Rochester St. Patrick’s Day Parade

Another Rochester St. Patrick’s Day parade bites the dust.

(Photo by lady with glittering green aluminum-foil hair.)

The whole idea is to march our rescue Irish-Setter with the Western N.Y. Irish-Setter Club.
The first one we attended was probably five years ago, and it engendered my first long-lost send to Marcy. Madness was everywhere. Beer-swilling volunteer firemen were openly peeing on the lawns of the beloved East Ave. gentry, and drunken macho types were standing around in kilts — bare knees in 30° temperatures.
That epistle also flew on FlagOut. Too bad it’s lost; it was one of my best epistles ever.
(Marcy published a St. Patrick’s Day Parade epistle in the vaunted “Grady-book,” but it’s parade number two.)
If any madness occurred yesterday (Saturday, March 15, 2008) I was unable to observe it because I was shepherding a frightened dog.

(Photo by Linda Hughes.)

“These humans do strange things. Usually it’s the park, but every year we gotta do this stupid parade.”
“Oh, he’s so cute. Can I pet him?”
—At least 89 bazilyun times.
“Irish-Setters rule!” from a drunken youth with a green Richard Simmons mop.
“Wanna beer?” A drunken skin-head proffered his open bottle of Michelob-Lite.
Killian passed.
It sure ain’t no normal parade.
“Johnny’s Irish Pub” and “School of Irish Dance” I can see, but a conga-line of gaily decorated Frontier Telephone bucket-trucks?
We were proceeded by a navy-blue Regional Transit bus festooned with green crepe-paper. (I used to work for them guys.)
....And followed by a small Cingular blimp.
I’m walking the dog down the sidewalk waiting for the parade to start, and “Vote for Judge Bellini,” yelled by a comely young teenybopper in a lined-up PT Cruiser with green streamers.
We passed an onlooker wearing a camo Superman tee-shirt.
“You’re not Irish; you’re Jewish,” someone yelled. “You’re lying,” schlurp!

Killian. (Photo by Linda Hughes.)

I think I interrupted a young dude about to take a wizz behind an apartment building.
“How ya doin’?” he asked, as I walked by.
“We’re fired up!” I heard. A contingent of Obama supporters was marching behind us.
Finally, about 1&1/2 hours after parade-start, our Division started moving — we were in the 10th Division, probably last.
We were followed by Brownies, and proceeded by a dark-brown Chevy-van promoting Guinness Stout.
Killian is the least show dog-like, and least trained (more rambunctious than most).
“This is why I come,” a lady said. “Can I pet your dog?”

Our rescue Irish-Setter is Killian. We got him about five years ago, and he had already been through two homes. His second home was apparently abusive. He’s not a show-dog; more a “Red Setter;” smallish. He’s now about 10 — we don’t know his birthdate.

“Marcy” is my number-one ne’er-do-well — she was the first I was e-mailing stuff to. Marcy and I worked in adjacent cubicles at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired. A picture of her is in this blog at Conclave of Ne’er-Do-Wells. Marcy married Bryan Mahoney (ex-reporter from the Messenger newspaper), and together they live near Boston. (Both Marcy and Mahoney keep blogs — Marcy’s is Playtime at Hazmat.)

The St. Patrick’s Day parade starts on ritzy “East Ave.” and then goes through downtown Rochester.

“FlagOut” is our family’s web-site, named that because I had a mentally-retarded kid-brother (Down Syndrome) who lived at home, and loudly insisted the flag be flown every day. “Flag-Out! Sun comes up, the flag goes up! Sun goes down, the flag comes down.” I fly the flag partly in his honor. (He died at 14 in 1968.)

The “Grady-book” was a book assembled by Marcy when I retired, of all my e-mails I had sent to her, which she saved in a computer-folder. “Grady” was my nickname at the Messenger newspaper.

“Linda Hughes” is my wife of 40+ years.

“Frontier Telephone” is our local telephone company.

For 16&1/2 years I drove transit bus for “Regional Transit Service,” the transit-bus operator in Rochester, N.Y. My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that.