My husband, John Hourihan, won a national award in the National Society of Newspaper Columnists in 2008 for the following post which is just as poignant today as it was then. His columns have won numerous awards on local, state, national, and international news. He has had his hand on the heartbeat of our Nation and the world. John stands up for truth in the face of adversity, no matter what the cost. Truth matters to John.
“I wrote this column decades ago, during W’s administration. I remembered it on (Jan. 6) as I watched the president instigate a coup as if we were some humiliating third-world pit.
“I’m sure she still slumbers in your memory, that first real beauty of your youth.
“For every young man who has stepped from childhood into the world of the differences between men and women, there was that one first beautiful girl, so physically perfect you would do anything just to stand near her.
“It was the same feeling as when you were first told as a child about the red, white, and blue of a shining country and how lucky we were to be born into the most wonderful place on Earth.
“Looking at her features was such pleasure you would do anything for her just because of her appearance. When you first saw her you were in love, wanted to protect her, stand guard for her, stand beside her, and keep her in your heart. Her physical beauty was so impressive that nothing else mattered.
“She was perfection. Remember her?
“Mine was on a California beach in the mid-60s. We soldiers-in-training had all flopped into a Corvair convertible at the Presidio of Monterey and unloaded in Carmel. Reclined on the beach, propped up on my elbows, I watched them walk by.
“Then, her dark silhouette appeared in the heat haze above the sand, coming up from the water. Ten yards or so in front of us, in the bright sunlight, she stopped and lifted her surfboard high above her head. It balanced horizontal for a split second and then she stuck it into the sand. Her actions passed frame by frame; her wet blond hair flipping back, her bathing suit barely winning the battle to hold her decent, her back arching and then snapping forward, and then as she let go of the board, she looked directly at me and smiled, a perfect white smile, burning blue eyes and a flame red bikini.
“Most on the beach just admired her from a distance, but I wanted to be closer, to see the curve of her lip, the softness of her eyes, to feast on her tanned skin.
“We spent an afternoon. She tried to teach me to surf on a board that was too small, and then we passed part of the night at a beach party somewhere down the coast.
“By the time I returned to the barracks I was in love. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing her face, her lips and everything else a young man would look at. It was burned into my brain.
“As I stumbled into the bright lights of barracks 14, there on the bed in the cubicle next to mine, the guys I had been at the beach with were all hovering over a magazine on the bunk, and when I came in, they turned to me in awe. “This is her, right Hourihan?” Biloxi asked. I looked. The centerfold was the girl I had spent the day with. “No,” I lied, “That’s not her,” and walked off feeling betrayed: proud, but betrayed.
“Years later, a still young but grizzled combat vet, heard she had been arrested. She even did time for hard drugs. Even later, I saw a picture of her. Her beauty had been bruised and misshapen, and she didn’t look at all like the picture embedded for years in my brain – the standard by which I had judged all other beauty.
“I sat that night in an EM club drinking and thought of how she was like my country. I had loved both for their initial beauty. But in a few years of revelations, my country had been laid bare, battered beyond recognition. So many times over the years I thought of the beach and the eyes and the bikini and wanted her back the way she had been that day — so beautiful you could die for her.
“And when I look now at my country, I want the red, white and blue beauty of her returned. I want someone to return to me the fantasy of perfection that used to be America. Return to us our rights; return our love; return to us our country. I felt betrayed that night under the desk lamp in the barracks to see her laid naked and folded out for everyone to see. And I feel betrayed now that my country has been splayed for the world by our own government.
“We have been told it was OK to torture people in some instances; it was OK to deny the Bill of Rights to some people all the time, and to all people some of the time; and we built walls around our borders; and attacked half the world for religious reasons and lies.
“No longer will anyone die for her just because she is so beautiful, so perfect.
“It is foolish now to tell young people they are supposed to love their country, when as a group of adults, we don’t love her anymore. Not like we used to.
“But sometimes, in a quiet moment, I remember how awe inspiring she has been, and how, for one shining moment, she was America the Beautiful, the perfection of youth.
“Remember her?
“It would be nice to feel that way again.”
***
Books by John T. Hourihan, Jr. include Play Fair and Win, Beyond the Fence – Converging Memoirs, Baltimore Catechism: Clean Slate, Baltimore Catechism: A Year of Confirmation, Baltimore Catechism: Mass of the Faithful, Baltimore Catechism: Sacrament of Reconciliation, The Mustard Seed -2095, The Mustard Seed – 2110, The Mustard Seed – 2130, Parables for a New Age I and II.
Soon to be published is The Eighth Commandment.
The Parables For A New Age, Parables For A New Age II, Baltimore Catechism: Clean Slate, Baltimore Catechism: A Year of Confirmation, Baltimore Catechism: Mass of the Faithful, Baltimore Catechism: Sacrament of Reconciliation, are from the perspective starting from the perspective of a growing Catholic boy trying to follow all the rules he was taught as a Catholic boy, adolescent, into adulthood, while attempting to live life with conflicting rules and situations, including the Vietnam War.
John is now retired after having won state, regional and national awards for his opinion columns in several New England newspapers. He received the Cross of Gallantry for valor in Vietnam, where he served three tours as a Vietnamese linguist.
It is my hope that you enjoy reading these insightful books on accurate history which always keep a thread or a party of humor throughout. These books are hard to put down once you open them.
Happy New Year!
God Bless Everyone Everywhere