They were on the way. I pulled about 100 feet off the main road, dropped them off, and then headed back on my way.

I forget how many Cunninghams there were.  Like I say, it was at least 4 decades ago.  There were at least two.  The younger one--who was 7 or 8 at the time--had the foulest mouth I have ever heard on a boy of his age, but he had his big brother, who I will call Walter Jr because it pleases me,  to take care of him.  It became a routine.  I did it for a year or two and haven’t thought much about it since.  

Then in the course of talking to my brother, he mentioned that Walter Jr. had caught COVID and was in the hospital.

Then, stretched out over time, came news of his gradual decline and death.

His demise has affected me disproportionally to our relationship.  Our entire interaction with each other had been in five minute intervals on a daily basis over maybe a year or two; but I find myself with tears in my eyes.

All I know of him is this: He’d been a good brother who got rides for him and his little brother. I saw his obituary picture on Facebook, and I wouldn’t’ve recognized him if I’d passed him on the street.

We are connected by a tiny, tiny act of kindness on my part that came at no cost to me.

Until now.

Every interaction we have with a fellow human being binds them to us by a tiny thread. As we grow older and busier these threads are spread out.  Those threads we form when we are younger are bunched closer together.  They become intertwined with other threads, other memories.  This is tied up with memories of my car and therefore memories of my father, my mother, some of my school teachers who are many years gone.  

The well of tears is deep.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Do them anyway.

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 and the COVID controversy

 Bubba and the COVID controversy

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last week I got a call from my old friend Bubba back home.  It had been a while since he’d called me.  So long, in fact, that some of you had been asking about him.  I’d been worried myself, but I put off calling him. Bubba is a complicated soul.  While he often comes off as an unsophisticated country bumpkin, under that rough facade resides the soul of an artist.  It’s best when I let him call me.

I smiled when I saw his name on the caller ID.

“Hello, Bubba,” I began. “It’s so good to...,” but I didn’t get a chance to finish.

“Hey there!” He talked over me. “Can you believe how stupid people are?”

There was an easy question, I thought.  Yes, yes I can believe how stupid people are.  I work with people.  While there are some who are brilliant beyond compare, others are plumbing the depths and looking for a longer rope. I was about to answer in the affirmative when he continued.

“Can you believe all of these arguments about masks and vaccinations?”

Here he paused to breathe for some reason.  Maybe a junebug had flown into his mouth.

“Yes, it is something, isn’t it.”

“People are fighting about it day and night,” he said. “You can’t scroll for an inch on Facebook without reading posts on it.  And nobody is being nice.”

I was about to agree, but I wasn’t quick enough.

“If you haven’t got the shots, someone will call you an ignorant baboon.  If you have got the shot, someone will call you sheeple. Whatever happened to kindness, whatever happened to patience?”

Here I decided to be more forceful and broke in.

“What do you think about the whole thing?” I asked.

“Well, you know,” he said. “COVID has turned up the heat on everything.  I personally have lost two friends to COVID that I know of.  One of them was a close friend. Both of them would’ve been vaccinated if they could’ve, but they died before the vaccine.  On top of that, COVID has put such a strain on the hospitals, that there are people who have died of other things who would’ve otherwise lived. So, even if you aren’t in a high risk group, getting vaccinated can turn down the strain on the hospitals.

“But it is a free country. While there are limits to freedom, this is one thing that people can choose not to do.”

This confused me because it seemed reasonable.  It was like I didn’t know Bubba any more.

“So you got the shots?” I asked.

“Well I wasn’t going to,” he said. “But I saw some people in line to get something that was free, so I lined up too and I got a shot.  Four weeks later, the same thing happened.”

“Goodbye, Bubba,” I said.

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. )

  

Time for Silence

Time for Silence

By Bobby Neal Winters

Sometimes I put on YouTube while I am going through my email early in the morning just so there will be a sound.  I got into this habit in June of 2017 while I was teaching Elementary Statistics down in Paraguay.  Jean had been going to go with me, but my second grandson had just been born so there went that.  I went down by myself and I got lonesome. The TV was mostly in Spanish so YouTube became my companion. 

There were times I became so hungry to hear English I began talking to myself while walking down the street.  You kind of have to choose your moments or they might take you away.

All of this having been said, there is a lot of value in silence.

I’ve noticed that while there are times that I need to have input from music, from audiobooks, from conversation for my writing process, there are times when all those things do is drive thought from my mind.  The noise of audio input drowns out my internal dialog and my thoughts become sterile.

I must make time for silence.

Silence is useful.  Silence is a thing.  I am not a musician at all, and while we usually think of music as being sound, silence is a part of it.  In music, not only are there symbols for every note, they have symbols for measured silences between notes.  They call them “rests.” 

Often rests denote periods where one musician stops playing for a while to allow others to do their bit.  We need to have something like this for meetings; that’s all I am going to say about that.

