before the fireworks

It would end in tears, but the day started with the parade. These days, the annual Fourth of July parade is the town's biggest event. Pretty much anyone can participate and pretty much anyone does. By the time we got there, all the best spots had been staked out with beach chairs and lawn chairs, so we sat on the curb, stretched out our legs out in the sun, and watched the parade go by.

We saw the local chapter of Shriners, wearing their maroon tasselled hats, spinning figure eights in child-sized trucks. Miss Cumberland County and Miss Culver County sat side by side on the back of a 1960s convertible. They wore matching red dresses, cut low enough in back that everyone could see the four Chinese characters tatooed on Miss Cumberland County's left shoulder blade. The two girls were talking to each other and laughing, but their hands kept turning from side to side in a slow motion beauty queen wave. In the car behind them was a blonde woman old enough to be their mother, the winner of the state's Mrs. America pageant. Her arms were perfectly tanned and perfectly toned and she smiled at us as if she meant it.

We saw a class of pink-shirted girls from the gymnastics academy who did back flips in the middle of the street. We saw a long line of ATVs covered with wooden frames in the shapes of different kinds of ships. There was a truck pulling a trailer with employees from the local bank and their children, all of them dressed in red, white and blue. There was a club of owners of black labs and their remarkably well-behaved dogs. There was my mother's neighbor, marching with her dwarf pony. There was a bunch of boys and one girl doing tricks on their skateboards. My mother recognized the local congressman, in shirtsleeves and a tie, who kept going from one side of the street to the other, shaking every hand he could reach.

We stayed for a long time, but the parade wasn't even half over when we let someone else have our places and started home, walking down Sewell Street, past the Greek revival houses that were built for wealthy shipbuilders and shipowners in the nineteenth century, when the town was an important place and its clippers were famous all over the world