Lingering Influence

(This is a rambling, unbalanced, pointless first draft that I began a few weeks ago but haven't had the time to finish and make semi-presentable. Since I haven't posted anything in a while, I'm publishing this as it stands and heading out to work in the garden.)

I was born and lived the formative years of my life among the coal mines on the state line between Virginia and West Virginia. Early experiences continue to affect my attitudes and my values.

Among my oldest memories are those of handicapped miners begging and trying to sell small items on the streets of Bluefield. One man stood outside a department store with a sign and a cup. He was blind. Embedded in his speckled face was black debris from the explosion that took his sight. Nearby another man sat in a cart similar to a child's peddle car but without the front end. Above the stumps of his legs was a small shelf which held pencils, combs and a few other items for sale.


My father preparing to leave home for a shift in a coal mine in the 1930s. (Larger version)

I remember the day my maternal grandfather took ill and was carried from a mine to die two years later. My paternal grandfather died in a mining accident as did one of his sons. My father had a lung removed due to cancer and the biopsy report indicated the presence of black lung from working in the mines.

As we drove from our house to my grandmother's house we passed through a small dirty depressing town named Pocahontas in which the whites lived on one side of the tracks and the blacks lived on the other. My family lived low on the economic scale but I remember the poverty in the black community as horrific, as something that I never wanted to experience.

Memories of my childhood and my home are positive. I had the important things, the things that contribute to happiness, the things that aren't material and the things that can't be given a monetary value.

These and other experiences that were part of my childhood exert an influence on me today. I make a good salary, an excellent salary, but I carry my learned childhood suspicion of government, corporations, wealth and being less than frugal. Money beyond the necessities of life doesn't contribute to -- or contributes little -- to happiness.

(I wonder where I was going with these thoughts. Was I simply reminiscing?)