On Friday, the rain was torrential.
Rene Mealey was aghast. Enough picnics and beach days had been ruined by this summer's unforgiving weather. Couldn't the cosmos spare the Fourth of July parade that Mealey and her fellow volunteers had spent more than six months organizing?
This wasn't some schmaltzy five-block affair, after all. The parade to celebrate the country's birthday is Glenside's biggest event of the year.
For 88 consecutive Independence Days - through peace and prosperity, through wars, depression and social convulsion - the Greater Glenside Patriotic Association's parade has functioned as the High Mass of the town's civic religion, a mixture of patriotism and community pride.
When last year's chairwoman stepped down, and there was talk over the winter of the parade's being canceled for lack of people to run it - unthinkable! - Mealey came forward to take the helm.
Since January, she had worked her heart out, co-opting family and friends,
helping with direct-mail fund-raising, making her home Parade Central.
She booked bands, clowns and cartoon-character impersonators to add some pizazz and youth appeal to a procession some said had grown stale over the years.
By Friday night, a promising lineup, from Mummers to motorcyclists, was firm. The costumes had been fetched, the banners finished. Things were as ready as they were going to be.
And it was raining like mad.
Rene Mealey banished worry from her mind. Before she went to bed, she put a statue of the Virgin Mary in the window, facing outward.
And she said a prayer.
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The parade in Glenside is the oldest in the state and among the largest, say Glenside officials, but dozens of towns across the area put on Fourth of July parades in some form or another.
Like Glenside's, some began as fire company processions. And, the people who run them say, their core cast has always been fire trucks and, of course, war veterans.
In that vein, parades are a time for civic organizations to get some recognition. They offer people a chance to cheer those who fought for the country, but also those who serve the community every day: the rescue squads, the town watch groups, the scouts.
But the grown-ups might feel a little silly about the whole thing if not for all those rapturous, cheering children. And the children love parades for the fun stuff - the bands, the floats, the clowns, the crazy guys in flashy costumes doing tricks on little motorcycles.
