I came back on the red-eye after a month in California, meaning I didn’t sleep much, not even when I scored an entire bench to myself in the Atlanta airport during my layover on the morning of the biggest travel day of the year. I did get a decent night’s sleep once I made it back to Key West, but the next day, Thanksgiving, I was still feeling somewhat discombobulated, as if part of my psyche hadn’t really made it home yet. I walked the dog and started to unpack in an attempt to right the internal ship, but eventually gave up any notions of purpose and usefulness and lay on the couch to watch some TV.
I’m not sure which corporate wormhole made it possible, but for the last couple years the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day Parade has been broadcast nationwide on Hulu, and having it on while my wife makes pies has become something of a tradition.
I grew up in South Jersey, just across the river from Philly, part of the city’s suburban sprawl, and I spent a lot of time in diners, as it was the way of our people. One of my favorite things about South Jersey diners, outside of the mountainous slices of pie, was that most of them had at least one wall covered, usually somewhere near the cigarette machine, with autographed studio headshots of celebrities you’d never heard of. Sometimes there would be a photo of a local TV reporter or radio DJ – your fancier diners might even have a photo of a TV news anchor or weatherman – but mostly the headshots looked to be of actors and musicians filling up the frame of the 8-by-10-inch glossy print with back-pocket chutzpah. You felt it was your fault for not knowing who they were. The photos didn’t always make it clear who was an actor and who was a musician – probably some were both – but they all seemed to be part of some secret world where fame happened locally but also elsewhere, like maybe in a parallel dimension, or some nearby neighborhood of small theaters and nightclubs that appeared and disappeared with the fog.
The parade, to me, had that feel. Dunkin’, née Dunkin’ Donuts, was the big sponsor and the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, the ones Rocky ran up, that formed the backdrop of the broadcast, were covered in alternating bands of blaze orange and lemonade pink. Dunkin’s head of regional field marketing made multiple appearances, occasionally handing out modest checks to local non-profit groups.
Every 10 minutes or so there was a new act lip-synching in the light drizzle to some big showstopper of a number. Usually this was accompanied by 20 or 100 young people in coordinated outfits performing enthusiastic dance routines. Sometimes you knew who the stars were. Darlene Love was probably the biggest name. Two of the sisters from Sister Sledge performed, as did a duo billing themselves as The Former Ladies of Chic. The Sugarhill Gang rap synched hip-hop, the hippie to the hippie from behind a half-dozen large plastic donuts.
Carson Kressley, from the original “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” and Lisa Ann Walter, who plays Ms. Schemmenti on “Abbott Elementary,” joined the commentary team.
Occasionally they spliced pre-recorded video segments into the feed, such as Turkey Day wishes from Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, or the Philadelphia Orchestra playing in Santa hats, or someone in a studio kitchen telling you how to spice up seasonal mocktails for children with edible glitter.
The parts I enjoyed the most were the acts I’d never heard of, and the ones I’m pretty sure none of my friends and family who still live in the area had ever heard of. I’d name them, but I can’t. Their names slipped from my mind as soon as they continued their trip around Eakins Oval.
It might sound as if I’m making fun of all this, but I’m not, at least not wholly.
Philadelphia is the sixth-largest city in the United States, but its Thanksgiving Day parade still feels very small-town, very local, very non-homogenized, very human, even on a television 1,500 miles away.
If you want polish and famous famous people, watch the Macy’s parade. If you want to keep a little mystery in your world, a little sense of the not wholly explicable, watch the Philly one.
I was watching the Funky Bunch – as in Marky Mark and the, but without the Marky Mark – trying to figure out why they all seemed to be lip-synching the same part, when my low-grade reverie was pierced.
In the weeks I’d been gone, Key West had slipped from Dear-God-when-is-this-choking-humidity-going-to-end season to oh-man-we-can-shut-off-the-air conditioning-and-open-the-windows-and-not-be-all-sweaty season, and we had the back doors open. All the jets and prop planes flying directly over the house on their run into the airport hadn’t really made much of an impression. But suddenly a high-pitched series of avian shrieking caught my attention, made me sit up on the couch even.
It was an osprey, flying low overhead, probably circling, because the volume didn’t fade.
We have resident ospreys in the Keys year-round. But we also get a lot of through traffic – 4,204 osprey were counted by the Florida Keys Hawkwatch in Marathon this fall. Most of them continued heading south, but no doubt a few slipped the attention of the local territorial toughs and found a snag or two to consider their own turf for a couple months.
Maybe the shrieking was a bird declaring this part of the island to be their own. Maybe it was a suitor trying to attract a mate. Maybe it was telling another osprey that this whole seasonal monogamy thing wasn’t going to work out with them.
I don’t know, but I started to get curious about how much I missed while I was gone.
It was time to recombobulate, to get back into the swing of things, to start paying attention to what is going on here again.
