Parade 2010

Here we are, the first day of the year 2010....i wonder what's ahead.
The past few years have been incredible, challenging, depressing yet joyous, fulfilling and frustrating....sounds a lot like life, eh?  
So as the Rose Bowl Parade wends its way down the street in Pasadena, I sit with my steaming mug of coffee; Jack is still sleeping....my thoughts are free to wander.

My traditional Rose Bowl Parade viewing began years ago....when I was a little girl and the images were grainy, black and white and seemed far away. But they felt personal to me; like they were a part of my family because after all, Dad was a florist. And to me in some sort of way that made him part of all that....at least to me.

As a kid I imagined what it might be like to work with the giant floats...gluing on the individual flower petals, seeds, twigs and other vegetative matter.  I imagined the smell coming from those huge workshops as a combination of farmers' market meets glue factory, and that by the end of working on one of those things a person could be fairly covered in the stuff...like some poor tar-and-feathered fella from bygone days.

Years later, Diane and I almost got to work on them when we were living in L.A., but she couldn't get out of work.  As luck would have it we did meet some of the float volunteers and they described it kind of like I'd imagined. 

That was back in the '80s.  It's 2010 now and San Francisco is fairly far away from the parade grounds, but through imagination and memory....and of course the t.v., Pasadena's Rose Parade beauty spreads before me like a royal garden before a queen.

I know the world's going to hell in a hand basket.  I know the economy sucks and everybody hates everybody else.  Fine.  But for a few moments I'm going to put all that aside and celebrate the fact that we humans know how to create something other than discord, violence, injustice and war.

We know how to create beauty.  And that is a redeeming quality.

So for today, the first day of 2010, Fifty five is the New Parade 2010....a parade of life and splendor.