Lessons from our friends

Yesterday was the Fourth of July, and every year this means making a choice: do we attend the parade on our own street, or do we go to the all-island parade (so masterfully em-ceed by my friend Mark).

This year, however, the choice was clear: we felt we had to do our street's parade, because this would be the first year it would NOT be led by our beloved Dick Cole.

Dick, who died earlier this year, was one of those rare individuals who always had a grin on his face and a kind or joking word for anyone who passed by. He seemed to genuinely enjoy life, and his contribution to the annual Sandspit parade was HUGE.

Now you need to understand that there are only 50 homes on our street, but this parade is really something. It begins with a 21 gun salute fired across the lagoon by our next-door-neighbor's cannon; involves an appropriately costumed march down the length of the sandspit; and ends at the park with a patriotic singalong. But Dick was the heart and soul of the parade.

He had a fabulous pair of stars and stripes pants, held up by stars and stripes suspenders; he wore stars and stripes shoes, a wig, and a revolutionary war hat that looked like it might actually have been authentic. And he beat this ancient bass drum as he walked, a drum that apparently once belonged to the original owners of our property.

Steve K, the young man to whom Dick bequeathed the pants, suspenders, and drum last year, claims that since the drum is more related to our property than to his, we need to get more involved next year, perhaps with a snare drum or tambourine? This suggestion, we told him, will go under advisement...

At any rate, there were very few participants in the parade yesterday who weren't thinking of Dick as we walked -- and of all the others who, for a variety of reasons, couldn't be with us that day.

But I would like to think we were celebrating FOR Dick, and somehow with him as well, and that the occasion was actually richer for it because we were united in the sense of loss and eager to "do it right for Dick." And I think that each of us now feels a responsibility to carry on his legacy of kindness and generosity, where before we just let him do it. It even occurred to me we might want to set up some sort of fund in his name that would support our work for a "kinder, gentler" community -- maybe a mediation fund? A parade fund? I'm not sure what it would look like.

But this morning I read the following quote from Confucius:

"When walking in the company of two other men I am bound to be able to learn from them. The good points of the one I copy; the bad points of the other I correct in myself."

And it certainly seems to me that Dick gave us lots of good points to copy: he had lessons to teach us all.