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For nearly each New Year’s Day since 1958, Carla Hall has located herself on a patch of asphalt in entrance of a automotive dealership in downtown Pasadena, Calif. To a 10-year-old woman, it was the right spot to observe the majesty unfold — the “artistry” she calls it, of the floats and the marching bands, the wonder queens and horses.
“All that love that goes into it,” Ms. Hall, 72, mentioned this week, tearing up on the reminiscences. “I’m going to start crying, sorry.”
In a small gesture of defiance within the face of attempting instances, she will probably be there this 12 months, too, sporting her masks, and marking her spot, as typical, with chalk and tape.
Of course, there will probably be no Rose Parade, a Southern California establishment that started in 1890. It was canceled months in the past, similar to every little thing else. But now its absence is lastly right here, to formally enter the ledger of issues misplaced to the coronavirus pandemic.
Even the superlatives which have connected themselves to the parade (“America’s New Year Celebration”) and the accompanying soccer sport (“The Granddaddy of Them All”) don’t appear to totally seize what the day has meant to Ms. Hall: household, neighborhood, custom, one thing to depend on.
For Ms. Hall, a substitute trainer who has not labored since March, who has misplaced buddies to the coronavirus, and who has seen two of her grandchildren catch the virus and recuperate, the lack of the parade seems like a metaphor for grief itself.
“See you at the Rose Parade,” is what everybody mentioned to everybody, yearly.
The solely different time the parade was canceled was throughout World War II, amid fears that the West Coast could possibly be attacked by Japan. Even on New Year’s Day in 1919, with an influenza pandemic raging uncontrolled however overshadowed by World War I, the parade went on, as unwise as that was.
As a placeholder within the parade’s lengthy historical past, there will probably be a tv particular this 12 months — filmed in latest weeks in strict accordance with virus protocols — for which Ms. Hall was interviewed. The Rose Bowl soccer sport was moved to Arlington, Texas.
Robert B. Miller, who has volunteered for the Tournament of Roses Association for nearly 40 years, and was named president in 2020, mentioned the affiliation would donate cash it could have used to host the parade to meals banks and organizations working to shut the hole in entry to broadband between wealthy and poor colleges.
“My priorities have always been my family, my work and the Tournament of Roses,” mentioned Mr. Miller, who will probably be on the sideline in Texas for the Rose Bowl, wearing his conventional crimson sports activities jacket.
He mentioned he hoped the tv particular would function “a means to help people process what’s happening, be grateful for what they have and where they are going and know that the world will return to something much more akin to what we all experienced before.”
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