READING ORWELL BACKWARDS

My grandparents, maternal and paternal, were immigrants. In the "old country" (England, France, and what is today, Slovakia), there were coal miners. When they landed on a mountaintop in Pennsylvania, they continued mining coal. A cousin who is significantly older than I told me about the houses they lived in, rented from the mine owner. They had no closets or cabinets. They had nothing to put in them. A nail in the wall served to hang their clothes, what little they had of them. And they shopped, of course, in the store owned by the mine owner. They never had enough money to pay all the rent or for all the purchases and thus, were always in debt to the mine owner. However, to be fair, when my paternal grandfather developed debilitating asthma and couldn't mine anymore, the mine owner employed him as a night watchman. And when my father's brother was born a cripple, the mine owner's wife took him to the doctors and eventually had him placed in a hospital (at her own expense) where he eventually died after several years. After working in the mines as a breaker boy (picking out slag from the coal from the conveyor after being broken into usable sized pieces) and as a mule skinner (dragging coal carts out of the mines), my father escaped to Philadelphia where he became a professional prize fighter. I am forever grateful to my grandparents for having the courage to pick up and move to America, and my father for having the courage to escape the mines so that I could be born free and to a life filled with opportunities. I never was a socialist, but always empathized with those coal miners. To this day, when I hear of a mine accident, I am riveted to the news.