Yesterday's post garnered a number of responses from you, not only the beautiful comments on the post itself but also a few emails and some remarks on the Facebook link. Whether or not you've had a teacher's or parent's relationship with children, all of you shared a patience and a wistfulness that, to me, was very moving. It is hard to be human.

Things aren't going very well, humanity-wise, here in Maine. Our horrible governor continues to make the worst possible decisions. This week, in collision with the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, he's ordered the state's Department of Labor to remove a mural depicting the history of Maine's working people. You've probably read about it: the national news has snapped up the story, as well it should. This version, in the Portland Press-Herald, sums up the painful stupidity of the situation.

By chance, I've been working on an essay about western Pennsylvania coal mining, thinking about the labor-worker relationship and how little I knew about it when I was the coal miner's grandchild. Not long ago, E. B. Leisenring, Jr., the man who ran the Westmoreland Coal Company, died. And when I read his obituary, I realized how much horror had been seething right under my nose . . . right then, while I was playing cards with my granddad, feeding his cows, running past the little coal tip he kept to stoke his kitchen stove. Quickly I bought a stack of books, so I'll soon be undergoing an intensive lesson in western Pennsylvania coal history. It will be strange to learn how that intersects with blithe childhood ignorance.

Here's a poem by my mother, the coal miner's daughter, that captures a different sort of childhood ignorance, and knowledge.

The Orpheus of Leisenring

Janice Miller Potter

. . . they heard the sluther of pit-boots.

--D. H. Lawrence

Often he winched his shoulders

quickly, to show he didn't know, as his calm

Sargasso eyes shifted away their troubles

with a remote expression of watery blue,

clear and unclouded but ruefully accepting

the reality that he possessed no clue to

how life had locked him in, a storm becalmed.

He'd thought and felt he knew nothing.

Was it the child, never scanting him

from her constellation of childish claims?

The lamp that rode his skull, the bright star

on the helmet he wore in the Leisenring Mine,

kept her wakeful at night, waiting for the dawn

and the sound of his Dodge. When he pulled in,

the untrellised, rambling seven-sisters rasped

that he'd come up in a cage from Leisenring.

Coal musk drenching his sunless skin,

sweat-sodden, he sluthered into the dark kitchen

where the child--up from nightmare--plundered

his dinner bucket for her wax-papered cake,

the coconut snowball he'd ferried down and back

for her to rob him of. In the half-light, whistling

"Mares Eat Oats," he knew he could assume

neither love nor delight the foil of time.

[from Psalms in Time (Finishing Line Press, 2008)]