Everyone Loves a Parade

Yesterday was the St Patrick's Day Parade in Old Town. I love St Patrick's Day for a lot of reasons. 1) Green is a pretty cool color. 2) I love that there is really no historical significance to the St Pat's celebration as we know it, but its still pretty awesome. 3) It reminds me of my family (and my former identity) 4) Anytime you can drink an Irish coffee on the street at 11:00am without judgment is a pretty awesome occasion.

I have to say I was a little down about this year's March 17. Last year was great - my husband and I hosted a great party at the Doyle Townhome and just had a great time with Irish beer, Irish music, green everywhere and awesome friends. This year with my husband far from home and no real plans in sight, it seemed like it would pass without many jigs or Guinness toasts. So discovering on Friday night that bagpipes would line my neighborhood streets the next day, it made me pretty happy.

The parade itself was fun with your bagpipers and military honor guards and Irish step dancers - even a rugby exhibition. But there were two things that stuck out to me.

Dogs - apparently this is quite the Old Town tradition. The parade starts with a dog show or lap or something. And then the dogs walk in the parade. My husband and I love puppies of all shapes and sizes and want a dog almost as much as we want to live in the same state. The former will occur as soon as the latter does. Maybe on the same day. But the puppies made me happy. The Irish Wolfhounds were quite impressive - being almost as tall as I am. My next favorite were the Bassets, who were all dressed up and adorably so (see the above photo). One even had his tail dyed green.

Shriners - I know Shriners do great work. But they scare me. They wear funny hats. They raise camels and somehow make money doing it. They have clowns with scary names and make up. They ride in silly little cars. The cars scared the hell out of me. And those around me - the little girl to the left of me asked her mom if they had legs. The little girl to the right of me scrambled up from where she was sitting, afraid the would run over her feet. I shared many of their same concerns, but was mostly afraid that they were going to overturn in their little cars and cause a fiery disastrous mess in the middle of Old Town on a glorious March Saturday. No one wants that. The good thing about being a Shriner in a little car though - you get a personalized license plate with your name on it. I guess knowing that the guy in the scary little car's name is Pete makes things just a little less scary.