The Parade That Weather Outranked

Somewhere in Brookings this week, a dog costume sits folded in a closet, unworn, its little felt ears slightly crushed under the weight of postponed glory. The Pet Parade, that most modest and most delightful of civic institutions, has been cancelled. Not defeated by low turnout, not undone by scandal, not even rained on in any dramatic biblical sense that would at least make a good story. Just cancelled “due to weather,” those three words that in South Dakota carry the finality of a court ruling and about as much room for appeal.

It is worth pausing on what exactly got cancelled, because it wasn't much, and that was rather the point. Pets in costume. Pets displaying talents, whatever a dog's talents might be beyond looking mildly betrayed while wearing a bandana. Pets simply parading, no costume, no talent, just existing in front of librarian judges and a crowd of neighbors who came for the free entertainment of watching a cat refuse, on principle, to walk in a straight line. This was never going to be Pamplona. Nobody was going to get gored. The stakes, delightfully, were zero.

And yet weather, that great leveling force of the Northern Plains, does not distinguish between the Homecoming parade and the Pet Parade, between a hundred-float civic procession and six dachshunds in raincoats. It simply arrives, checks nothing against anyone's calendar, and cancels what it likes. There is something almost bracingly democratic about that. The sky does not care that librarians had already worked out a judging system. It does not care that somewhere a golden retriever had been practicing sitting still in a tutu for a week. Weather in Brookings operates with the serene indifference of a substitute teacher who has decided, this once, that nobody is getting recess.

This is, if you squint, a small parable about the town itself. Brookings spends a great deal of its calendar organizing modest, cheerful things: a flu shot clinic that asks nothing of you but a rolled-up sleeve, a mini golf crawl through downtown storefronts, an open house with punch and door prizes at a new caregiving office. These are the events that never make headlines beyond their own announcement, the ones that exist purely to give a Tuesday or a Saturday a little more shape than it would otherwise have. They are, collectively, the town's way of insisting that ordinary life deserves occasional decoration. A dog in a costume is, in its way, exactly as important as a resolution about a tax levy, possibly more so, because at least everyone agrees on what the dog costume is for.

But decoration is fragile precisely because it is optional, and optional things are the first to go when the weather turns uncooperative. Nobody cancels the flu clinic because of rain. Nobody cancels the city council because the sky looks moody. The unglamorous, mandatory machinery of a town keeps running through weather that stops the parade cold, and there is a kind of honesty in that asymmetry. The parade was never structural. It was a gift the town gave itself, and gifts, unlike infrastructure, can simply be returned to the shelf when conditions aren't right.

Which is, in the end, a strangely comforting thought rather than a sad one. The Pet Parade will presumably return, next year or the year after, on some drier Saturday when the sky has nothing better to do than let a beagle in a hot dog bun costume trot past a folding table of librarian judges. Its cancellation this year is not a verdict on its worth. It is only proof that Brookings, for all its ordinances and budgets and provisional levies, still makes room on its calendar for something whose only casualty, when lost, is a little bit of everyone's Saturday afternoon delight.

That the weather can take that away so easily is not an argument against having it. It is the argument for having it again.