Think About It. Never Will. My recent great good fortune was the 
opportunity to read stories of three most extraordinary ordinary people who have written of their lives in three different but fascinating ways. Alma Gwyndolyn’s brother thought her name much too pretty for what he described as “this ugly duckling”. So the maternal grandmother of James Polk Tackett was known as Jack from then on. Sixty pages are devoted by Edward J., cramming in his first twenty or so formative years illustrating the “itchy feet” he clearly shared with his father, the paternal grandfather of the same also well-travelled James Polk Tackett. If you are not adequately confused yet, please read on. Jim’s 400-page treatise was intended to provide his family with thoughts of his philosophy and dedication to a good life, but particularly reports experiences of his early youth in the Panama Canal Zone. Hence the title IN THE ZONE.
Jim admits to growing up in Texas, but to this day insists his spiritual home is the narrow isthmus between Costa Rica and Columbia at the edges of North and South America between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, by way of the Caribbean Sea. There are memories of childhood in the jungle and socialist-style structure of life in a government owned and occupied area, coupled with the hints of the lives of his forebears.
His happy childhood was growing up with scorpions, snakes, sharks and tarantulas in a space shared with the smell of decay, fungus and mold loved by ants, spiders and mosquitos regularly threatened by trucks spraying DDT followed by young bicycle riders. Jim writes, “We are too soft. Our skin is not right. We cannot hear enough. We cannot see enough. We are not adequate. And it was our playground.” Later in life when he and amazing wife Juli led a strange staff of people in a daily dance with death while destroying our nation’s Chemical Weapons, we had already learned that the fog they followed (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was itself a banned danger to man and animal. Somewhere I think he described this young life as idyllic.
For the record, his grandchildren will learn American history from the honest look at bigotry in the Zone and in the continental U.S. where we learn of the struggle for survival of three generations of families throughout this now prosperous country. His father describes what he called “travel bureaus” which in 1941 provided shared automobiles driven by the owners over many miles. Uber anyone? Gwendolyn’s brief hand-written contribution begins, “I was born ….. in a pretty town” and ends “Here in this beautiful little town.” BTW, she was no “ugly duckling”.
Here is evidence of a family exemplifying unusual character and integrity. I have promised to return the last family copy of this important document, now in my possession. You have probably not read it. Until and unless IN THE ZONE is published publicly at least in digital form, perhaps you Never Will. Think About It.
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