Rick Leddy

I Love a Parade

 

There are those who wait a year

Breathless with anticipation

Sleeping fitfully on hypothermia’s unforgiving sidewalk

Giddily waiting elbow to elbow with other poly-filled North Faced Michelin Men

Breath billowed clouds co-mingling

Rising before the north-facing mountains of dawn’s early light

Waiting

For lumbering flower-covered electronic marvels

Commercials rounding the corner covered in petals, bark and seeds   

as horses shit in the new year

Thousands of shiny shoes from Indiana and Alabama and Idaho stomp

Supporting fancy uniforms that echo strife and war

Marching to the beat of different drumlines

The crowd cheers for strangers rolling in cars with frozen smiles

They wave at elite private school princesses and queens

who wave back in practiced figure eights

And we are charmed

The parade is named after the Rose

Because it leaves thorns in your back
and weeds in your joints

But, I love a parade

Don’t you?

 

I have been to a parade in San Sebastian,

(Donostia, for those in the know)

A San Sebastian parade is a very different thing

filled with salt air, chaos and thudding hangovers

It is not named for flora, but for drums

The Tomborrada

It is the heartbeat of the city and a people

We paid to sit in front-row rickety fold-out chairs
that hugged the curb to watch a parade without context

But, boundaries in a Spanish parade are malleable

To say non-existent

The boulevard soon became a churning soup of spectators, horses, bands
and locals dressed as chefs, Napoleonic soldiers,
and women in Basque clothing
wielding spoons, small barrels and drums

But, there is a story behind that

As there always is

It began as a subversion

To punk pompous French soldiers who drummed through the city
during Napoleon’s occupation

The women mockingly beat counter-rhythms on barrels as they passed

Because Basque women are baddasses who love a parade

Don’t you?

 

Traveling in our turquoise Comet

Light my Fire writhing on AM Radio

We serpentine up PCH to San Francisco

My brother and sister and I sit in the back seat

Wanting to ask are we there yet?

But knowing that living is better than asking stupid questions

We glide into the City during the Summer of Love

And there are girls with actual flowers in their hair

Swishing hippily and bouncing bralessly on Haight Street

It is a kaleidoscopic fever dream filled with doubt and hope

I gaze out the car window, slumping low, a child, frightened and giddy

Fascinated and repelled by the sea change by the bay

As the candy-colored nickelodeon unwinds before us

Despite us

Then, my father rolling down the window

inhales deeply, taking in the aroma of change, and yells:

“Get a job, you dirty hippies!”

Acid-raining on their doomed flower parade

Later, I pick up a smudged flyer on a dirty grey sidewalk

featuring a poem titled, “God is Dead.”

And I hate the verse, not because it’s bad

But, because I suspect it might be true

That the parade is actually all sound and fury signifying nothing

But, so be it

Because I still love a parade

Don’t you?