When we bought our house, I had moved down from San Francisco, so I didn’t know that much about Santa Cruz County. We chose our house because of the trees, and because there wasn’t that much out there to buy. I can’t remember if we went to the Fourth of July parade that year, but I’m guessing we went the next. The area we’d moved into is closer to rural than the northern part of the county, so perhaps I thought the parade would be more “normal” than Santa Cruz. Guess again!
First of all, the name: The World’s Shortest Parade. The length of it is 1/4 mile, so that’s what’s short about it, but the time it takes is anything but short. I think perhaps we are one of the few households in mid-County that haven’t taken part. Any guy with a cool car (T-birds, Model-T’s, ATVs) drives in the parade. Groups of dog fanciers from dachshund to Great Pyrenees. The neighborhood kid who can walk on stilts. Sometimes a whole school of kids who can walk on stilts and ride unicycles. Every troop, including the Boy Scouts on a truck equipped with a climbing gym. Religious groups of various flavors. E Clampus Vitus. I could go on about as long as the parade goes on, which is long!
We walk down from our house, usually with family members or friends in tow. We park ourselves somewhere near the donut shop, which is always open and stocked to the gills with donuts. We see lots of people we know, and even more we don’t. Hopefully everyone we sit around is good-humored, because our kids get really obnoxious, running out to get candy and free giveaways. Last year we were the ill-humored ones, as one of our thousands of neighbors we’d joined to watch the parade decided to bring her very badly behaved dog along, and then seemed unwilling to keep him on a short leash. It’s not a crowd like in other places — there are only 10,000ish people living in this area — but it is a crowd and people do show how much sense they have!
Our kids’ favorite floats are the ones that give out stuff and that have exotic animals. We all love the Klingons, who march every year. My husband and I have a fondness for a float that hasn’t appeared in the last few years: The Synchronized Lawn Chair Brigade. It is somewhat like this one that I found on YouTube, but much more ragtag and much funnier. You got the impression that it was a group of friends who thought it up while drinking, though I now see by searching the web that it’s actually a thing people do.
I liked that almost always, though the parade organizers swear it’s random, you’d get funny pairings, like the Democrats right after the “US out of the UN” guy, or Planned Parenthood right next to a conservative church.
You’ll notice that a lot of this is in past tense. It may just be our getting jaded, but our little parade seems to be getting staid these days. The beach chair people have apparently gone back to their drinking. The “US out of the UN” guy is long gone. The highlights were few and far between, with more and more cool cars (woodies this year), fewer weird groups of people who thought up something random (one year there were Bucketheads; they had buckets on their heads). More local business floats that are pure advertising; fewer with really fun ideas.
The exceptions stood out: A few DIY vehicles, like a guy on a tandem bike that had a wire figure in the front seat peddling along with him, and a motorized vehicle made of coolers. A local cleaners that had a really excellent float that blew bubbles and gave everyone a good laugh. A pickup brass band that really could play to go along with the old staple, the Watsonville Community Band. A guy singing with a cover band that had a thrillingly pure and lovely falsetto. The Revival Party guy, and don’t ask me what that is because though I have seen him for 13 years now, I don’t know! An exotic animal therapy ranch that had two very funny guys picking up the poop (always a good job for the funny guys).
Oh, OK, so it wasn’t so tame. But I do feel like the playfulness has gone out of a lot of us in the last few years. As the Watsonville Community Band marched by, I noted that they might not exist in the future since funding for school bands in our area is being cut. (I notice that they mention that on their homepage, as well.) As our various elected officials rode by on their cars, it was hard not to think about the fact that California is deep into the stuff the guys were scooping up off the street. (I was thinking of linking to a page about this, but heck, how to choose? If you don’t know what California is deep into, just Google “California budget crisis”!)
Yes, we were all there, and we were rooting for our ragtag parade, but I wonder if anyone else felt the dampening that I did. It just didn’t seem as weird, as crowded, as energetic.
The news has been very bad for almost a year now, and pretty bad for a long time for those of us who were paying attention. But its effects on the state of local life seem to come in waves. Sometimes things seem to be going on just fine, then you find out that someone you know has been out of work since January, but hasn’t been telling people. Sure, the houses on our block go on the market and then off without selling, but as a neighbor who’s been trying to sell his house said, it’s not a bad place to be stuck. But unlike the pendulum that swings from negative all the way back to positive, it seems like the positives are getting shorter and the negatives are piling up.
This morning we got to look at the Declaration of Independence with our kids because it was reprinted as a full page in the SF Chronicle. (Yep, we’re one of the dwindling number of households where we shuffle out each morning to get the paper!) We talked about it with the kids, pointed out John Hancock’s signature, talking about going to DC to see the real thing. But for the present, like most everyone else we know, we’re keeping it closer to home. Hoping that in the future we’ll be able to talk about this year as the bottom, rather than the beginning of the path downward.
So Happy Fourth, and let’s hope for a better one next year!
ps: Sorry for the crappy photos: as usual, my camera battery died about five minutes in!
