May Day
May Day might be as good as it gets.
May Day Play Day. Do you remember that? It was a fair we had in grade school to celebrate the beginning of May. We used to love it. My parents were always really involved. My mom helped with virtually every aspect but my dad built a three hole mini golf course one year. We had some extra blue carpeting lying around so instead of lush greens we had we lush Berber blue. I forget what the course was playing. I think it was Par 9. 3, Par 3s. Most of which challenged players with sharp, unforgiving 90-degree “dog-legs.”
Those May Day Festivals were fun though. They always had a table with these snacks that I guess you might call them a lemon peppermint stick.
Basically it was a lemon cut in half and then this thick like midget candy cane on steroids stuffed inside. The peppermint stick had a hole running end to end. A tunnel which allowed you to suck on the peppermint stick and get lemon juice in your mouth. For some reason we loved it.
Nowadays we just have a bag of Sour Patch kids to replicate the perfect balance between Sweet and Sour but back then boy you had to improvise. It was the Macgyver of snacks. The rest of May Day Play Day was a hodge podge of games, deliciously fatty foods that took into account absolutely no dietary restrictions or allergies. Allergies back then were for like two kids in our class who we just thought had colds all the time. And ya know what they toughed it out. Sure no girls would talk to them and they weren’t being picked first at recess but I hardly remember any of our allergy kids acting like their allergies were holding them back. Their dietary needs to hamstring the rest of us from going hard in the paint on dairy, sugar, nuts, gluten and whatever other pretend issues the liberals have invented to take away our fatty freedoms.
I should probably mention that I went to St. Joseph’s — Texas, in Maryland.
Yeah, I never understood it either. As a nation I think we need to get together and do something about our overlap and misuse of city names and mascots. For example, there shouldn’t be a Manhattan, Kansas. Who the fuck did those settlers think they were moving to Kansas and saying, “hey ya know what this tornado-ravaged prairie reminds me? Tribeca!”
And now for a bit of old time learning.
Manhattan:
The name Manhattan comes from the Munsi language of the Lenni Lenape meaning island of many hills. Other theories say that it comes from one of
Munsi words. “Manahactanienk” meaning “place of inebriation”. Other possibilities are “manahatouh” meaning “a place where wood is available for making bows and arrows” and “menatay” meaning simply “the island.”
But anyway, St. Joseph’s was a Catholic Parish and Grade School in Cockeysville, Maryland. Which is part of Baltimore County about 20 minutes from downtown Baltimore but it’s galaxies away from the charm, heart, danger and violence of that beautifully misunderstood and underrated place.
Cockeysville, along with Hunt Valley, Lutherville, and Timonium are the perfect example of what communities look like when white people are given free reign. Our most important cultural import is Pier 1 Imports. And yes we owned a papazon chair which was perhaps the most useless and challenging seating option available to me.
But going to that Catholic Grade School was actually great experience. We had uniforms which I kinda hated then but now I am envious of. I’d love to just go with the monochrome, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg style wardrobe. Jeans, sneaks, a bunch of the same t-shirts and hoodies.
Back then we had yellow pseudo-polo shirts although these were like wearing sandpaper mixed with plastic and brown corduroy pants. We had to shop at a special store to buy them all as well. Cohen’s Clothiers. Sometime around my stint there they switched school colors from being yellow and brown to yellow and blue which was fine. The corduroy gave way to the khaki/chino and just like that the institution would waiver to the influence of parents who were fed up listening to their kids complain. I want to blame millennials and Gen-Zers for their weakness ruining the planet but if I’m being fair this sort of weakness has been growing since the early late 70s.
I’m beginning to realize I grew up at possibly the best time in history because nothing was really asked of my generation except to shut up and close the door to the refrigerator. I was post Vietnam, Reagan-era, pre-9/11, pre-cell phones, and smack dab in the middle of cable television, the dawn of MTV/Nickelodeon. The mall was the place to be. There were still rock and roll bands you could be proud of as well as the arrival of the best hip-hop and rap thats ever been created.
I think about the people who lived and grew up before me and the people now with your social media, school shootings and terrorist attacks and all I can think is I’m glad I’m beginning to make my exit. You can have the planet, the political unrest, the religious persecution, the still rampant racism. All I want to remember is how truly and ignorantly happy we were during those May Day Play Days.
Now some will argue that we were blind to the world around us and to that I’ll say, what are you doing about it now? I mean, now you’re not blind to it and all you’re doing is getting on your iPhone and your Twitters and bitching and moaning. And certainly I don’t mean everyone but the majority of people are too goddamn comfortable to invoke any real change. No. The best case scenario is to get out while the getting’s good. To run for the hills. To step into the great beyond.
Of course, now I’m worried that the Great Beyond is actually not that Great. And I don’t mean hell. But how funny would it be for everyone who committed suicide to not have the satisfaction of living in either some glorious heaven or hell but just another floor in the department store of humanity.
Imagine if the lights go out when you die but then you wake up and you’re expecting the fire of hell or the sound of your old dog, Teddy, barking as he runs through the Pearly Gates on a puffy white cloud, but instead you wake up and you’re in something that resembles Cleveland but it’s not the Cleveland you knew. It’s just New Cleveland. And like New Coke it sucks just a little bit worse than Classic Coke but Classic Coke has been discontinued.
What was my point?
Right! May Day Play Day. And my father’s Kentucky Bluegrass mini-golf course. THAT was perfect. That was the best spring is ever going to be. As many more have said, youth is wasted on the young. No one young really has the capacity to realize that their life is at the apex at 18.
I would even argue its younger. I’d say it’s best right before puberty. When you still don’t care about girls or guys or how you look or what other people think. Running around that school yard with my buddies and my brother and his friends — THAT was heaven.
That is what I’m reminded of every year when May 1st comes around.
