barry burton

a Parade

6:15am, Saturday morning. This morning. A loud rapping at my door. I open it to find a police officer. Of course. No one else knocks like that. That firm, persistent beating on my door that would only be perpetrated by someone who has no fear of noise ordinances. He told me I needed to move my car, else it would be towed.

Turns out I misread the signs which said that my street would be closed at 7:30. Or failed to read the sign in its entirety, rather. Further down the sign, it said that parking on the street ended at 5am. It was only driving that was still allowed until 7:30. Oops. I apologized and promised to move my car. Fortunately, I awoke at 6 to go running so I was at least dressed and about to leave anyway. Parenthetically, all running should be done at sunrise or sunset. It is in the midst of these periods that the sky becomes a giant motion picture, marked by dynamic grandeur. The run only made better when there, to be watched, is an interesting story unfolding. So as you may have guessed, my street was shut down for my town’s Christmas parade. The parade of course goes down the main street of the town, which is not named Main Street, but which does intersect Main Street. My street. My street was used for the parade to form on, before marching out to the main street. As a result, the bands and floats and boisterous children were all camped out in the street in front of my house from 10 to 12, when the parade finally started. I walked down to witness first hand the cause of all of this and it seemed… well, strange. There were quite a few floats that had obviously been the recipient of a great deal of some person’s time. But none of them were that good. They seem to have fallen in the middle of the quality spectrum. Too good to have just thrown it together in no time at all, and yet not quite good enough to have been worth spending the time on it. I can only hope that some families had fun together working on the parade. It did seem like I was the only person walking around the parade who was out of high school but not yet a parent. So I guess once again I was not the target audience. Its at least nice to live in an interesting town. Tonight I will be glad to park my car closer to my house than an entire block away.