There is something humorous about having launched a newspaper column of personal musings during the doldrums of a pandemic: Shall I write about how I procured a can of dolmas (stuffed Greek grape leaves) without going inside the grocery store, or shall I thrill the reader with the antics of the lone-ranger raccoon who frequents my backdoor trash bin?
It’s one thing to believe your immortal pensées are worthy of pen and paper; it’s another to believe your pensées about A Whole Lotta Nothing Going On in the Tedious Privacy of My Own Home should be foisted on the public.
Joan Didion had Haight-Ashbury. George Orwell had an elephant to shoot in imperial India. I have a raccoon, a missing bedroom slipper, and a home-office job in Covid-19 tracing that I’m contractually obliged not to talk about in (or to) the media.
Inspiration has to come from within, mining, as it were, my chit-chatty inner monologue and memory. There are no sold-out meadow concerts at Deep Hollow Ranch to rant about; no basketball games at the Bridgehampton Hive about which to rave; no celebrity run-ins; no bar-mitzvah celebrations, no endless drunken dinner parties during which we debate the Rosenberg case and solve the parking crisis.
And no parades for the duration!
The Montauk Friends of Erin St. Patrick’s Day Parade has been canceled for a second year.
I’ve already said — thrillingly, I’m sure — in a previous column that the Ladies Village Improvement Society Fair is my favorite day of the year. (And so it was. Though I might strike and refuse to re-enter the cake booth until I hear a reasonable explanation for why a man was hired to be the grand old women’s organization’s first executive director.) But my second favorite day of the year has always been St Patrick’s at the Last Resort.
When I was 7, a fellow passenger on an Aer Lingus jumbo jet noted my freckles, patted my head, and asked if I was flying home to see my Irish grannie, but I’m not Irish in any ancestral percentage. My enjoyment of the St. Patrick’s Day parade doesn’t have much to do with Ireland. I love it because it’s the first outdoor gathering of the calendar year. It’s boisterous, and those who make the day trip to Montauk can’t help but catch the mood of high good humor. It isn’t quite spring yet, and marchers and spectators alike are underdressed, and freezing — with the wind blasting in off the Atlantic — but that only raises spirits. Our teeth chatter and we complain in loud voices and tuck our chapped hands into the armpits of our fishermen’s sweaters. I love the ceremonial meal of corned beef and cabbage. Boiled potatoes don’t get enough respect.
Nothing illustrates all that’s best and most idealistic — you might say naive — in our national character than a parade. Parades are the most purely American rite: a mass, public demonstration of civilian involvement in the community, for the good of the community. Parades are the American way. Plus fezzes and plastic necklaces.
Parades look very different in North Korea, in Russia, in France. There, they don’t tend to feature grown adults piloting golf carts decorated like choo-choo trains or Santa sleds as part of a convoluted fund-raising scheme to distribute hard candies while helping St. Jude Children’s Hospital.
I’ve never forgotten coming home in the summer of 1995 to the Fourth of July parade on Main Street, after having lived for a couple of years in Central Europe. The blue skies, the voluntary volunteerism, the unashamed clown-costume-wearing, the marching band playing the theme from “Rocky” — it knocked my socks off. I don’t trust people who don’t like Elvis, and I don’t trust people who say they don’t like parades.
Years of prosperity and peace. Let them return.
The East Hampton Star has always joined in a parade with enthusiasm, down the decades constructing floats that ranged from — I won’t say sublime — the silly to the ridiculous. For the 350th anniversary of East Hampton Town, when the highway was shut to traffic, we marched alongside a replica of an 1800s Sag Harbor steam ferry, then wandered giddily in the middle of Main Street till dusk. It was more fun than a week in Cancun. I’ve ridden on a stage-set version of the Star office’s interior, pushed a stroller containing a baby in a lobster costume alongside a rolling lobster pot manned by lobster-children who popped up out of the cauldron waving their claws, and worn a green martian helmet as I strolled past the reviewing stand alongside a gigantic silver flying saucer, accompanied by fellow aliens on roller skates.
Now that, my fellow Americans, is Democracy.