I don’t know if it was the baseball game, or the parade.
The traffic on the way to New York today was truely a taste of hell on earth this afternoon. Someone made the unfortunate decision to hold a baseball game and the Salute to Israel Parade on the same day. It probably would have been faster to walk there.
Maybe it was just the parade, after all. With every third Jew on the continent somewhere in Manhattan (last year I saw a contingent from Texas), it can get pretty crowded. Every school, synagogue, and vaguely Hebraic organization from here to Pondunk sends a chapter, via some combination of Zionism, school spirit, and intensive guilt-tripping. (The last was a favorite tactic in my elementary school: “There are reporters counting every single person there, and if you stay home, America will stop supporting Israel, and we’ll be all killed by terrorists.”)
Naturally, I was late. Very late. I was supposed to meet my school at 1:15.
1:00. Stuck in traffic. But hey, these things run on Jewish time, right?
1:30. Still stuck in traffic. If I don’t get there on time, how will I know who won the shirt-designing contest? I’m guessing it’s probably not me, because they haven’t written me back. But hope springs eternal, right? And it would really suck to miss the parade the year everyone was wearing my shirt.
1:45. Maybe things will be really, really delayed, like last year? Where are those road-blocking Palestinian protesters when you need them?
2:00 We’re here… no, I lie. We’re several blocks away. In New York terms, that translates to “several more hours stuck in this car”. I can hear the louspeakers blaring out names, though.
“Yeshiva of Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky!”
At that point, I found a friend on my phone list who was actually at the parade. She confirmed that, yes, our group left a long time ago, and was already at 74th Street.
“Great Neck Synagogue!”
I got my parents to drop me off at 76th, at which point I realized that I had no idea if they were in front of me, or behind me, or what, and that I had forgotten to ask what color the T-shirts were, and that I probably was in some trouble now.
“Yeshiva Kehilla Chevrusa Tehina!”
I resorted to the Desperate Last-Minute Prayer Method: “Um, God, I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’ll probably miss them unless they’re right in front of me. So how 'bout arranging things so that they’ll be passing by at the exact same moment that I reach the parade route?”
“The Zulu-Jewish Alliance of Upper Mars!”
I ran down the block- and, oh, is it hard to run when there’s something like 7,000 people on one sidewalk- and reached the parade route just as the louspeaker yells:
“[Malleus’s college]!”
And so, T-shirtless and out of breath, I walked the remaining five bloacks with my classmates, after which I resolved to leave home earlier next year, or at least check if there are any baseball games.
And the T-shirts? They weren’t my design, and the color scheme was pretty ugly. It’s just as well that I didn’t get one.
Question: why are all the drummers black? All the professional parade people are African-American. Is there an affirmative action union, or something?
Also: Why in the name of Og did “Census 2010” have a float? Why would the national census make an appearance in any parade, for that matter?