Whatever You've Learned - Using It
Thu., March 16, 03:46 PM
I’ve had stuff running through my mind about things I learned and how useful they turned out to be. But what kept coming to the fore was this incident that occurred long before my philosophies were formed.
It was my first day working at the public library, just a couple of hours after school to start with. After being taken on a brief tour of those areas I had never seen as a borrower, I was turned over to Evelyn at the circulation desk. In time Evelyn was to become a very dear friend, but that day I was just learning the name that went with the face, and I called her Miss G. until she began calling me Miss V. (Who?)
Well, she didn’t have to teach me how to slip books, but there was an electric clipping machine that recorded what books were taken out and there was a cash register to learn, for fines and fees. Then, it being a rather quiet afternoon, we just chatted.
Evelyn mentioned that one of the stools behind the desk had gotten a little wobbly, but she was afraid to give it to the janitor because she might never get it back. So I turned it over, took a screwdriver out of my purse, and tightened the screws. That’s all. I might have forgotten it right away, but Evelyn told everyone – for years.
How come I had a screwdriver in my purse? Certainly not because I thought I’d need one at the library. My dad had made the screwdriver out of a key blank, so I could put in on a keychain and have it for emergencies. Dad was one of those people who used everything at his disposal, physical or mental. He knew instinctively what it takes some people a lifetime to learn, that the more you teach a child, the more likely he is to think efficiently – what is often called thinking out of the box.
My dad would have been ninety-seven this week. Whenever I learn to use a new tool, I think about how it would have delighted him. Twenty-eight years ago this month, he died. So I miss him more than usual just now, which may be why this incident came to mind. My mother’s sisters always said I was Daddy’s girl.
How I started thinking in this vein came from chemistry courses I took in college. I loved chemistry and actually took enough courses to make a chemistry minor, but I soon knew that I’d never be a chemist. Not only am I a terrible klutz in the lab, but I have no patience with slow reactions. (Maybe if I were back doing the same thing, I’d get two experiments going concurrently so I could move from one to the other…but I’d still be a klutz.)
One of my favorite courses was qualitative analysis, which the boys called “cookbook chemistry,” because it was a systematic way of determining the composition of an unknown substance. Add a few drops of this, watch the reaction; add some of that and see what happens. I love a mystery, y’know; this was just a mystery in a different form.
While everyone else is watching “CSI” or “New Detectives” and marveling at fingerprints and DNA, I’m waiting for trace. They put the substance in a machine and it not only tells them what’s in it and how much, it specifies the manufacturer! A lot faster than the way we learned it. We knew about such things as gas chromatography, but we couldn’t do it very well. (I think we had the wrong kind of filter paper.) We knew DNA existed but had no idea what we might do with it. (Maybe we could cross-match, like donated blood?)
If you have learned everything you can, and if you continue observing, the wonders go on forever. What a wonderful gift!
