Parade Ready: Candy Crush

Parade Ready

A few years ago, two of my daughters participated in a “summer cheer clinic.”

(“Summer Cheer Clinic” defined: The high school cheerleaders need new uniforms, so let’s get a bunch of kindergartners-through-third-graders to cough up $30 a person for two cheer lessons and a t-shirt.) The clinic culminated in the children showing off their newly-learned cheer moves in a parade that celebrated the local flora and fauna.

One of the things I find fascinating about being an American is the way that communities can turn the most mundane things into a reason to invite the world to come visit and join in celebrating the local banalities.

Work with me here to help prove my point: Get online and search the following:

“Turnip Parade”
“Lentil Festival”
“Potatofest”
“Chicken Wing Festival”
“Couscous Parade”

Let me know what you find.

Anyway, as I watched my girls, dressed up in $30 T-shirts celebrating this year’s participation in the local fauna-flora fest, I was reminded of parades that I had participated in years before.

Now, before I get too far, I need to point out that my ex-wife holds the family parade-participation record, because, thanks to some persuasive campaigning by a friend in junior high, she was a member of Seattle’s All-City Band while she was in, (and after she graduated from) high school. 

However, I’m not her, and thus I am unqualified to write about her experiences, bizarre though they may have been. Since the dissolution of our marriage, I find it unlikely that I will be able to manipulate her to share some of her experiences, although, I suppose it's not impossible, since she was a victim of persuasion to get her into the program in the first place.

When I was a kid in the Cub Scouts, we participated in a parade in a the idyllic, small Seattle community called Ballard. (Perhaps "i-DULL-ic" is a more accurate description.)

Ballard, as a community is best known for its large contingent of Northern European (Scandinavian) stock and its “UFF DA” bumper stickers. (Some cities have “Chinatowns,” Seattle has “Norwaytown”.)

So anyway, we the Bobcats, Wolves and Bears (and a few WeBeLos) participated in this Ballard parade touting the local flora or fauna. In this case, I think it was something like “Lutefisk Fest” or “Lute-a-fest”. 

This, I admit is extrapolation from what little I know of Norse stereotypes and tastes. 

Our job, so far as I can tell, was to be a uniform ocean of navy blue and gold (with a few checkerboard green and red for the WeBeLos,) thus creating a Cub Scout “presence” in the parade. In modern terms we would have been “raising awareness.”

Ultimately, the parade experience boiled down to dodging the deluge of hard (hence painful) butterscotch and “root beer barrel” candies that were thrown out by the cheerleaders behind us, while managing to catch the softer (and tastier) chocolate and caramel ones.

The parade was very long, especially since we didn’t really didn’t know what we were doing, but because we were at the front (read: ADHD and general youthful energy) we were one of the first groups to finish the route.

After we finished, (I had collected five “Krackel” bars, four Snickers miniatures, three (rejected) Hershey’s Special Darks and two welts (from the butterscotch candy thrown by the All-Metro League Cheerleading Pom-Pon Queen,)) the Cubs and WeBeLos were dispersed to the custody of their various parents, guardians and parole officers.

My mother (Den mother extraordinaire for Pack 123-Crown Hill Elementary School (1919-1979 R.I.P,.)) my sister (frequent victim of my youthful shenanigans) and I adjourned to our bright orange 1974 VW Microbus.

Mom was a careful driver, but because the parade had affected traffic flow, making navigation of the streets trickier than usual. After a series of wrong turns and other mishaps, my mom--for reasons that elude me--wound up driving in the parade.

She made a turn, then another turn, made a sound that went something like “ACK!” and BAM! we suddenly were a part of the parade, this time toward the end, tucked in behind Shriners driving their stunt go-carts and the 1978 Parade Lutefisk Princess.

Now, while this would have been embarrassing enough, to suddenly merge back into the parade again, it was at this point (Mom and I were waving, acting as though we were supposed to be there) that my hapless little sister was fiddling with her door handle and …

…fell out of the van!

Luckily, she didn’t just fall out into a heap on the ground. You see, she managed to hang onto the plastic door handle as she poured out. So now our orange microbus had reentered the parade with a five year old (Norwegian-looking) blonde girl dangling from the passenger door, her feet barely reaching the pavement, keeping pace with the parade. This was accomplished, all the while dodging Shriners in their stunt go-carts, and being pummeled by butterscotch and root beer candies.

After a few blocks of this unusual display, Mom finally got off the parade route and we extricated my sister from the hazards of airborne Star Brite Mints and root beer barrels. After a quick check to make sure the candy-borne pounding was not life-threatening, we adjourned to "Dick's," one of the local hamburger shops for the healing powers that come from a cheeseburger, hand-cut fries and a chocolate milkshake.

All these memories come back to me as I watched my girls marching with the local high school cheerleaders. They have some sort of cheer espousing the virtues of flora and fauna.

So, almost thirty years after the Lute-a-Fest debacle, I marched with the members and employees of the local library, a placed a few groups behind the junior cheer clinic, following a mule-drawn cart that was either hawking the importance of organic growing practices, or was just there for show behind a group of young equestrian riders. 

