Honk If You Hate Parades

If I were to ask you to name a few important American holidays, what would probably spring to mind is Fourth of July or Thanksgiving or Memorial Day. I doubt anyone would actually think “Columbus Day,” even at the end of his/her mental list. I wasn’t even aware of Columbus Day as a holiday until I attended college in Massachusetts, which, I believe, is the only state in America that really recognizes it as an actual holiday and gives you a day off. I could be wrong about this. I will admit that I’ve not done any research on the matter.

At any rate, Wellesley College and all the other colleges and universities in the area gave their students a day off on that particular Monday in October. But no one actually celebrated anything. In fact, Wellesley didn’t even call it Columbus Day on their calendar—they went so far as to give us Tuesday off as well and lump it all together as “Fall Break,” skipping any direct reference to Columbus. After all, isn’t Columbus kind of passé now? I mean, didn’t historians find out a while ago that he wasn’t the first one to discover America, and that he was mean to Native Americans and brought smoking back to Europe? Or something like that. There was that weird year in the 90s where two movies about Columbus came out in theaters, starring Gerard Depardieu or Armande Assante or some other similar actor(s), but other than that, I didn’t think there were many people left who cared about Columbus other than elementary school teachers, whose students still perhaps chorus back “Nina! Pinta! Santa Maria!” the way I did in grade school.

So all of this to say that in my mind, Columbus Day simply means "three-day weekend in Massachusetts.” My sister, who is a resident of Massachusetts, regularly goes up to Maine during this holiday weekend. My father, who is retired, has joined her for the last several years, and this year my brother and I decided to join them as well—both of us using personal days at work since neither Virginia nor California recognizes Columbus Day. Despite the fact that global warming, evil culprit of all bad weather in the world, has made the idea of a crisp New England fall something of a joke (it was 81 degrees the day I arrived), Maine was still lovely and we had a nice family weekend together.

On the last day—Monday—my brother and I drove our rental car back towards Boston. There was no traffic on any of the major highways and we even had time to stop for a leisurely lunch in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The 95 South, the 1 South, and the 60 East were all beautiful. It was when we were only three miles away from our destination—Logan Airport—that everything came to a screeching halt. Literally. One minute we were sailing along at 65 miles an hour on the 1A south, and the next I was hitting the brakes. We sat there idling for five minutes, then ten. After another few minutes, we heard some sirens in the distance. Must be an accident, we concluded, and checked our watches in that compassionate/selfish mix of, I hope no one’s hurt and I hope they get this cleared up soon. When another five minutes passed, I saw a few people behind me getting out of their cars, and I sent my brother out to ask the state trooper parked a little ways behind us if he knew what was going on. Meanwhile, I rolled my window down and stuck my head out. And that’s when I heard it—the first daaa da daaa da, BOOM cha BOOM cha.

Yes, that’s right, it was the sound (in case you couldn’t tell from my descriptors) of a marching band. This was no accident backing up all of the traffic trying to get to Logan Airport and other important places—this was a PARADE. A parade to celebrate Columbus. Who cares about Columbus Day, I ask? Apparently, the good Italian people of Revere, MA do. Enough so to shut down one of the major highways leading into Boston without any warning or rerouting for an entire HOUR. To the people of Boston and the far-sighted neighborhood of Revere, dozens and dozens of people panicked about missing their flights is nothing compared to the importance of properly paying tribute to Columbus. They even had bagpipes at one point. What bagpipes have to do with Columbus, I haven’t the faintest idea, but their inclusion could have something to do with the unwritten rule that all parades occurring in and around Boston must always have bagpipes.

Meanwhile, all those of us trapped in our cars could do was boil and stew. One poor British man did several frantic laps back and forth from the parade front to his car, but this didn’t gain him any more information than we had simply sitting our cars. At least maybe it helped him work off some of his stress and anxiety, which was making my own stomach churn. At one point early on in the parade, I suggested to my brother that all of us in our cars should blare our horns and drown out the parade. I was bitter enough to make the suggestion but, at that point, not bitter enough to take the action. When we passed the half hour mark, however, someone else had the same idea and began to honk.

It was like a match to tinder. Immediately, every driver in the vicinity (including me) began to blast his/her horn. The overwhelming blare of sound made my brother and me wince, but it also made us cackle somewhat maniacally with glee, and I leaned on my horn with relish, not caring a bit that I might be ruining some high school trombonist’s big moment or making toddlers cry. I felt a wave of joy wash over me in this act of making myself heard (literally) and a warm solidarity with the people around me who were just as enraged by this situation as I was. Stop traffic, suffer the consequences! You will pay! Ha ha ha! Take that, stupid Columbus Day Parade!

And then another sound emerged. The same state trooper my brother had spoken with earlier was now loudly reprimanding us all over his loudspeaker, ordering us to stop our honking and informing us that “it doesn’t help anything.” He even got out of his car to yell at a few drivers in person. I didn't have the courage to say this to him directly, but here's what I wanted to say: Actually, Mr. Trooper, you are wrong about that. Very very wrong. It may not have helped the parade end any more quickly or gotten us to the airport any sooner, but that wave of honking was a wonderful release of all that toxic anger and anxiety and stress that was building up in all of us, not to mention the strongest bond I've felt with an entire group of strangers in a very long time. Sometimes, it just feels really good to honk at a parade—especially a Columbus Day parade. So there.