Okieinexile's Blog

By Bobby Neal Winters

I find myself in a strange position on my woodworking journey.  As those of you who follow this space know, for an extended period of time, I’ve been learning how to make musical instruments. It’s more complicated than this, but I’ve learned to make a recorder, a Native American-Style flute, and now a cigar box guitar.

This in spite of the fact that I don’t play any of those instruments.

I almost included a clause in that last sentence that I had no desire to.  That would be at worst a lie, but it is certainly incomplete.

I have an incredible amount of respect for those who can place musical instruments and do it well.  They appear to me to be the closest people we have to real magicians. They can by their efforts move us to joy or move us to tears at their whim.

Yet, as much as I admire that, as much as I hold that ability in awe, that admiration has not been enough to move me to spend the incredible amount of time it takes to achieve competence, much less mastery.

My call has been to different things.  And I have respected that call.

I’ve rolled up a lot of ambiguity into that word “call” and have done it on purpose.  Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss.” I don’t mean that.  While I don’t know for sure, I expect Campbell put some scaffolding around that because it needs it.  If your bliss is heroin, this advice leads to ruin.

There are certain things we learn because we need to learn them.  I learned to use a shovel to a certain level of competence from my father because I needed to.  The lateral line needed digging out and it wasn’t going to do itself.  Having learned for that purpose, I’ve been able to put this skill to use in later life for burying dogs and transplanting roses.  It’s a skill that helps my wife justify keeping me around.

No, by “my call,” I don’t mean following my bliss.  It’s something different.  I think that my writing has been a call.  Writing for me has been a chore since day one.  By this I mean the physical act of writing. At first, it was so difficult to me, that when I wrote, I struggled to put what I had to say in a single word. (In hindsight, that’s not bad training, but I digress.) When I wrote by hand, my penmanship was horrible, almost unreadable.  I was encouraged to take typing because it was clear I was going to be a scholar of some sort, and no one would be able to read my handwriting.  I could type, but the same sort of lack of dexterity that interfered with my penmanship introduced a lot of typos into my typing.

Computers have been a Godsend. 

(All of this being said, after many decades of hand-writing notes and recopying them, my penmanship is almost legible.  I can read it sometimes when it gets cold.)

The call of writing has forced me to learn about the process of writing and the craft of writing.  There is structure in writing even if, often, that structure is organic. 

Writing has informed my teaching and teaching informs my writing.

For me, I think teaching is a calling too.  I have been blessed that this calling puts beans and cornbread on the table for me.

My woodworking has also been a calling for me, but in a different way.  I feed my family with teaching; I have that level of skill.  If forced to, I might’ve been able to do that with writing, but we would’ve all been a lot skinnier.

Woodworking, I don’t know if I could ever be skillful enough to do it for a living, but it’s different.

Woodworking connects me with reality.

If the joint doesn’t connect, no amount of pretending it does matters. It’s there; it’s ugly; you–and everyone else–can see that it is ugly. 

It also connects me with other people.  I’ve talked about teaching and writing, but I’ve left out math and computers. This is because there are too few of you out there who connect with these topics. (I put that a little mildly. Most of you are actively repelled by those two topics. I understand.) 

I can connect with other people through my woodworking.  And–for now–I feel called to make musical instruments. And I want to learn to do this well.  This next statement is important, so I will give it its own paragraph:

I don’t know why.

But if I figure it out, I will tell you.

It’s my calling.

Bobby Winters grew up near Harden City, Oklahoma.  He teaches mathematics and computer science, does woodworking, and blogs at okieinexile.com.