I Love a Parade

This summer my family got up early the morning of the Fourth of July, drove thirty minutes to a neighboring city, wore silly red, white and blue hats, beads and t-shirts in order to wave at perfect strangers while we walked behind a truck draped in patriotic tissue paper bearing the banner of my employer. We were breathing the fumes of the truck, our feet hurt, we were sweating profusely and getting significant sunburns. And yet, when we were in our car on our way home, we all agreed that we’d had a great time and wanted to do it again next year! What is it about a parade that takes us back to our childhoods?

A couple of my memories of Olton involve parades. The Homecoming Parade of 1967 (or was it ’68?) caused great excitement and worry in my little four-year-old world. My sister and her friends worked on the class float in the evenings after school for what seemed like months. I’m sure it was probably just a couple weeks. I was always eager to ride by with Granddaddy and see the progress being made filling the holes of the chicken wire with little puffs of blue and white tissue paper. The theme of the float was “The Mustangs are Tops” and there were to be two six foot blue and white spinning tops adorning the main area of the float with smiling, waving pep squad members artistically placed around the tops. Then, a few days before the big event, the bad news came. The tops would not spin. I (and I assume the big kids I adored) were crushed. There was a problem with the wiring and they would just have to be stationary tops. But somehow, on parade day (at least as my memory paints it) there was a Homecoming Miracle and the tops spun. Proving to me that, yes indeed, THE MUSTANGS ARE TOPS.