Center City Philadelphia is a mess already with detours and street closures, because the Mummers Parade is New Years Day. The bleacher seating is mostly erected. All of the intersections are jammed with cars, everybody honking, because you can’t take your usual route. All my buses today were detoured.

I commented on the traffic problems to my hygienist, while I was getting my teeth cleaned.

“There’s a parade?” she said.

I struggled for a moment, trying to understand what she had just said. This is Philadelphia. How can you not know there is a parade on New Years Day?

Turned out she was from New York.

I tried to explain it to her, without success, because the Mummers Parade is not what people think of when you say “parade.” “They make their costumes, and most of them are drunk,” I said finally.

She looked politely baffled.

The dentist, who had just come in, said, “You know the hockey mascot Gritty? It’s like that,” which only works if you are familiar with Gritty, and then only in terms of a general aura of disheveled goggle-eyed mania.

My teeth cleaned, I headed out to catch my bus home. A Black man who was striding around talking to himself moved his shopping bag so I could sit on the bench in the bus shelter, and I thanked him. He went back to striding around and making loud pronouncements, partly to himself and partly at the cars passing by. He shook his fist a couple of times. Three ladies, two Black and one White, were sitting on the bench with me, and we discussed our hair, because all of us are going gray at different ages.

The bus came. A Black dad and his son arrived, and the son (about eight, with very fine dreads tipped with orange) put his little bicycle on the front of the bus.

“I like your hair,” said  the White woman to the little boy. “Can I have it? Can we trade?”

“Uh-huh,” said the little boy and smiled.

As we all got on the bus, the white lady with the long thick blonde-gray hair showed me a photo of her own grandson on her way past me. I don’t know why.

The Mummers Parade is kind of like that, too.

I love my city.