One of the unusual side effects of the equestrian display was a large quantity of Organic Material on the street. (Either way, it was very important to pay heed to the unspoken message of “watch your feet.”)

My job was to “distribute candy to parade-goers without actually throwing it. Apparently there had been enough "Candy-Injury" lawsuits in the intervening decades from my youthful experiences.

 Each piece of chocolate candy was glued to a strip of paper that had some interesting factoid about the importance of community library systems. Despite prohibitions to the behavior, I was hurling miniature chocolate bars wrapped with bits of Library-related trivia to the crowd. It seemed that the paper tails actually gave them some distance.

Here’s a bit of next-generation library trivia: Did you know that a father of five could throw a Hershey’s Miniature chocolate bar through an open third-story apartment window? (Or a closed second-story apartment window?)

(I blame the mule.)

Once our part of the parade was finished, we rounded up the kids and headed home.

Luckily, we walked, rather than drove.

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Phoenix Flight: Rise of the Phoenix Flight: Phoenix Flight Book One

"Sock" It to Me: The Agony of de Feet

You wouldn’t know it right now, but as I write this, moisture is being wicked away from my feet, presumably to be distributed either into my shoes, or in a perfect world, a moisture-deficient atmosphere. You see, I have new socks.

I recently purchased a package of three pairs of black socks for work. My workplace doesn’t require black socks, but I am required to wear black pants and black shoes, and I don’t have any desire to look like a Michael Jackson impersonator during a flood event, so I got the black ones.

Before I move on, I need to get one important piece of information off my chest.

I love new socks. I love the feeling of them on my feet. Some people love the feeling of mud squishing beneath and between their toes, some like the feel of soft grass under their feet, some love the feeling of warm seawater splashing over their feet while they stand on hot sand on the beach.

To me they’re all crazy. I can’t stand being barefoot, especially outside. I have giant feet, and they don’t like stepping on foreign objects. Outside is full of foreign objects.

I guess I’m an inside boy. Probably always have been, probably always will be. One summer, my father brought home a pile of old used pallets and thought it would do me some good to spend time outside, breaking them all down and building something with them. I built a club house with my friends so I could be inside when I was forced to go outside. (We attached giant slingshots to the roof, but that’s a story for another time after I make sure all the statutes of limitation have expired.)

Anyway, I’m an inside boy, and I love to have my feet covered. For most of my adult life (read: previous marriage) our house had a “shoes off” rule, so I walked around in stocking feet a lot. And the only feeling better than having socks between my feet and those objects that would seek to do me harm is having new socks between my feet and those objects that would seek to do me harm.

New socks are soft and comfortable. “New-sock-feel” is akin to that “new-car-smell.” It gives you a sense of freedom and well-being (and, unlike chemicals sprayed into new cars, "new-sock-feel" is probably less likely to give you some ridiculous new form of cancer.) Walking around in new socks is like a love letter from my brain to my feet.

Why, you may ask then, do you not just wear new socks, and then discard them after a single use?

Three reasons:

1) Every sock a wanted sock, I always say.

2) New socks actually feel good for about the first week or so.

3) Socks are freaking expensive!

What makes this new batch of socks so surreally wonderful is that they were ostensibly free!

All it took was to actually read the junk mail that clutters my mailbox, and then hold on to a coupon for the requisite week. That’s it!

In this case, I had received a coupon for "Ten dollars off a purchase of ten dollars or more."

At the end of this time, I was able to waltz…well…walk into the store that had sent me the coupon and voila I had three pairs of black socks, valued at ten dollars. BOOOM!

The following day, I broke into the new package of socks. After snapping off all those nasty plastic tabs that are woven through the socks so you don’t steal a single stocking from the store (and doing it without actually damaging any socks, a feat unto itself,) I slipped my feet into a pair of poly-nylo-cotton heaven.

I prepared to discard the cardboard packaging when I noticed that my socks had “features.”

Socks have…features?

I thought socks were these things that you put on your feet to keep them warm…and let’s face it, to make your feet feel like they’re in…heaven!

Specifically, the socks have “moisture-wicking” capabilities, which (so far as I understand the whole moisture-wicking technology) remove moisture from my feet, keeping them dry and comfortable. Now, to your average, moist-footed citizen, this would seem like a good thing.

However, I started wondering. And boy, did I wonder.

Are my feet going to come out completely desiccated, cracked and dry?

How do the socks know which direction to wick the moisture? Do they wick moisture exclusively from my feet, to be distributed into my shoes (or the moisture-deprived atmosphere)?

What’s stopping them from subsequently wicking the moisture back from my shoes and into my feet?

Could you prevent mold and mildew in the house by tossing socks randomly into the corners of various rooms?

And for heaven’s sake, what happens if I wash them?

When I open the washer, will I have a load of clothes that are still dry, with two over-saturated socks, filled to their stocking capacity with all the water that had been intended to wash the load?

So, despite the heavenly feeling, I pulled the socks on with a degree of trepidation. At the end of my first workday, I was pleased to note that my feet were not desiccated, and they were—for the most part—dry. In fact, I’ve worn all three pairs now, and they have performed (as much as a sock can perform) wonderfully.

And to date, they have not yet sucked all the water out of the washer…