Not only do we need silence ourselves, there are times when we need to be silent.  As someone who has made his living in higher education, let me say that I do know something about this.  I was once in a meeting where someone spoke for ten minutes just to say that he didn’t have anything to say about the topic.

And that is a clue: If you don’t have anything to say, then don’t say anything.  You’d think that would come easy, but as illustrated in the anecdote above, it does not, at least not always.

If you’ve ever read James’ epistle--and if you haven’t I encourage you to--you may remember the passage in Chapter 3 about the tongue.  We all understand--or should--the problem of gossip.  But there is another aspect worthy of consideration.  This is the effect that the things we say have on us.  A lot of people are afraid that hearing the wrong things might corrupt us. I won’t say that’s not a problem, but we do have the power to think about what we’ve heard and make up our own minds.

But when we say something, our ego gets attached to it.  Even when we’ve been proven wrong, it is easy to just double-down and stick with our mistake.  As James says, “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts.”

There is much to be said for keeping your mouth shut when you don’t know what you are talking about.  There is also much to be said for changing your mind when you discover that you are wrong, but that is very, very hard.  It is much easier to be silent.

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. )

 Nature and Nature

By Bobby Neal Winters

Have you ever considered how odd it is that we have zoos?  Cattle ranches, I can understand; hunting ranches somewhat; but zoos?  

We rip wild animals out of their natural environments, and put them into enclosures so that we may see them safely. The more “realistic” it is, the better we feel about it.  We pay money for the privilege in most cases, and we believe it is important for our children to see them.  We believe it’s very important.

We do this because we enjoy seeing the animals and our children enjoy seeing the animals.  We like the feeling we get ourselves and we like the vicarious feeling we get from our children.  I enjoy zoos too.  Given a choice between going to a zoo for a few hours and sitting through a sporting event for an equal amount of time, I would choose the zoo every time.

I enjoy it; we enjoy it.  The question is why.

My answer is that it is natural for us to like animals, to like to see animals, to like to be around animals.

This raises (not begs!) another question: Why?  Why is it natural for us to like to be around animals?

One answer would be that we evolved as animals.  If there are other animals around, that means there is water somewhere around.  There are sources of food for the other animals, so there must be a source of food for us, and, of course, the other animals are a source of food for us.  If the other animals are predators, then seeing those predators trapped within a zoo’s enclosure gives us a safe adrenaline rush.

That all sounds quite reasonable, but let's try another.

We were created after all the other animals and given dominion over them.  This dominion is not to be the dominion of a despot over slaves, but it is to be a dominion modeled after the Loving God who created us.  We are to be caretakers rather than despots.  This is built into us.  This is why we have zoos; this is why we have pets.  We have a built-in need to nurture not only our own children, but the animals of the world as well.

First appearances aside, these two characterizations are not really at odds with each other.  They are just written in different languages, in different alphabets, by different typewriters.  Both explain, one gives meaning.

We’ve got raccoons in the neighborhood.  Jean and I walked past the old Methodist parsonage one day and saw a pair of yearlings in the garbage which had been dutifully set out on the curb.  We saw one the size of a full kitchen garbage bag stealing food from our cats as the cats looked on in terror and disgust.  While we were on vacation, a raccoon broke out of the vent on our roof like the Kool-Aid Man. 

Foxes roam around town in the twilight. There are squirrels in every tree.

All of this wildlife around us, but we don’t kill it. (Though that one raccoon is skating on thin ice!) Indeed, it is a subject for conversation and often delight.  We love the animals as long as they don’t encroach too far upon us.  We love seeing them; be love being around them.

It is the way we were made.

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 boring details about an exciting age

 Some boring details about an exciting age

By Bobby Neal Winters

One of the hats that I wear at the university is that I am the Director of the Polymer Chemistry Initiative.  I’m not a chemist, but don’t let that confuse you, because I am an administrator.  We specialize in directing things about which we know zip.  Sometimes it's easier to do if you don’t know anything about it. One of the issues we have is that not many of the general population know much about polymers.  What are they good for?

I recently purchased a 3-D printer.  I say recently, but I’ve had it since mid-June.  It came with some assembly required, and I was able to do that over the course of a Sunday with time enough for Bible Study in between.

The big issue with these devices is getting the bed correctly calibrated.  That took me the better part of a week.  The nozzle kept knocking whatever I was printing off the bed.  I was ever so patient in going through the procedures to calibrate.  Then I noticed a wire that was unplugged from a connector. (For those of you who are familiar with such things, it was the connector to my z-axis stepper.) I astutely plugged the wire back in, and, voila, it works.

I’ve been learning how to use the printer now and a whole new world has opened.

I am using it on my current project.  I want to make a weather station in my backyard.  As I am reaching a certain age, one of my duties will soon include talking about the weather in a level of detail that younger minds are not able to comprehend.  They don’t get how it was possible for us to walk to school twelve miles in the snow, uphill both ways. They will soon enough, but in the meantime, I will be up to me and others like me to fill them in.

