I Love A Parade

OK, make that "tolerate".
We don't usually do parades, but it was unusually cool yesterday, and I was pestered with that nagging feeling that if we didn't go I would regret it because one day soon, the girls will be too old for parades. So we went, and enjoyed ourselves for the most part. The kid's loved it, and it was easy to get caught up in their excitement for awhile.

But after an hour had gone by with no end in sight, we began watching with a more critical eye. And wondering what the criteria are for being in the parade. Or to be exact, if there actually are any criteria.

It BEGAN like a parade.

There were soldiers, many, many soldiers. Truck after truck of soldiers of all ages. There were veterans including former POW's from WWII and Korea and Vietnam and Desert Storm and the current war (I forget its name). And really, if anybody should be in a Fourth of July parade, its our servicemen and women.

There were marching bands which you really can't have a parade without;

There were cute little girls in tiaras and glittery sashes, waving as they rode in convertibles;

There were a couple of clowns, a LOT of motorcycles, some square dancers, and church choirs;

all in keeping with the spirit of a parade.


But for every half dozen or so legitimate parade floats that went by, there was a vehicle that was apparently there for no other reason than free advertising. It really did appear for a little while, that every business in town saw the parade as an open invitation to roll out their ad-displaying cars, trucks and vans.

I have a tendency to be overly cynical at times, and I try to nip this in the bud when I feel it welling up, but when "Good Old Boy's Tree Service" (yes, that's the real name), paraded it's fleet of not two, not three, but SEVEN trucks by - without so much as a single patriotic streamer flying from the antennae to at least give the pretense of, well, patriotism, I think even my kids wondered what they were doing in the parade.


The kicker is that yesterday evening, after drought conditions for I don't know, forever, we had a major storm which left many downed trees and limbs in its wake. It was absolutely great...... if you happened to own a tree service company. I wonder if it's a coincidence that SEVEN has proven to be the average number of times a person has to see a name before it sticks in his memory.

Really, the timing of the storm was kind of eerie. Kind of makes you wonder if God has a soft spot for "Good Old Boys".