That time I almost led the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade by accident.

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Each Thanksgiving morning I experience the flutter of a memory of a moment in which my own experience of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles almost came true. Mine was going to involve accidental participation in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade between my bus and train, however, which is a notion that even the late John Hughes might have rejected as far-fetched.

Despite my lifelong proximity to New York City, I do not have vast experience within the city, and I think most of my time in Manhattan has been spent on foot as I walked from either a bus or train station to my destination. And then back. The secret reason for this is I do not trust myself on subways—one must know the subway system through experience and the only way to gain that experience is through, you know, experience. The one and only time I rode the NYC subway alone, I did not know how quickly we would reach my destination, nor how briefly we would stop there, nor how long it would take to get back from Brooklyn, which was far, far past where my destination (a job interview somewhere in the Financial District) lay. That one experience led me to a decision I still stick to: walk (nowadays with a cane, a bit more slowly than years before) to my destination, no matter how far.

In the early 2000s, I worked and lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and would travel east twice a year. I usually would visit friends in the Hudson Valley, in New Paltz and Poughkeepsie, and then travel to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where my parents and sister were, or sometimes I’d start in Boston and work my way to New Paltz.

One Thanksgiving, in 2002 or 2003, I visited my family on Cape Cod first, then planned to travel by bus and train to upstate New York. I was going to do this bit of travelling on Thanksgiving Day itself and not the day before, which was a dumb enough idea that if any family member or friend brought to my attention how dumb an idea this is, I long ago blocked it out. Given that one of the saddest facts of my life is I have not blocked anything out, even the memories I wish I no longer possess, it must be that no one said anything. The only way to gain experience is through, well, experience, after all, and I think my family long ago adopted this as a motto for how to deal with me.

Voices of family and friends would sigh, “That’s Mark,” in four or five syllables to accompany reactions to many of my decisions in the past.

Now, what would make this a terrible decision? First of course is the idea of travel between any two places farther apart than next door on Thanksgiving Day. I think my thought was that travel on the day before and the day after Thanksgiving would be foolish since these days are often described as the most heavily trafficked in the entire nation, but the morning of? Not so bad. Picture me with my index figure tapping my temple as you read that last sentence. So I bought the earliest, pre-sunrise, bus ticket out of Hyannis, Massachusetts, and headed away from the sunrise, towards the southwest and New York City. It was a beautiful day.

Here is some history and scene-setting for you. The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade took place in 1924 and it has been held every year since, except for the years between 1942-’44 during World War II. Marching bands, balloons, floats, celebrities, thousands of people walk south down Eighth Avenue along Central Park and then over to Sixth Avenue and down to 34th Street and finally to Macy’s storefront. An even greater number of thousands line the entire parade route—two-and-a-half miles!—on both sides of the avenue, at some spots fifteen to twenty people deep on the sidewalks. For three hours, from 9:00 a.m. till noon, Midtown Manhattan is at a standstill in the most NYC way: it’s a standstill that is all energy, all crowds, in motion unless you need to get anywhere … especially across Sixth Avenue.

I knew all of the above, of course, except for the exact details of the route. “9:00 a.m. parade start? I’ll be on my way up to Poughkeepsie and out of Manhattan by then, according to this ticket in my hand,” I thought out loud to my parents, gamely.

Some cities have their various transportation needs met in one building. New York City is not one of those. Subways and Metro-North commuter trains (Poughkeepsie is the northernmost station for Metro-North) converge and disperse out of Grand Central Station, one of the most beautiful buildings on the planet. Busses, including the various companies that comprise the Greyhound universe, arrive and depart from the New York Port Authority station, as do New Jersey Transit vehicles. Amtrak is serviced out of Pennsylvania Station.

My bus would arrive at the Port Authority early in the a.m., according to my ticket, and I would walk quickly over to Grand Central and grab the next train north. Easy as anything that you’ve never done before can ever be. I slept the sleep of the unaware the night before.

Now, a bus schedule is only as good as traffic will allow, to quote a famous song that is not at all about bus travel. Thanksgiving travel on I-95 is not completely inadvisable, as I made it to the Port Authority on the same day as I left Boston, even the same morning, but it was not early, not the expected time.

I grabbed my backpack and my one soft suitcase, departed the bus, which had been unsurprisingly uncrowded since no one but me thought that interstate travel on Thanksgiving was a good idea, and I looked at a map to see which direction I needed to walk to get to Grand Central Station. The Port Authority is on 8th Avenue (mentioned above) and 42nd Street, and Grand Central is several long city blocks away to the east, across 7th, Broadway, 6th, 5th, then Madison Avenue, and finally Park Avenue. It’s a long walk, but it’s one I’ve done before, and it’s in one of those parts of Manhattan that can make you feel like you’re a star in a Hollywood movie about New York City, so who cares how long a walk it might … by 7th Avenue I noticed that I was in a crowd and we were all headed in the same direction and that some folks had lawn chairs in their hands, which is not a common Midtown sight.

Moments later, I noticed the sound: the sound of thousands of people in one small area, and worse, far in the distance, the live music of a marching band or dozens of marching bands combined. It was the parade itself, many blocks north of our block but audible.

Through my sheer skinniness and the single-minded determination of the utterly oblivious person that I can be, I made my way through the already fifteen-to-twenty deep crowd of parade viewers to a wooden sawhorse employed to keep people off the avenue, off the parade route. The line of sawhorses stretched north and south, unbroken, all stamped, “NYPD.” Of course I could move one, anyone can move a sawhorse, but wouldn’t that constitute me, you know, “starting something” by NYPD standards?

To my left, the north, I could see the parade, the head of the parade, but it was still many blocks away, maybe ten or even more. (We could see it and hear it.) To get to Grand Central was far more important to me than to watch the parade, which would have reached our spot maybe a half-hour later, and then continued for the next three hours. I would have been pinned with luggage and no lawn chair. Now that I phrase it THAT way, I still think Grand Central was the correct desire.

A female police officer spotted me before I saw her. She saw my luggage, and then when I noticed her, I displayed my backpack and bag in a pantomime gesture to declare that I was not here for the parade and somehow was dropped in the middle of all this. She moved a sawhorse aside, made the universal gesture with her head to tell me to get going before she thought otherwise, and I slipped out onto an empty 6th Avenue. I see on the map that I must have been just uptown from the television broadcast location, which leads me to wonder if I may have been a brief object of wonder for the television producers as I quickly marched alone across the avenue.

The police officer who let me out had not radioed a police officer on the other side of the avenue, however. There I was confronted by that same unbroken line of NYPD sawhorses, and instead of people walking along in the same direction as me, I saw a crowd of faces, fifteen to twenty deep, staring at me as if I had started something. It was a real-life Daumier print or Fellini moment of angry, staring faces.

No longer oblivious, but still single-minded, I crouched down and walked under a sawhorse and plunged into that crowd of parade-viewers. I made my way through them, and then continued on my journey.

It must have been a traumatic experience, because I did not speak of it with my friends later that day, or I said something to one of them in passing that elicited no response. I guess I thought that since there were no consequences or substantial delays, there was no punchline, and thus there was no story.

On my long list of near-misses in my life, though, this one had the loudest drums and the largest audience.

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Mark Aldrich is a journalist, award-winning humor columnist, and writer/performer with the Magnificent Glass Pelican radio comedy improv group, now in its thirty-second season:

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