“Oh, I don't know,” Rachel sighed. “It's better than the pitying looks I get now. I'm suddenly the resident Old Maid.”
I looked at her with wide eyes. “But you're only twenty six!”
She laughed. “Well, yes, but most people get married at eighteen or nineteen around here.”
“People get married before they go to college?” Chad asked.
Rachel shook her head. “I can count on one hand the number of people in this town who have gone to college. And given that three of them are in this room…”
This strongly reminds me of Öckerö, the place where so many of my Pentecostalist relatives live. I spent the summers of my childhood there, but I don't really go there anymore. Can't say I feel at home there. When I was a kid in the sixties, the Öckerö kids went to school until they were fourteen or fifteen. Then they got themselves jobs, and then at eighteen the girls got married. The boys usually waited until they were about twenty. The girls became housewives and mothers to a whole bunch of kids, and then they spent their lives taking care of their homes and their families. For pleasure, they visited all the other housewives on the island and went to church.
I can't help hoping that Lois will not permanently settle in Smallville. I think Lois was meant to do something greater with her life. I think she was meant to make an impact, and not just by raising her kids well.
It is generally agreed that Clark had to leave Smallville in order to become Superman. I think Lois has to leave Smallville to become Lois Lane. Maybe she will decide that she doesn't want to be that kind of Lois Lane, and that she will be happy spending her life working for a paper that comes out once a week, and which mostly writes about farm subsidies. And I'm not saying she can't be happy that way. I don't really want her to be that kind of woman, that's all.
Oh, but this Lois isn't Lois Lane, is she? She is Lois Andrews. Maybe that is the difference. By becoming Lois Andrews, she broke up from the life where she might have been Lois Lane, and where she might have had a real impact on her country.
I have to comment on this:
“Not everyone agrees that there should be subsidies,” Jonathan explained. “There's lots of reasons – for example, there's a belief that the only reason corn is so big is because of the corn lobby, but it's not that healthy and we shouldn't be eating so much of it – either directly or indirectly since a lot of corn is fed to cattle and passed on to us in our beef.”
Since I don't like corn, it isn't hard for me to be critical of corn subsidies. But really, I think it's true that corn isn't all that healthy for you. My colleague Arnost showed me an article about the Maya (or was it Inca?) culture in South America. The article said that for these people, corn as a staple food was both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing, because corn was relatively easy to grow, and it became possible to feed a much larger population than before. But it was also a curse, because when the people started eating mostly corn, their health deteriorated. Skeletons from different time periods proved that the Mayans had been much healthier when they ate a varied diet than when they started living on corn.
Ann
