okieinexile
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The Preacher, Hell, August, Lefty’s Italian Tomatoes and a few other things.
By Bobby Neal Winters
For everything there is a season or so says the Preacher. When this appears, it will be the middle of the month of August, or so close to it that it’s not worth arguing about. It’s the time of year I start thinking about Hell.
There is a reason for this that is more than the heat. When I was a kid and went to the revivals at my church this time of year, the concept of Hell became all the more real to me. The sermons were much more affective.
“Shape up and quit your sinning, or you can look outside and that’s what you’ll get forever and ever.”
No evangelist ever said that of course, but, to a kid, he didn’t need to. That was the inference we drew. Yet these days, having a grown-up’s perspective, I might think differently.
“Preacher,” I might say through a smirk, “I’ve lived though more than forty Augusts in the southern Great Plains. You can’t scare me.”
I am only joking, of course. August is not really hell, but if you think in a broad, poetic way, August is like a threat of imminent death. It helps you to focus on the important.
August burns away the unnecessary, the distractions. You have to figure out what really needs to be done, and you have to do it in the two hours of the daylight in which doing things is not absolutely suicidal.
For example, I’ve taken to going on my walks first thing in the morning. I set my alarm at six, but sometimes I wake up earlier and lay in bed until I either go back to sleep or decide that I can’t. On the mornings I can’t, I get up and walk as soon as there is enough light to put one foot in front of the other. I did that this morning. Somewhere along the way—and the secret I will take to my grave—I saw a man out stealing his neighbor’s paper. And he saw me seeing him steal it. We each stopped for a moment and looked at each other, and then we spoke, neither saying what the other knew.
It’s August, such things as stealing papers won’t be important again until after Labor Day.
The grasshoppers have been making that sound. Either you know the one I’m talking about or you don’t. It’s the sound that calls boys to catch them, hang them on a hook, and toss them in the water where there will be coolness, wetness, and then the release of death.
“Catch me, gore me, and drown me,” they say. “I’d die in the belly of a bass just to be wet again.”
The garden vegetables are getting ripe, the tomatoes in particular. My friend Lefty from Frontenac gave us a mess or two. Though he is not Italian himself, one of his Italian friends from Capaldo taught him the secret technique that only Italians know. It is passed from father to son and only two in a family can know it at once. Lefty didn’t tell me why he was let in on the secret, but I got the feeling that was for my own protection.
I think you have to sing to them and pour red wine on their roots, but that’s just a guess.
Lefty’s not the only one with produce. On the home front, our grapes and peaches have started to get ripe. I grow three varieties, green and pink and purple, one vine of each. We’ve already run through the green ones. The pink ones are ready to eat now, and they’ve never been sweeter. I have to think it has something to do with the hot dry weather, but maybe I am just trying to rationalize bad weather. To put purpose where there is one.
It’s August, and sometimes the sun causes our brains to overheat.
The peaches are perfect too. They are Indian peaches we transplanted up from Oklahoma a few years back, and their fruit is red. I stepped out briefly this afternoon, pulled one off the tree, and ate it fuzz and all. The heat from the sun had warmed up the juice inside. As the juice was running down my throat and dripping off my chin and with the fuzz sticking to my lips, I looked at the red flesh I’d just exposed and felt like a carnivore, one who’d just ran down a small, round, sugary animal.
It’s August, and we think strange things like that.
(Bobby Winters is a Professor of Mathematics, writer, and speaker. You may contact him at bwinters1@cox.net or visit his web site at www.okieinexile.com.)
By Bobby Neal Winters
For everything there is a season or so says the Preacher. When this appears, it will be the middle of the month of August, or so close to it that it’s not worth arguing about. It’s the time of year I start thinking about Hell.
There is a reason for this that is more than the heat. When I was a kid and went to the revivals at my church this time of year, the concept of Hell became all the more real to me. The sermons were much more affective.
“Shape up and quit your sinning, or you can look outside and that’s what you’ll get forever and ever.”
No evangelist ever said that of course, but, to a kid, he didn’t need to. That was the inference we drew. Yet these days, having a grown-up’s perspective, I might think differently.
“Preacher,” I might say through a smirk, “I’ve lived though more than forty Augusts in the southern Great Plains. You can’t scare me.”
I am only joking, of course. August is not really hell, but if you think in a broad, poetic way, August is like a threat of imminent death. It helps you to focus on the important.
August burns away the unnecessary, the distractions. You have to figure out what really needs to be done, and you have to do it in the two hours of the daylight in which doing things is not absolutely suicidal.
For example, I’ve taken to going on my walks first thing in the morning. I set my alarm at six, but sometimes I wake up earlier and lay in bed until I either go back to sleep or decide that I can’t. On the mornings I can’t, I get up and walk as soon as there is enough light to put one foot in front of the other. I did that this morning. Somewhere along the way—and the secret I will take to my grave—I saw a man out stealing his neighbor’s paper. And he saw me seeing him steal it. We each stopped for a moment and looked at each other, and then we spoke, neither saying what the other knew.
It’s August, such things as stealing papers won’t be important again until after Labor Day.
The grasshoppers have been making that sound. Either you know the one I’m talking about or you don’t. It’s the sound that calls boys to catch them, hang them on a hook, and toss them in the water where there will be coolness, wetness, and then the release of death.
“Catch me, gore me, and drown me,” they say. “I’d die in the belly of a bass just to be wet again.”
The garden vegetables are getting ripe, the tomatoes in particular. My friend Lefty from Frontenac gave us a mess or two. Though he is not Italian himself, one of his Italian friends from Capaldo taught him the secret technique that only Italians know. It is passed from father to son and only two in a family can know it at once. Lefty didn’t tell me why he was let in on the secret, but I got the feeling that was for my own protection.
I think you have to sing to them and pour red wine on their roots, but that’s just a guess.
Lefty’s not the only one with produce. On the home front, our grapes and peaches have started to get ripe. I grow three varieties, green and pink and purple, one vine of each. We’ve already run through the green ones. The pink ones are ready to eat now, and they’ve never been sweeter. I have to think it has something to do with the hot dry weather, but maybe I am just trying to rationalize bad weather. To put purpose where there is one.
It’s August, and sometimes the sun causes our brains to overheat.
The peaches are perfect too. They are Indian peaches we transplanted up from Oklahoma a few years back, and their fruit is red. I stepped out briefly this afternoon, pulled one off the tree, and ate it fuzz and all. The heat from the sun had warmed up the juice inside. As the juice was running down my throat and dripping off my chin and with the fuzz sticking to my lips, I looked at the red flesh I’d just exposed and felt like a carnivore, one who’d just ran down a small, round, sugary animal.
It’s August, and we think strange things like that.
(Bobby Winters is a Professor of Mathematics, writer, and speaker. You may contact him at bwinters1@cox.net or visit his web site at www.okieinexile.com.)
