Gotta get throught the breakfast M. prepared. Well, prepared in the sense of “toasted,” which ain’t exactly cooking.

I’m shivering with the anticipation of small-town kitsch in an upscale community. There’s a parade for the kiddies to decorate their bikes and trikes and wagons and all and head down the main street, which unfortunately in this cliched image is not actually called Main Street.

Witnessing this event will answer a question I haven’t been wondering, welll until now midway through this question, do munchkins still use crepe paper or have cheesy decorations evolved?

The best ever kid parade of my childhood didn’t involve the traditional yards of red, white and blue streamers. Nope, in my nostalgia, the source, no doubt, of my digging July 4th, was the Scituate parade.

Instead of patriotic colors, we wee ones dressed in Halloween costumes and marched through town. It was better than Halloween, though, since everyone was on summer vacation so you had some time to do it up right without schools and your parents’ jobs and shit getting in the way.

The highlight was turning the same corner, year after fucking year, the exact same row of ocean-facing cottages. There the judges would sit, and some local civic group handed each and every kiddie a small box of candy and a Kennedy half dollar.

Alas, a Google search indicates Scituate has no celebrations any more. Must have been the bonfires on the beach that killed it.

Today, though, maybe I’ll run into the douche supreme with four children today. Tell me if I’m an asshole busybody or a good fucking sport.

Last night, we rode our bikes over to a diner-type place with outdoor tables. Our quiet little dinner, and everyone else’s on the patio, was interrupted with the entrance of two parents and their four, blonde-ringleted moppets.

The boy, as every boy seems to now, clomped in on those wheeled sneakers, and he and two sisters wove there grimy little selves through the tables oblivious to other folks’ personal space. They settled at the table next to us. Oh, joy. They then continued talking in their outside voices.

The baby, it just kind of whined, howled and whinged unabatedly and inconsolably, even when they moved it from high chair to an inappropriately unstable regular chair tottering on the brick patio.

Somewhere during the meal, one of the little girls knocked her milkshake glass to the bricks, where it shattered with globs of frozen cream and broken glass. The parents left it there.

As the meal progressed the largest shard of glass migrated to directly below where the approximately 9-year-old girl’s foot barely shod in flip flop swung. Other shards and a lot of splinters had rolled over to just under the lummox of a dad’s flip flops. At one point, he swung his foot around grinding glass and milk into the stone.

They seemed so fucking oblivious that as we left, I pointed out that all of the glass was under their feet.

(I assumed they knew it was there because of the loud shattering noise when the glass hit the ground, but I didn’t know if they realized where all the glass had landed. It’s not like most 9-year-olds have the focus and memory to remind themselves to be careful about an accident that happened 45 minutes earlier. I imagined the girl jumping off her chair directly onto a bleeding gash wound.)

The man of the family, he didn’t look up at me, he didn’t thank me. Nope. He said, “Yeah, we know.”

Feebly, as you inevitably feel when your expected social contract is unmet, I tried to clarify. “Oh, I figured you knew, but I wasn’t sure if you could see where the glass landed, it’s right under your feet.”

“Yeah. It’s fine. We know.”

The mother-type chimed in, “Sometimes it’s just easier to leave it until we’re done.”

I rode my bike away hoping that dad sliced his toes upon exiting.

I also sympathized with the two Mexican dudes bussing and waiting the tables, who would now have to contend with smeared, ground glass and congealed milkshake among the french fries and napkins the kids were dropping as they ate.

Fuckers.