Pennsylvania's bitter bloc

I couldn't resist. Suddenly, the backwoods where I grew up is a do-or-die stop on the road to the White House.

Don't get me wrong, the place has merits -- abundant wildlife, lovely fall foliage -- but, until this month, it tended to be a part of the state that candidates blinked past on their way to national office. Never in my life did I expect to see so many Altoona bowlers, Yuengling beer drinkers and small-town, deer-hunting, Mass-missing former strip miners and woodcutters dissected on CNN.

My mother said people were "heating it up with the election talk," though many, like her, had already made up their minds.

She's in her 70s, lives on a fixed income and suffers from emphysema and kidney failure. She goes to dialysis three times a week, requires a portable oxygen tank and gets around in a wheelchair. When I was a child, growing up among the red oaks and the slag heaps, she and my dad were considered well off for working-class people. He cut wood and sold logging equipment and made enough money to send five children to college, with some left over to drop a donation every Sunday into the church collection basket.

Our tiny community was 2 1/2 hours from the nearest city, but there were jobs -- at the coal mines, the brickyards, the shirt factory. The county seat had a department store where my mother went shopping. Sometimes she and my father would go dancing on Saturday nights, and she would look so beautiful with her black hair and her perfume and her red lipstick that I would throw my small arms around her and bury my face in her off-the-rack cocktail dress just to see her smile.

In the 1970s, though, recession forced my father to sell his business. His was one of many places of employment that began to disappear. By then, the strip mines had shut down and the factories were moving. Kids at the high school -- in numbers far larger than they had when I was a teenager -- started viewing military service as the one way they could afford college.

The little downtown in the county seat began inexorably shrinking. Now it is all but shuttered, and my brother, who cares for my parents in his off hours and is in his 40s, works day and night and still can't afford to fix his pickup. Old friends give me a reckoning every time we talk of this one's son or that one's daughter lost in desert combat. My father, a joyful, affable man, talks about the economy nonstop. Unreimbursible medical expenses consume my mother's Social Security check, and she worries constantly about money. A big night out for her is a dollar spaghetti dinner at the local Sons of Italy with my father and aunt and uncle.