Did you enjoy Park City’s 4th of July Parade and and activities yesterday?

Marie Kondo specializes in helping people remove clutter from their lives. One of the questions she asks when helping people decide what to keep around is, “Does it spark joy in your life?” If not, you get rid of it.

We’ll assume like many Parkites, you attended Park City’s 4th of July parade on Tuesday. Did it spark joy in your life?

That may be a little bit extreme. The parade and associated festivities are SOMETHING TO DO. Unless you are Mayor Jack Thomas, at the center of attention, riding your bike down Main, it’s probably more of something to do than something that sparks joy (to be fair, Mayor Thomas probably doesn’t like it that much).

It’s a spectacle.

We gazed upon the throngs of people who crowded, sitting under a tent on the baseball diamond, to eat their BBQ. There couldn’t have been more than a few inches separating each person in 90 degree heat.

We watched as people walked across the Rugby field, oblivious, as the game was still going on.

We tried to swim upstream from City Park and head back towards Miner’s Park, through the tens of thousands of people heading down from the Parade.

Park City knows it’s broken, and they’ve tried for a few years to fix it (god bless their souls). But like traffic, it’s probably unfixable.

Friends of ours say they are going to Oakley’s Parade next year. However, that just seems like the locust mentality … where others have overrun our parade so we’ll go overrun somebody else’s. We can’t buy into that.

So, did the parade and related festivities bring you joy this year?

We hope so.