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I consider myself something of an expert on parades; after all, I was the Grand Marshal of the Meeteetse Labor Day parade. Meeteetse is a wonderful little town in the western part of Wyoming with a population of about three-hundred and fifty. It's the place where I did my debut library event when my first novel, The Cold Dish, was published. When they first asked about the parade, I said no, thinking I was over-stepping my bounds by taking such an illustrious position-but they explained that the parade was only three blocks long and was so much fun that they usually circled back around and did another lap.
I never had such a good time in my life, and I have to admit that it changed my entire perspective on parades. Most of the parades I've witnessed have been in uniform, and there are sixteen parades in New York every year. I know because I worked practically all of them as a young patrolman. There are the ones that everybody knows about because they're on holidays or because people grew up watching them on TV back when there were only three channels. New Year's Day is a biggie along with Thanksgiving where I once saw twenty guys get lifted about ten feet off the ground because Underdog got an unexpected tailwind. But there are also the ones that nobody's heard of.
So you wanna give it a try, huh?
The Mermaid Parade.
Go ahead, I'm waiting.
It's the one where a bunch of people in the metropolitan area get dressed up like a mermaid, and I'm assuming even from close inspection, mermen... You know, like Ethel. Then they go to the boardwalk and throw fruit into the ocean to appease the sea god, Poseidon.
I'm not kidding.
It's in June.
You should go.
Then there are the usual holidays; but the biggest annually scheduled disasters have to be the lumped in with the ‘pride parades'. Now, some of these stand alone like the Cuban Day parade, which was great because the girls were really hot, closely followed by the Puerto Rican Day parade, which, by some of my less tolerant partners was sometimes referred to as the 911 parade, but as far as the women go, maybe I'm relaying a personal preference. Columbus Day is forever intertwined with the Italians, and everybody brings hibachis and cook on the sidewalks, which is great until some jabon pushes his under a parked car and heats up the gas tank and we get Chinese New Year in October.
The official Chinese New Year parade is, appropriately, in January.
That was an inside New York joke.
Now, you probably already know why it is that I'm bringing all this up, and it's even harder on me because I'm part Irish-but then so's everybody, right? I actually know families where the patriarch will suddenly announce on some arbitrary day on the calendar that "It's August 12, and you all know what we do on August twelfth!"-whereupon the entire family will troop into the den for the one-thousand and thirty-seventh viewing of The Quiet Man. Speaking from a law-enforcement background, I think I can call that a justifiable suicide pact. Now don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against The Duke-but about that nine-hundred-and-fifty-fifth viewing, I'd be getting twitchy.
You got it. St. Patrick's Day was the one everybody dreaded working the most. Why? Sometimes people drank too much. That was my politically correct statement on the subject, but not exactly true-everybody drank too much. I once had to break up an altercation outside of an Irish bar where two guys were fighting by throwing up on each other. I think I can say that of all the mutual assaults I've had to break up in my time as a cop, I really loathed that one the most.
As for the women, they aren't so great looking ‘cause it's March in New York and they're layered up to their red eyebrows-so who the hell knows? You try to judge a potential date by her forehead.
Happy St. Patrick's Day, and have a green beer for me.
Best,
Craig
View more information on Kindness Goes Unpunished
Craig Johnson, 
Kindness Goes Unpunished, 
Sherriff Walt Longmire, 
western, 
parades, 
New York City, 
St. Patrick's Day, 
Penguin Books, 
books
