Fleet Week is one of my favorite times in San Francisco. For a week, sailors from the navy, marines, and coast guard recently home from their overseas deployment come to town, and the city celebrates with events, cheap drinks, air shows, and parades. The Blue Angels fly all over the city, and often show up when you least expect them. You can hear the deep rumblings from afar, and start frantically look up to see which direction they are coming from while blindly searching for your phone.
In 2009 I was still living in Dallas, but commuting to Mountain View for work. I happened to be in town during Fleet Week, and caught one of the parades heading down Columbus Avenue. There were puppeteers on floats, cowboys on horses, fairy godmothers in drag, and this quirky band. The group was made of mostly of older gentlemen and gentle ladies, dressed up in fruit of the loom colors, and having a jolly good time. It seemed to me that they were there to entertain themselves, but it was ok for the rest of the people to join in on the fun too.
That was actually the last time I watched the Fleet Week parade. When I finally moved to San Francisco, there were always so many events and parades and things to do, and never enough time to do all of them. There’s always next year, I always thought. Now that I’m no longer there, the FOMO is strong. I would love to run into this crazy and awesome band again someday!
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