Labor Day

September 11, 2006

"If you bought it, a truck brought it."

I don’t know why the Labor Day Parade was a week after Labor Day, but a bunch of construction workers a week behind schedule didn't seem too unusual. There's a parade for everything in this city, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I had no idea a Labor Day Parade even existed. Maybe it's because so many people, including myself, usually leave town. When I gave Deborah a ride to Midtown Manhattan so she could run some errands, and we got trapped in snarled traffic, it was evident that something was going on. Police barricades lined the avenue, and traffic cops diverted crosstown traffic. "Must be a parade," I said, "Wanna get out here?"

I dropped Deborah off so she could walk to where she needed to go, while I fought my way out of the congestion. I did not attempt to see the parade. A bunch of slow-moving backhoes, cranes, and garbage trucks clogging city traffic was nothing new to me.

The traffic wasn't that bad, considering. I mean, it certainly wasn't a parade on the scale of an old Soviet style May Day labor parade or anything, although probably more communist. I mean, a bunch of union workers and construction vehicles lumbering down Fifth Avenue is a better celebration of “The Worker” than a bunch of goose-stepping soldiers carrying giant portraits of their fearless leader in Red Square. I probably wouldn't say that to a drunk with an American flag, though.

After a few wrong guesses on the best way to get out of the traffic jam, I finally slipped away from the commie parade, sputtered past the crass capitalism of 42nd Street, zig-zagged through the anarchy of Union Square, to the Minarchism(?) of the Lower East Side, and finally over the Williamsburg Bridge to Bohemia.