I want to be able to tell them about the wind, the humidity, the dew point, how much rain we got last night and when it started.

For this, I need a weather station.  True, our local treasures Doug Heady and Mike Hayslip do give us great information, but they have to cover from Chanute to Bela Vista.  I want the lowdown on the southwest quadrant of Pittsburg.

Yes, you can buy weather stations, and ones that are probably better than what I am going to make.  Yes, they would probably cost less than what I am going to spend on building one.

But what is the fun in that?

For my project, I need a computer controller.  This will either be a Raspberry Pi computer or an Arduino controller.  I am sort of leaning toward the latter right now.  They will need a source of power.  I will be using a 12-volt marine battery.  I need a box to house it all in.  

As I don’t want to be having to interrupt my data to change or charge the battery, I want to have a solar panel to keep the battery charged.

My first priority is to get the power situation in order.  I bought a plastic storage box from Home Despot [sic] to mount everything to and in.  I want the battery and the controller (eventually) to be in the box, but the solar panel will have to be on the outside.  

In order to get the most out of the sunshine, I need to keep the solar panel angled to the south.  To do this, I 3-D printed some brackets to hold it at that angle.  Of course the first solar panel I got didn’t work (I don’t buy  the most expensive kind) and I had made my brackets specifically for that type, so when I bought my second solar panel it, quite naturally, didn’t fit.  As I type this, I am printing out an addition to my original brackets to make them work.

When I am done, I am going to mount my system on the top of a landscaping timber that is planted vertically like a fencepost in my backyard.  I printed a bracket that will hold it to the top of that poll.  I’ve also printed a variety of brackets to hold the battery and wires in place.  Believe me, there are a lot of wires.

If you’ve made it this far, you are probably thinking to yourself, he doesn’t have to have a weather station to become a bore, he’s there on several other fronts already.

I know it and I am okay with that.

But the point of this is the plastic filament that I am printing all this stuff with is a polymer.  These polymers can be created with different properties for different applications.  There is a lot of stuff that is coming together.  It is an exciting age.

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. )

Back from Virginia

 Back from Virginia

By Bobby Neal Winters

I recently got back from a trip to Virginia.  We visited Jamestown, Yorktown, and Monticello. (And they pronounce it Mont-i-CHEL-lo.)  We just soaked in history for three days.  The details presented clarified some perspectives which I think we need to think about as a nation.

Jamestown provides a nice place to look because in those early years we have three big influences on what it means to be an American already present: The English Settlers, the Indigenous Peoples, and the Enslaved Africans.  Yes, while the original colonists Jamestown didn’t have slaves, they did enter into the picture very shortly after the colony was established. 

This has all been swimming through my head for days now.  I’ve been waiting for it to jell so that I could write about it.  Here goes.

There’s been some nasty complicated stuff that those of us who are of English heritage really need to ruminate on.  I would have to include myself in that because as far as I’ve been able to discern, I don’t have a single ancestor who came from anywhere but England.  At various times, I thought there was some Cherokee ancestry; at others, I thought there was some Irish.  But with every DNA test, with every internet ancestry search, it’s just English, English, English.

That is so boring.

The previous sentence would so confuse my colonist ancestors because it was very important to them that they were English.  This seems to have been one of the bones of contention leading up to the American Revolution.  They didn’t feel like they were being treated as Englishmen. Then the Revolution was like a bad divorce. They didn’t want anything to do with England anymore.  

If you look at surveys of ethnicity, you will see a big stripe of “American” there.  Likely as not, the bulk of those are of English ancestry.  They say “American” instead of “English” because it had been so important for their ancestors to be English, but then they felt betrayed.

We need to pay close attention to that because this could happen again.

Here I am getting into dangerous ground and some of you might be mad at me.  The English, the Indigenous people, and the Enslaved Africans all had descendents who are now American.  (Yes, there are others and we love you too.) It is very important to all of these people that they be American.

But there are problems.  The descendents of the Enslaved Africans have problems.  It came to be currently encoded in the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”  There are those who say “All lives matter” or “Blue lives matter,” and these are all true too.  (I am not responsible for this nomenclature, but there it is.)

I would like to characterize the situation a little differently.

Think of the descendents in America of the English, the Indigenous, the African, the Irish, the Italian, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, etc as all being organs in the body.  They are all part of one thing: America. (The Apostle Paul does a nice riff on something similar in one of his epistles.) 

So think of your body.  Suppose you get an x-ray and there is a spot on your liver.  Would you react by saying, “All organs matter” and ignore the spot on your liver?  I don’t think so.  I think that you’d see about getting your liver fixed.

Not only is it a vital part of your body, but the spot might very well spread.

This is an analogy and arguing by analogy is always dangerous. It depends upon everyone realizing that we are all part of the same body.  But I believe it is good because it catches the fact that I am actually helping myself when I help someone else because we are all Americans and America is healthy to the extent its “members” are. 

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. )