The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 91: July 4

Today we were in the Fourth of July parade again. Probably we wouldn’t have gotten our asses in gear were it not for the vengeful motivator of last year’s loss. Or rather our Second Place Tie distinction that was, yes, so much more insulting than a total failure to be recognized. From the moment we tied for second place — literally minutes after we were bestowed with this dodgy honor, and handed a twenty-dollar bill — we’d enlisted the children in a small-fry smear campaign against the judge. I taught them about village politics and corruption; I taught them how to read between the lines of a local Xeroxed newspaper reported and written by a single home-schooled eleven-year-old boy, in which it was stated that, “the crowd cheered most enthusiastically for the Dolphin Rescue float, involving children in doctor coats rescuing a sick dolphin. First place was awarded to the Farmers Market float.” Could they hear the unspoken allegations of corruption?

The kids dutifully took up the cause. Their whispered accusations apparently made it back to the judge, who (because the job is so politically thorny) tried not to be the judge this year, but no one else would take his place. Again on the morning of the Fourth, riding a mountain bike and wearing an American flag button-down shirt, he corralled the Model Ts and fire trucks and motley acts into line by the Odd Fellows Hall.

Our float this year was Maine-themed, involving tourists and black flies. We got a standing ovation by the general store (or the standing ovation equivalent of already-standing people). After us came another float. A bunch of lobsters in bathing suits boiled tourists in big pots while reading Cooks Illustrated. My friend said, “Shit, that’s really good.” We knew we’d never beat this float, but we didn’t really care. They deserved the win. We wanted the deserving to win! That was the important takeaway for the kids. Let the deserving win even if those people, this year, are not us.

But the deserving didn’t win. We won. We beat the better float. Which was confusing at first, because it was explained to us, when we worried to a stranger about the goodness of the really good float, that we weren’t a float, we were a “walking act,” and so we would be judged in a different category.

Then we won first prize in the float category.

A bit of on-the-spot research revealed — the judge gave the “walking act” first prize to the color guard, a crew of octogenarians in uniform, because one of the color guard members suffered a small cardiac event while waiting for the parade to start. When you cheat death, was the judge’s thinking, you deserve a prize.

I had no issues with this.

But the poor judge, still bruised by the bad chatter we’d initiated via the kids over the past year, and not wanting to endure another winter of child-fueled rumors about his fraudulence, decided to reclassify us as a float so that we could win, and so that we would leave him the fuck alone. And so we won. And so the other float, the really much better float, didn’t win.

The children, meanwhile, were jubilant; they felt the cosmos have been righted. I don’t know how to explain that sometimes, in the righting of things, there are occasionally more wrongings. Last year I was all about lessons. This year, I’m all about silence. I don’t even know what the lesson is this year. That unfairness is actually fairness in disguise, or fairness is unfairness in disguise? That the squeaky wheel gets the grease? None of this is news to me. But I want these lessons, for a little bit longer, to remain news to them.