SRQ Daily Columnist Diana Hamilton, after living 35 years in Sarasota, labels herself a pragmatic optimist with radical humorist tendencies and a new found resistance to ice cream.

This is the first year in forever that I’ve missed the veteran’s parade. No matter what I would always scramble my day to get there to stand on a corner alone as I could make myself in a crowd and cheer and wave and then cry as my guys, my Vietnam generation's rag tag mix of boys grown to men overly thin or pot-bellied in beards and jeans, the occasional dress shirt and slacks, walking or riding Harleys, came into view carrying our flag and with it that other flag, the black one with white letters-MIA. Public attendance at the parade has grown over the years. It wasn’t always so popular, at least in Sarasota, but lately as it has become more clear we are a country fated to endless war and as more veterans are daily being created, I suspect many of us-we’ve all lost someone-need the parade. We need to stand together waving tiny flags made in China and for a short while be reminded that no matter what cause sent them to fight, they went believing it was for the good, and we must always honor that.

I was 25 years old walking down Cumberland Avenue in Knoxville, Tennessee with one of the architect boys, Bill Finney. It was early evening April 1975. We were talking about I can’t remember what, maybe Corbu or Louis Kahn, or well, it doesn’t matter now though it did so much then. I am certain however the topic was not John Wayne when the words came into my head whole in one piece and stayed there patiently waiting until I could find a scrap of paper and, crouching on the steps of the old Roman Room, write them down.

how i have loved you john wayne

in innocence

how strange to find you now

the boogie man

how many sweet boys

have wished

watching you in baby brave wonder

to be close enough quick enough

to whistle the smoke off the end of your glimmering six shooter 

i have seen the figures

i know them like a poem

the bullets blank

no one died

ever

but

how were they to know that

as they flung themselves in cinematic suicide across the evening news

death

far away from us

death

maybe far away from them

but

all those sweet dead boys

dead

in another country

a country where john wayne had never been

Is it possible that words and ideas just float around out there haphazardly bumping around looking for a way in and on that night the hole in my head was the one available large enough open to receiving them?  I don’t know and I am not a poet, but through all the years I’ve kept that poem in my head and in my heart I’ve never stopped missing those boys. 

Words and tears and thank yous are not enough but they are all we have. See you next year.

SRQ Daily Columnist Diana Hamilton, after living 35 years in Sarasota, labels herself a pragmatic optimist with radical humorist tendencies and a new found resistance to ice cream.