Don't cross paths with these guys

So I wrecked my car in my parents’ driveway. It happens. Okay, it’s actually happened more than once, but the last time I drove through the garage door and didn’t hit another vehicle. So what. That’s not what this is about. It’s about the second most embarrassing moment in my life.

I was pulling into the driveway as my mom was pulling out. Neither of us saw the other and we collided. Her car was fine, mine was a little battered. The front end was pretty torn up, but it was still drivable. At the time I was house-sitting for a friend of my mother’s in Stuarts Draft. She told me that I needed to hurry up and get to her friend’s house because it was the night of the annual Fireman’s Parade and I wouldn’t be able to get to their house when that started. I needed to go feed the animals, so I drove my battered ‘81 Dodge Colt (yellow with a brown racing stripe…hot) down 340 to Draft.

I decided to go the back way because I just wanted a more scenic route. As I neared the end of the road, I saw people lined up for the parade. I was thinking to myself how smart I was because I actually beat the parade itself. The roads weren’t blocked off and I was good to go. I turned left onto Main Street and went about twenty yards before I stopped in the middle of the road. Coming down the street directly in front of me was the parade.

Now if I had been turning the other way, I could’ve just driven ahead of the parade and been fine. I could ‘ve faked being the Grand Poobah, and waved. It was too late. I was trapped. So I did what anyone else would’ve done: I sat in my mangled car, windows rolled down, and waited (I even turned it off). Majorettes had to re-route their formations to actually go around my car, the Shriner’s drove their teeny cars around mine, circling it as if it were roadkill. Floats had to be pulled over to the side and people had to move their chairs from the sidewalk to make room for it. My favorite part had to be when the kids went by throwing candy into the crowd. Someone must’ve radioed back to them that I was there because they didn’t throw, they pelted me with Starlight Mints and Tootsie Rolls. A kid not even a foot away from me hit me in the face with a Bit-o-Honey.

So I sat there until the parade was over. It was probably only about a half an hour in reality, but it felt like hours that I had to sit there. It’s summer and the Fireman’s Carnival is gearing up again, but this time I’m not going anywhere near that town on the day of the parade.