Entry in parade unintentional

If there is a record for walking backwards down Meridian Street in Portland, I may hold it.
Another year, another Fourth of July parade. And this one may have been the hottest ever.
I know that after walking backwards about three blocks while shooting photos of the Marching Patriots and taking about 60 other pictures of various parade participants and folks along the route, my face was so red that Dru Hall called to me from the parade and insisted I accept a bottle of water.
“Before you keel over,” he said.
But you can’t use a camera properly with one hand, so I gave the bottle to a guy watching the parade and cooled off later after I got home.
For some reason, this year’s parade, which was a long one (or seemed longer because of the heat) got me thinking about another one in — of all places — a little town called Penn Yan in upper New York State.
It was, as I recall, the Fourth of July weekend and we were heading back to Indiana after a family vacation in New England.
My guess is that we were cutting down from the northern part of New York State, heading toward Bath, where we would pick up old route 17, the Southern Tier Expressway, which would take us toward the Midwest with less traffic and no tolls.
Our route took us through Penn Yan, a picturesque little town in the Finger Lakes region that I’ve always been fond of.
But the moment we hit the edge of town, we knew something was up.
Traffic was clogged on the narrow streets. There were way too many people around for a typical Saturday downtown.
Finally, it hit us: A parade.
So we ratcheted down our impatience and did our best to go with the flow.
But as we made our way through town, something became clear.
The “flow” we were going with was also the parade route.
All the traffic was going the direction we were, and we were suddenly finding ourselves in the position of being the parade’s caboose.
We were the unofficial parade entry that marked the parade’s official conclusion.
The kids caught on first.
People were staring at the family car with anticipation. Maybe they were expecting us to throw candy at them.
What should we do? Someone asked from the back seat.
The answer: Wave.
And wave we did.
We waved like Queen Elizabeth. We waved like beauty queens. We waved like anyone does who has ever found himself on a parade float.
We waved our way out of town, but as far as I know we never received an award for being the parade entry that came the farthest to the event.

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