Freddogg Off The Chain

The tabula rasa--blank slate--theory of mental content and personality development goes back to John Locke, which makes perfect sense; otherwise, babies are popping out all over the earth saying, “This is the shit I be knowing.” We know what we know through experience and perception and if you don’t pay attention and assimilate experiences and adapt them to new and unanticipated realities, you run the risk of being a lifetime perpetual non-adaptive dumb ass.
Personally I’m more of an etch-a-sketch type learner, most empirical stimuli evaporating except for the grainy pebbles stuck in the corners of my piggy bank of memories.
The home town of Penndel, Pennsylvania evolved from hamlet to borough after World War Two and I, a precocious, inquisitive and investigative little boomer boy with an underdeveloped sense of a moral consciousness, snapped up snippets of war stories and re-enacted them: capturing weaker kids in the neighborhood, knocking them from their fat fender bikes by a trip wire tugged taunt across a road of ruts or launching dirt bombs like howitzer shells into backyard gatherings.
I grew up under the piercing, non-blinking eyeballs of “Death March” guy from two blocks away and two rungs down the social ladder. His hovel was a flat roof row house of clapboard crap, the best asbestos on the market. Bataan Man, who had survived the infamous march, drove a black Chrysler Imperial Crown and got a new one each year. By 1957 with the advent of the finned car, he had arrived. I loved Bataan Man and he never gave me a smile or a nod. He was burly and non expressive with a giant head and unlit stogy. He never came out of that car not to work or play or grocery shop. He drove around and watched people in a relaxed state or permanent shock.
“Life is a death march,” my grandmother always said, “otherwise, how do we know when it’s over?”
Personally my Chrysler Imperial Crown has always been a three-quarter ton pickup truck with a bench seat. I have driven around Delmarva for 35 years imagining myself as Bataan Man although I am in no way worthy. I park at the beach and observe people or cruise down to the Little League Park and watch games. I do walk long distances in the heat and call them “death marches” and I always think of those young men in 1942 in some godforsaken place and 20 thousand of them dying ugly on a 60-mile forced march.
Literature can be an escape or an embrace. I brought the hard back book “Tears in the Darkness” by Michael and Elizabeth Norman to my hip replacement surgery and rehabilitation at Beebe Hospital last July 16. I never read in detail what happened to those 75 thousand surrendered men. I simply strafed the story but now as I was cut to and from the bone, I was looking for courage from distant men who endured what I could not.
And my revelations expanded as I drove through the book like Bataan man himself reading at odd hours and caring little about history and more about endurance and toughness and the incredible cruelty people can inflict on one another.
Hospitals are insults to human dignity staffed by humanists wearing white. It is just necessary to catheterize surgical patients and ask them embarrassing questions like “Do the concept of black tarry stools mean anything to you Kingfish”?
Back in 1964 when I was taken on a walking tour of Temple University being recruited to play basketball, the Hall of Fame coach Harry Litwack said, ”You could read one book every day for the rest of your life and not read half the books in that library.”
“Right or I could not read any of them in no time at all,” I answered, then pointed to my head. “Tabula Rasa Forever.”
Bataan Man has stayed with me since he came back to my hometown after the war. He watches over me like “Garden Angel” in Philly vernacular. I knew I had to read of his plight as a 63-year old guy in a cranked up bed who just had the ball of his femur sawed off and replaced by titanium.
I am back, death march driving the back roads of Delmarva, thankful for the brave young men who made that possible. Ironically, I drive a Toyota Tundra. Tabula Rasa Forever!