2006年NPR美国国家公共电台一月-My Father Worked the Mines

（单词翻译）

Marcos Mcpeek Villatoro: My father worked in the coal mines of Kentucky. It was his last job before he retired¹. 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 risky², 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 Creek³, Kentucky, where the mountains were so steep and close together, you'd swear the sun never peeked⁴ into the valley until noon. 'You think this is cramped,' he said. 'You should see the shaft⁵.' 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, shack⁶ houses, rickets⁷. 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 ambivalence⁸ 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