When I was a boy, I thought living on the route of my hometown’s Fourth of July parade was just great. (Why, yes, I did like Frosted Flakes as a boy. Why do you ask?) But then, things were different then.

For one thing, the parades were held in the morning, and on the actual holiday, rather than on the evening of the day before as they are now. In those halcyon days of the mid-1970s, Riverton was just a sunbaked farm town where the local good ol’ boys whiled away their mornings over cups of joe and slow-burning butts at the counter of the local cafe, and there were as many tractors and combines running up and down the main drag as pickups and cars. Back then, our Independence Day revels began at dawn with the sounding of the yellow, barrel-shaped air-raid siren that used to be crouched on top of a telephone pole behind the town hall. Which just happened to be kitty-corner across the street from my house. If you’ve never heard one of those things, take it from me, there isn’t a living creature on this planet that could sleep through their unholy Banshee’s wail. I remember sitting straight up in bed with my heart hammering away inside my rib cage, year after year, and my dad answering the Banshee with an eruption of profanity that would have left human-shaped shadows singed into the walls, atomic-bomb style, if anyone had been unfortunate enough to be standing at the foot of his bed. After a couple minutes of this clamour, the siren would fall silent, and then, while our ears were still ringing, along came the old sound truck. This was a green 1950s-vintage panel truck with four huge, horn-shaped PA speakers mounted on the roof. The driver — I’m sure my parents could tell me the guy’s name, as he was undoubtedly one of those good ol’ boys from the cafe — would be yammering away over the speakers, exhorting everyone in town to get up and come on down to the city park for an old-fashioned pancake breakfast. My dad usually had some very specific ideas about what that guy could do with his pancakes; I don’t recall my parents or me ever going to that community cookout. The three-person Bennion clan always made our own holiday breakfasts.

Then it was time to get ready for the parade. Dad would put our lawn chairs out in front while most of the townsfolk were still wandering toward the park in search of pancakes, but I don’t recall there ever being any particular sense of urgency about it. Nobody would think of squatting on a lawn that didn’t belong to them, at least not without asking permission, or at least not until the parade was underway and everything became fair game. Around nine o’clock or so in the morning, the normally busy road in front of my house would become eerily still. And about 45 minutes later (the parade has always started about a mile from my house and it takes a while for the slow-moving procession to reach the Bennion Compound), the floats and marching bands and horseback companies and fire engines would begin to stream past. Teenaged beauty queens beamed at their neighbors, salt-water taffy and little boxes of Chiclets and Bazooka Joe rained down on the children lining the street, and the same antique cars and novelty acts we saw every bloody year would roll past, and the spectators would wave and clap and smile as if it were the first time. These parades of my hazy, sepia-toned memories comprised our friends, our neighbors, people we knew… they were family, often in a literal sense — it was a small town, after all — but always in a metaphorical one. Back then, the parade was a ritual that seemed to actually mean something; it wasn’t just a way to occupy the kiddies with gathering free candy for an hour (although that was certainly an aspect of it). The parade reinforced a sense of belonging to something: a place, a community, a town. And when it ended, there were old-fashioned, homespun activities all day in the park, cheesy midway games and hamburger grills and plastic wading pools filled with iced watermelon and friendly horseshoe-pitching competitions, all of it leading up to the big finale, the fireworks that would fill the sky just after sundown. Rude awakening aside, Riverton’s Fourth of July used to be a pretty low-key, and yet thoroughly satisfying, affair. It was cornball, yes, but it was also organic and homegrown, and it was good.

That’s how it used to be.

Today, I still live in the same old house, and the parade still passes right in front of it, but practically everything else has changed. Riverton is now just another anonymous suburb, with a population several times the size of what it was during my childhood. And our small-town Independence Day is now such a Big Damn Deal that it has to spread itself across two days instead of one. Now, instead of fun and games provided by the Lion’s Club and the local church wards and the familiar good ol’ boys, there’s a traveling carnival every year at the park, and concession stands selling national-chain fast food, and the fireworks are electronically synchronized and spectacular. Everything about the Fourth is bigger and more professional now, more sophisticated… and somehow it’s less than it was, too. It feels… commercial. Store-bought. It isn’t ours anymore, it’s just something we ordered on Amazon. As for living on the parade route… well, that’s turned into a royal pain in the tuchus.  The fun little small-town event that used to bring us closer together has metastasized into an overblown, stress-filled competition in which inconsiderate jackasses will do whatever they can to ensure themselves a seat, because there are now so damn many people living in this town and everyone wants to bring their kids to the parade for that free candy, but the route is still only a mile long, and seats are a precious commodity. People start staking their claims with chairs and coolers and yellow caution tape days before the parade — this year, they made their appearance a full week ahead of timet — and people just leave them there all up and down the road, unwatched eyesores, to mark their territory. The competition doesn’t end there, though; I’ve personally witnessed soccer moms jump out of their SUVs, toss aside someone else’s chairs, and set up their own in the same spot. The whole sad, sorry spectacle makes my stomach turn. It’s just a damn parade, people.

I don’t remember when this whole thing became such a BDD. It’s come on slowly, over the space of a couple decades, like that tired old saw about the frog in the pot of water that’s gradually heating up. I only know that for at least the past decade, I have been obligated to set out my own chairs at the first sign that the land-grab is beginning, or risk having squatters we don’t know and didn’t invite plant their crap in my park strip for seven days. Because they would, without a second’s thought. It isn’t that I mind sharing my frontage with others — hell, given my work and commute schedule, I don’t even get home until the stupid parade is half over, so somebody may as well use the space — but I do mind the way people don’t even bother to ask. They just swoop in and drop their junk and expect you to put up with their placeholders sitting on your property for a week, and then they and their rambunctious little carpet monkeys show up for the party you didn’t want to throw, and they get huffy as hell if you ask them to make room for you and your own invited guests, or request that they not make a hellacious mess with their Subway wrappers and Super Big Gulps and juice boxes. And inevitably when it’s all over, they leave behind a pile of garbage that I have to pick up and put in my bin, because these disrespectful freaking slobs apparently don’t see anything wrong with expecting strangers to clean up after them.

And I guess that’s the difference… in the ’70s, most everybody in town knew each other, or at least knew of each other. There weren’t that many people here, and we interacted with each other pretty regularly, so you couldn’t really get away with being an ass. Today we’re all mostly strangers, isolated in our cul de sacs and our hermetically sealed vehicles, and our hermetically sealed lives that mostly happen far away from the places where we cook and sleep. Nobody really cares anymore about inconveniencing somebody else, because they’re not likely to bump into you at the grocery store, and even if they do, they won’t recognize you. With a population count of nearly 40,000, how could it be otherwise?

The ironic thing is that the damn parade isn’t even any good anymore. It’s degenerated into little more than a long line of politicians in convertibles and jacked-up 4x4s with the names of businesses on their sides, and wave after wave of military and law-enforcement vehicles. It’s almost enough to make me want to stay at the office and put in some overtime…