Pop 89: Fill the Salt Shakers and Read, Read, Read

By Madonna Hamel

The UPS man enters the library, huffing and puffing, and cursing me by name. He drops his boxes on the desk in front of Betty, who is wearing her librarian hat today. "I'm sure half of these are yours," he says to me. Betty warns him not to give me a hard time as I help keep the circulation high and the library open. "Yeah, so there," I laugh and start snooping through the boxes, looking for my latest requests.

While I'm snooping, Betty signs me up for canteen duty at the rodeo on Saturday night. I'll be sharing the shift with Amy and her youngest daughter Michaela, whom I refer to as Mickey-Moo. Mickey was a toddler when I met her and her family for the first time at The Nativity of The Virgin Mary church back in 2014. Saturday night, I find myself gasping the old cliche: "The last time I saw you, you were this high. Now you're taller than me!"

My other canteen companion is my former pen pal Elizabeth, Lizzy-Lou, as I like to call her. Lizzy-Lou wrote to me for a whole year, not knowing who I was. Keeping my identity secret meant I had to write about my life pre-Val Marie. 

I love these girls. There is a touching eagerness to them, borne of the last vestiges of innocence. Do they realize that soon they will stop running everywhere? That they will assess their bodies in shop windows, constantly sucking their guts in or critiquing their smile as they tug at their clothing? It won't matter that they are beautiful - all youth is beautiful - they won't see it until they are on the other side of it - until they're on the verge of old age.

Perhaps they are free just a little longer than most girls because they live in a tiny community where there are no shop windows to mirror their burgeoning womanhood. But also because women are running here. They run, haul, holler and are expected, at times, to be full-out physical. (And I mean outside of a culturally prescribed hyper-sexual physicality.) Without a woman's physical agency, rural communities could not survive.

And yet, while these girls ride horses, feed animals, bail hay, it never occurs to them to stay busy behind the canteen by refilling salt shakers and napkin holders and ketchup bottles. To stay on top of the many endless chores that keep a canteen or restaurant running smoothly on a hectic night. So, I teach them a few of my old waitressing tricks. I'm two university degrees broker, and yet some of the most important life skills I've ever needed came from waiting on tables.

I remember a speech Michelle Obama was giving a room full of girls: get an education, she kept saying. I get that. But some of us are built for the trades. I personally love welding. I wish I had my welding ticket. Still, it was at art school I learned I loved welding. And my English degree has made my life more meaningful, richer and exciting in every way. It cracked the world wide open, helped me live with life's paradoxes, heightened my curiosity, which directed me to think beyond money, clothes and boys.

The Humanities didn't train me to produce, it's true. They did more than that: it nourished my soul. They - English, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science and Religious Studies - gave me insight into joy and suffering, into how to talk to others, even to argue. It opened me to ideas and options. 

It built character. Something I'll be working on til I die. Which is why I still carry a dozen books home from the library every Wednesday. The Humanities made me a reader and a ponderer because, as author Robert Barron insists, the liberal arts are essential, points out: You can get a tech degree and design a faster car, "but what will you do when you get there?" 

I used to say the same something similar to a Marxist when he proclaimed that microwave ovens would "free the worker to spend more time with their family." "Not if they don't already," I replied. "The microwave doesn't teach you how to talk with your kids. It doesn't make all that free time quality time. If they don't know how to talk or be with their families, some other busy work will fill the gap."

I don't mean to say that microwaves, dishwashers, washing machines weren't welcomed by women who operated as workhorses all their lives. But we seem to have created a world where women who once stayed home, scrubbing and baking, are now expected to work outside the home and still return to cook and clean. Yes, they use more efficient machines, but have the machines made the worker any freer to spend time with their families? 

Education is meant to be about exposure to different philosophies, world-views, ideas, etc, not the production of business majors and computer wizards, not pipelines to high-paying jobs. In her book: "Not For Profit," Martha Nussbaum writes: "Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young….Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills needed to keep democracies alive … nations will soon be producing generations of useful machines rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves."

Is the situation as grave as she claims? I do think the young should be allowed to learn, to choose what they read and be trusted with our support, to develop discernment. I personally intend to stick around and encourage Michela and Elizabeth and their peers to fill the salt shakers, ask questions, and to read, read, read. Read the conservative and liberal authors AND, Indigenous poets AND, medieval theologians AND, turn-of-the-century anthropologists AND, contemporary novelists of all genders AND, yes, even some old dead white men.