Another great radio show by Doug, especially with Yanis Varoufakis. The other guy was also good at explaining the total lack of any dynamic at the Doha Climate Conference.
I wish I shared some of the slight up-beat direction. I don't.
And yet, I had especially fine Christmas dinners, one with my son, daughter-in-law and grandkids who look like candy, delicious and sweet. The other with an near ancient best friend and his family who have over the years, adopted me of all strange things, and I love them. They made me so sentimental that it was hard not to cry for joy. Isn't that odd. That's an emotional constellation out of Rainer Maria Rilke in the Duino Elegies.
I even got a best Christmas present. It is the oral history of a tiny mining town in Colorado that was once filled by Italian and Mexican immigrants. The place is now under several hundred feet of water, thanks to another dam by the Army Corp of Engineers. The book is called Legacy of an Italian Coal Miner, Louis Fantin.
The real stories are like legends, like Steinbeck or Hemingway. Lou the old man, now in his nineties tells the tale of growing up in the 1930s as a boy. With a little editing, it is even better than Mark Twain. He is no literary genius. It's the stark realities that are so compelling. This is the brutal mining of American history. I am glad that oral history has finally taken a place in academic history. We need these stories for our souls.
Lou will not be with me and my buddy Dennis much longer. Lou has a list of medical conditions that are so long and devastating that I stopped him. Lou. You fight down to the last bullet, the last sharp object. I am not sure he understands this is praise of the finest sort I can muster. He can barely see, he can barely walk, he sleeps a lot, but god damn does his hand feel strong. That's the history of work.
We held hands for grace. Grace! In this day and age? Yes, and for once it had meaning. On my right was Lou firm but sweet and on my left was his grandson firm and sincere for a change. The very old and the very young. There is a beauty in that. The boy is struggling hard with or against drug addictions, family abuse, confused ideas of a twenty year old boy. And let's mention Genny the mother, grandmother. She has the same western woman accent that my mother and aunts had. What a treat. To hear them again, dead these many years. Women just about as hard as their men, good and not so good. Who knew, the best you could have was an admirable life, something of substance?
Lou's stories would cheer up even Michael Yates at the other end of the rail lines from coal to steel. The houses were just as make shift, the men, just as absent and twisted by work, the kids, just as skinny, the land just as hard, and history just as unforgiving.
I shouldn't go over the edge. But I want to pay tribute to working men and their near infinite capacity to struggle, to fight, to love and feel, even if they were cruel and mean, which many were. It's forgotten now, maybe. But you know these guys before Lou, his father was a mean old bastard, as Lou confided to me. You know, he said at his computer desk with giant print, he was mean. He said this while unwrapping the book and giving it to me on loan. Lou said, It's already called for, so I knew I had to give the book back.
I told Lou the story of my mother-in-law a tiny woman born and raised in a Wales coal mine town. She died early from chronic lung problems. It explains why she liked me and brought me lunch on occasion to the UCB construction job. It was like taking lunch to her brothers and cousins. It was a tradition of a coal miner's daughter.
CG