Coal in your stocking

Coal, strangely enough, has returned as a subject in my life at the same time as it has returned as a subject in the political world.

Some of my earliest memories of coal are the coal delivery truck coming to our brick row house in South Philadelphia.  I would rush down to the basement to watch the chute come in the coal delivery window into or coal bin, which was actually a small closet like room, dark and dirty with old coal dust.  The coal came rattling down the chute in a torrent of black glittering gems.  I suppose my father shoveled the coal into our heater, but that part I don't remember at all.

The coal going into a furnace that I remember was at my grandmother's house in Ocean City.  She had a small black, pot bellied stove in her kitchen, and she would allow me to go to the coal bin and bring up a scuttle full of coal and then she would open the door to the blazing belly and I could use the little shovel to throw the coal in.

Also from my Philadelphia childhood, I remember the coal cars rattling down the railroad tracks on the waterfront where we went to church at Gloria Dei Old Swedes church.  I also remember the lowing of the cattle penned there I suppose for the slaughter house. So sad and mournful.  And I remember the hobos with their barrels full of fire, warming their hands.  Such sad sights for a young child, but that was city life in the first half of the twentieth century.

My father told me when he was growing up, near to the place where we lived in my childhood, he went to the railroad with his mother and brothers to pick up the coal that fell off the coal cars, to bring it home to heat their house.  After his father died, suddenly, on a return from a Merchant Marine voyage, my father and his widowed mother and his brothers were exceedingly poor.  It was the depression.  

What brought the idea of coal back into my current thinking, was reading a book 266 Days, an account of the 266 days of the British occupation of Philadelphia, city of my birth.  The narrative is built on the diaries, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and the letters from military men on both sides of the conflict.  The women's diaries talk a lot about marauders pulling down their fences and outbuildings to get the wood for fires for heat.  So, naturally, I was thinking of the times when people heated with wood instead of coal.

Wood fireplace fires are not effective which is why Benjamin Franklin, our historic genius, invented the Franklin stove.  A wood burning fireplace makes a LOT of heat close to the blaze, and leaves the air, a few feet away frigid.  I know this from my visits and volunteer work in historic houses and from the accounts in diaries that I have read.  

The greatest waste and destruction of the woods and forests of my current home, New Jersey, was to serve the iron smelting businesses and for charcoal making.  Vast swaths of our natural forests were destroyed as they are now being destroyed in the Amazon, which is heartbreaking to me.

Back to coal:  my next 'personal' experience with coal was when my parents retired to West Virginia.  Their next door neighbor, Mr. Rose, came often to visit and play cards.  He had a raspy voice and chronic cough because he suffered from 'black lung' disease which would kill him not long after my parents moved there.

Last night, I was watching THE CROWN, on Netflix, the series about the modern monarchy, Queen Elizabeth and her sister Margaret, in particular, and there was a brief and at the moment inexplicable scene switch to a rural school with a black mountain behind it.  Immediately I knew it was going to go back to the tragic coal mine disaster of Aberfan, Wales.  Although I didn't remember the details, I remembered the mine disaster and how the whole village had lost family members.  If you aren't familiar with the story, the disaster occurred in 1966, when a black mountain of coal waste became engorged from extraordinary rain fall.  The bloated mountain of soggy dust dislodged and became a thunderous avalanche that buried half the village and the entire school.  Only 22 of the 144 school children survived, one because her teacher threw her body over two of the closest children protecting them from suffocation.  

The scene in the show of the minors digging with their bare hands to free the children from their black ocean made me cry.  Every single family lost people, and half of the children of the village died.  

My first house had petroleum heat, a big tank in the yard and an ancient heater that stood by me for 30 winters and which had served since two years before I was born.  It was original to the house, built in 1947.  The liquid petrol would come in through a pipe, be spewed into the cabinet, set alight by a spark, and the heat generated would be air pumped through the registers, leaving a pale aura of black greasy dust around the registers.  

Eventually, about 3 years ago, I converted to gas, using a home equity loan.  It turned out to be a pretty expensive proposition once all the hidden costs were factored in:  the building permits, the substitution of a larger more expensive heater after the estimate had been found inadequate.  The total was a bit over 10,000, but the heater installation team assured me that I would get the cost back in a few years.  They were right.  Oil heat cost me $250 a month once the prices rose.  In the early days, $600 a year would keep the tank full and the heater going, but just half a dozen years later it rose to $1200 a year, and soon after, $100 a month, then $200 a month and up to $250 the last decade.  Also, my old tank had begun to leak through a rusted seam in the bottom and had to be removed and replaced.  Fortunately the tank removal guys dug up the dirt, replaced it with sand surrounded by stone, and the new tank held good until the gas heater replaced it all.

Recently in my town and surrounding areas, rooftops became covered with solar panels.  It was gratifying to see this transformation, though it could't work for me because of my trees.  The sun rarely to never sees my roof.

It is easy to take for granted the modern luxuries we enjoy, indoor plumbing (I have used an outhouse - again, in West Virginia, and they are horrible from the stench to the bees and spiders) electricity, heat, clean indoor water (I have also used a water pump, and have even fetched water from a mountain spring in a large 5 gallon plastic container - yes, always in West Virginia).  It is nice to turn on a faucet and have water, hot or cold!  Every day I appreciate the luxuries of my American bungalow in the 21st Century!  Often, I ponder on the marvels of living so long and seeing so many transitions in ordinary life.  I have lived from the end of the second World War, 1945, to 2019, soon to be 2020, from coal furnace to cable tv, from horse drawn huckster wagons down the alley to space travel.  AS the Grateful Dead have said, "What a Long Strange Trip it's Been!

The stockings are hung on the bannister to the attic at my house (no chimney) and when Christmas morning comes, there won't be any coal in them.  I wouldn't even know where to find coal these days!  Maybe in West Virginia.