Monday, June 30, 2008

Parade season is upon us

This is the paradingest town I've ever seen. We have a parade for the rodeo. We have a pre-rodeo pet parade. We have parades for homecoming, Christmas and the Gloss Mountain Cruisers car show.

Fairview is certainly not alone in its peculiar love of parades. Please understand, I do not mean any insult to the parading public by using the term 'peculiar.' But, nonetheless, grown men in clown outfits, cages of hermit crabs and horseback riders all making their way down the same street is, well, peculiar.

And yet these public demonstrations, sometimes somber, sometimes bizarre, and sometimes downright riotous, thrive in communities around the world.

Nearly every Spanish town has a parade of its patron saints, complete with ornate costumes, food festivals and reenactments of saintly martyrdom.

Most Caribbean islands and many South American cities have carnival parades that make Mardi Gras in New Orleans look like a ladies' temperance march.

Parade season in Ireland usually means polishing up the riot gear and making sure enough tear gas is on hand. Catholic and Protestant parades often combine into one indistinguishable mass of fists, head butts and general brotherly love. If this happens in the street you know its a parade, if it occurs in a stadium it's just a soccer match.

Now, Fairview can not claim to have some of the more exotic attributes of overseas parades, like the sweet smell of tear gas, self-flagellating pilgrims, or costumes that wouldn't make it into an R-rated movie.

But our parades have their own festive atmosphere, with the upside that you can take the whole family to our parades and leave the gas masks at home.

One of my first experiences with Fairview's parading culture was with the pet parade last year. Not having a dog, horse, or other traditional parade pet, our daughter Maggie decided to take her short-haired white house cat Monty for a ride in the parade.

So, she strapped him in her wagon, tied a bandana around his neck, and headed off to the parade. Nothing says festive like the homicidal rage of a house cat that's been pulled through a quarter mile gauntlet of people, dogs, and horses.

These parades are fun for just about everyone, except maybe Monty. We decorate every possible kind of wheeled conveyance to the point of not being recognizable. We dress our kids, our pets, and ourselves up in elaborate costumes. And, we throw the kids enough candy to send the American Dental Association into an epileptic fit.

But, if we look past the costumes, music, candy and clowns we can see a deeper meaning to parades in this or any community.

No, the clowns aren't carrying a secret message. But, the size, attendance, and atmosphere of a city's parades can be a valuable indicator of that community's health.

I don't have any hard scientific research to back this up, or even any quasi-scientific poll results that I can manipulate to give the appearance of supporting my view of parades.

What I do have is a considerable amount of experience living in towns that did not have parades. Marydel, the town where I grew up in Delaware, did not have parades. It had the streets, the population, everything required to put on a parade.

So, then, why no parades? And, why should we care? Marydel, and many towns like it, do not have parades because they are towns without a community. They are geographically co-located homes and families that have little or nothing to do with each other outside of the required business transactions of daily life.

In towns like Marydel very few people would care to organize a parade for the public enjoyment. And if there were a parade, very few people would care to sit outside and watch their neighbors' kids display their pets, their accomplishments and themselves.

And yet, in Fairview, we're always ready to sit out in the sun and watch our neighbors and our kids display the best attributes of our town. We stage these bizarre demonstrations and then line up to watch them because we are a community, a community that enjoys celebrating together. So, next time you see a grown man in a clown costume doing donuts with a tiny car on Main Street, just think of what it might mean if the parades went away.

No comments: