For
a good part of my childhood, I believed that May was my own private month,
centered on my birthday and designed solely to shower me with delights. It didn't occur to me to consider how
many people there were in the world, or to divide that number by the available
365 birthdays a year. I knew no
one else born on May 5th or any other day of the month, and since there were no
other major holidays to distract me, I saw no reason NOT to believe that May
was mine. I was evidently part of
a "Me" generation long before the term became fashionable. My
month started on May Day, which seemed just a warm-up exercise for the main
event. We had three May Day rules
in our house, and I tried my best to observe them all. First, my mother assured me that if I
wanted to be beautiful, I needed to get up before sunrise on that day and wash
my face in the dew on our front lawn.
Willing to do anything it took for such a transformation, I faithfully
set my alarm and tiptoed out in the cold, scrubbed hard at my little turned-up
nose, and dashed inside for the closest mirror. Nothing ever changed, but the hope was always
there. Next,
if I wanted to bring on good luck, I had to make a paper May Basket, stuff it
with some freshly-picked flowers, and hang it on someone's doorknob without
getting caught. There were a
number of elderly women on our street, and they always moved slowly enough to
allow me time to ring the doorbell and scurry away. Sometimes, admittedly, the
flowers were nothing more than a couple of scraggly dandelions, but the thought
was there. Finally,
May 1 was the first day I was allowed to go barefoot in the
spring. More often than not, May 1
was cold, or wet, or both, but the anticipation was wonderful. Then
came "my day" itself.
Birthdays seldom live up to their hype, and mine were not
exceptions. I never found a pony
in the back yard, and parties usually turned out to be huge flops. I remember one when I decided to forget ordinary cake and
serve strawberry pie with a layer of cream cheese on the bottom, just like my
mother served to her bridge club.
My little friends took one look at the offering and went
"Eeeewwww!" Not even my
father's offer to take everyone out for ice cream cones could salvage that one.
Still, it was my party and my day. Eventually
I learned that in other parts of the world, May celebrations occurred for
reasons I had never heard of. May
5 is actually a nationally holiday in Mexico. It celebrates a classic "David and
Goliath" story of a small Mexican militia that held off an invasion by the
French Foreign Legion at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. May
Day was, and still is, a major civic holiday in much of the rest of the
world. It was originally planned
to mark the date of the Haymarket
Riot of 1886, which resulted in the adoption of the eight-hour work day for
American laborers. As May 1 became known as International Workers
Day, many socialist and anarchist
groups used it as an excuse for demonstrations, and Communist governments
retaliated with public parades of their military preparedness. In Oxford, England, university students
still hold ceremonies at dawn, and until fairly recently, some foolhearty
students defied university officials by diving into the River Cherwell from
Magdalan Bridge. Dangerous practice,
that! The river is only about
three feet deep. For a complete
description of the goings on there, go to Linda Proud's blog at wordpress.com/. But
such international goings-on made little impact on me. My childhood month of May ended as
delightfully as it had begun. Even
Decoration Day, as we called it back then, had its connection to my birthday,
for it was on May 5, 1868, that General Logan, commander of the Grand Army of
the Republic, issued an order declaring that Union and Confederate war dead
would be honored on May 30 with flowers laid on their graves in
Arlington National Cemetery. My
mother's family had its own Civil War soldier to honor, and Decoration Day was
the traditional day for the family to gather in North Sewickley Cemetery, right
outside Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, for
a day of clean-up and family reminiscing. Five sisters, carting picnic baskets, flower pots, rakes,
hoes, grumbling husbands, and assorted children spent the day moving from
gravestone to gravestone, not mourning but celebrating the good times they
remembered. There
was the marker of the family matriarch, who brought her seven children from
Ireland to the hills of Pennsylvania in 1795, traveling first in steerage, and
then on foot. The stone bore only the single word, "Nancy," but it
still stood firmly rooted on that hillside. There was Electra, who died in the flu epidemic of 1918, and
little James, a victim of diphtheria at the age of two. By noon, the decorating crew had
usually made its way to a circle of pine trees, where lunch was spread on
tablecloths while someone told the story of Sgt. James McCaskey, who died in
defense of his country in 1862.
When I was old enough to read the headstone, I discovered that it said
he had died in South Carolina.
When pressed, the sisters admitted that he was not really buried there,
but that the fake grave served his memory just as well. That made perfect sense
to me at the time. It was part of
the magic that made up "My May." |