Parade
There’s nothing our town likes better than a good parade. Parades punctuate the calendar with surprising frequency, celebrating civil rights and responsibilities — and some of them are just for fun! My favorite launches the annual Shrimp Festival in early May. Shrimp Fest itself is a major tourist event; arts, crafts, and shrimp-themed food stalls line the streets, bands play, and fireworks flash across the night sky. In contrast, the parade is a bohemian affair, quintessential small-town America. Local gymnasts and dancers flip and twirl around the route, karate kids posture, dogs walk their owners, all the local businesses share the love, the arborists to the zen masters and everything in between. And, it goes without saying, there are pirates rampaging around sharing their swag with the crowd. Their pirate ship brings up the rear. Cover your ears before the cannons boom! Small-town America at play.
It was a different scene at our former hometown in Massachusetts, where the Patriots Day Parade is a much more organized event. Groups of deliberately disheveled Minutemen and spick and span military bands travel from afar to participate in this celebration of “the shot first heard around the world” 1, the beginning of America’s War of Independence from British tyranny. As someone who has dual British and American citizenship, this leaves me somewhat disquieted. All the same, I wish we could have been at the North Bridge in Concord, MA, this year to witness the festivities for 250 years of relative freedom from oppression.
Instead, Chris and I attended another sort of “parade” – a demonstration protesting, dare I say, the “tyranny” of the current democratically elected administration. Together, with about 3000 others, we lined the road brandishing homemade placards and waving at the traffic driving by. I smiled in recognition at the sign that read, “Things must be bad when introverts protest.” My own was rather bland: “Defend all human rights.”
1Ralph Waldo Emerson
As we left, I doubted we had made much of a difference; perhaps we merely incited greater injustice but, oh my, let’s hope that before more harm is done, we can discard our signs and join in fun and harmony with our neighbors in a celebratory small town parade.
News Flash!
Cape Sound Book Club discusses
“A Glass Darkly.”
End Notes
Reading
This Must Be the Place
Maggie O’Farrell
Listening
Prelude in D flat major Op. 28 No. 15
Performed by Eric Lu
Yesterday When I Was Young
Charles Aznavour
Poetry
I Am Salmon
Duncan Berry
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