2006年NPR美国国家公共电台一月-My Father Worked the Mines（在线收听） |
| Marcos Mcpeek Villatoro: My father worked in the coal mines of Kentucky. It was his last job before he retired. After a life moving from one mechanic's shop job to another, this was a real job, said the friend who offered it to him. Sure, it was risky, but you couldn't beat the paycheck, $17,000 a year. Our family had never heard of such money. My parents had plans for it. They wanted their son to get a good education, maybe even go to college. That took money, so Dad went to the mines and I went to private school. Marcos Mcpeek Villatoro: In the summer break, I would go home to Turkey Creek, Kentucky, where the mountains were so steep and close together, you'd swear the sun never peeked into the valley until noon. 'You think this is cramped,' he said. 'You should see the shaft.' I never did, but I did see my dad. I watched how, though he bathed everyday, parts of his body were always stained black, his fingers, for instance. The coal dust hung in his prints and fingernails. Even as a teenager, I recognized in Kentucky mining towns then what I would later see in poor countries throughout Central and South America—illiteracy, shack houses, rickets. Even with all those great mining jobs, poverty dwelt deep. They couldn't let me go down into the mine, but I could hang out at the opening. I watched Dad go down that shaft and cried, for he had told me stories of the three men he had seen killed in accidents. One of them, a boy, 4 years older than me. And now Dad was going down there. I wanted to yell out, 'Forget this. Let's go home, back to Tennessee. I can go to the local school. Let's just get out of here.' But he didn't. He stayed even after I graduated from high school. Marcos Mcpeek Villatoro: Dad was able to do what so many struggling working-class fathers want to do--get his kid out, out of Dad's life. 'Don't crawl into the shaft bucket, son. Sit behind a desk.' And now I do, but at my desk today, I sit thinking about those miners who died in West Virginia and the awful dull grief that their families must feel. I feel, again, that guilty ambivalence toward these mines that enrich lives and also take them. At my desk, I read a book and turn its pages. I notice that none of my fingers are stained black. Note------------ illiteracy:someone who is illiterate, who has not learned to read or write; 文盲 |
| 原文地址：http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/NPR2006/40756.html |