I live in a very small town on the island of Hawaii. It’s so small it’s really not a town at all. I like to think of it as the Mayberry of the Pacific, which it is, except that we have more than one town drunk.
Nothing much happens here, except parades. A parade can happen at the drop of a hat. Anybody’s hat. I guess this is because Hawaiians are really into pageantry. Or it could be they just really like parades. Whatever the reason, they think nothing of bringing the entire town to a screeching halt to have one. Actually, “screeching” is probably not the right word. That would imply that things were really clipping along and then suddenly they weren’t. It’s more like getting your bicycle wheel stuck in the mud.
See we only have one highway, which is a two-lane blacktop, so if you need to get somewhere when a parade is going on you’re just out of luck. It’s not a good time to have a heart attack because you couldn’t get to the hospital. But there’s not much chance that any of our parades would ever induce a heart attack anyway. However, were the unthinkable to happen, the mortuary is conveniently located right next to the hospital (The rumors about a chute running directly from the hospital to the mortuary are untrue. I think.).
When most people envision a parade, they think of something like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or the Tournament of Roses Parade. These spectacular events require a year’s planning, billions of dollars and thousands of people to pull them off. In my town, you can have a parade if you have at least two running cars, a hula dancer and some guy to throw hard candy at you.
The other night I was in a hurry to get home. There was a special, The Incredible Secret World of Wombats, on the Discovery Channel that promised to be highly enlightening as to these remarkable creatures’ little understood behavior. But as I rounded the curve into town, I saw the traffic had stopped. This could be only mean an accident or a parade. Sure enough, as I crept down the road, I saw cars parked on all the shoulders and hundreds of people lining the street. Several boy scouts were huddled together under their flag and a hula halau was lining up in their colorful costumes. A racing canoe was atop a festively decorated (tinsel) wrecker (our version of a float) and several musicians were tuning up. This was going to be a big one.
Fortunately for me, the parade had not yet started so I was able to snake my way through eventually. But by the time I got home I had missed the special about wombats and never did find out exactly what secrets their world held or why they were incredible. Disappointed, I turned around and went back to town to catch the tail end of the parade. It was over, a few pieces of hard candy in the street being the only sign it had passed that way. I guess this was a lesson to me. As I sat on the curb sucking on a raspberry sourball, I realized that no matter how small the parade is, you should just stop and watch it.
© 2002 Kona Lowell
