New Year’s Day, reading Elizabeth Bishop and watching the Rose Bowl Parade. Dancing pumpkins and smiling sunflowers, each as impertinent as the other. People waving from floats to people standing on the street but not to people watching their TV, no matter how hard we try. All dressed in multi-colored costumes as bright as fields of flowers—a spastic eye test of floats and stuff and stimuli. Elizabeth would say the road lies like a blue river on a map with sidewalk people for a coastline, each tugging from underneath, perpetually pulling the other along.
You can almost smell the preened rodeo horses, feel the pinprick of their blackflies, and hear the clip-clop of hooves on pavement. A small child runs to pick up a trinket tossed by the “Oceans of Possibility” float, or is it a rose? It should be. Bubbles drift from the rear of the assemblage, illuminating a school of suspended fish that swim along with the current of the parade. Elizabeth, are they not zigzagging among the silken waters of the heaving street, or am I too verbose? No, I suppose instead, obtuse.
High school girls marching with trombones strut like debutantes, their toots and tweets smothered by uniformed drummer boys following behind. Smoky tells us only YOU can prevent forest fires, and blames us with a clawless finger, while a monochrome expressionless panda asks for support of endangered species. OK. War veterans file by, smart and proud in their freshly pressed uniforms, all smiling but their thorny eyes betray them. Elizabeth, they swallowed their tears years ago. No one was thirsty for their memories.
Such a bird’s eye view! The dull clamor moving everything along with river-like inertia. No end in sight: Shriners, Masons and Kiwanis drone one after another, after another. Latino cowboys and snowy swans, a smoking dragon with pendulum eyes, oh my. Gyrating cheerleaders and stumbling mascots from the upcoming game. Look Elizabeth, the theater of floats and flowers and people are so very like a bouquet of Carnival dancers.
Now, pop musicians stop to jack everyone up. Even the studio emcees jerk stupidly about. But look! It’s the Tournament of Roses beauty queen and her Royal Court. All waving so slowly, like mannequins or maybe Queen Elizabeth on depressants. Perhaps they are too self-aware, too bare—eh, Elizabeth?
It suddenly occurs to me that this parade is happening 2000 miles away, yet its pixelated sunshine and cornucopia of people and colors are flooding the wintry haven of my own living room. Somewhere there must be a stupendous point to all of this, some hidden irony, or poignant meaning. Perhaps a stark juxtaposition of life and parade and voyeurism? Or, on this auspicious New Year’s Day, might there even be a purpose? Who knows—but me and Elizabeth are letting it go.
INSTANT NOODLES 