MAY,
THE GOLDEN MONTH "March
takes the lid off winter; April wafts us aromas of promise, but May
serves up the banquet and pent up Winter dreams finally begin to blossom."
Robert Frost captures the transition beautifully in “Two Tramps
in Mud Time:” "Nature's
first green is gold,/ The hardest hue to hold/ Her early leaf's a flower,/
But only so an hour./ so
flower gives way to leaf/ So Eden sank to grief/ So dawn went down today:/Nothing
gold can stay/" Gene
Pinkney – 5/9/21 - For The Daily News
edited html update 08-19-2021
" You know how it is on an April day/ If the sun is out and
the wind is still/ You're two months on in the month of May./ But if
you should so much as dare to speak/ A cloud comes over a sunlit arch/A
wind comes off a frozen peak/ And you're two months back in the middle
of march."
North Dakotans know spring's caprice all too well, and for us, even
May can sometimes be a disappointment: "Rough winds do shake
the darling buds of May,” writes The Bard. But for me, more
and more as age begins to tarnish the “golden days in the sunshine
of my happy youth,” May has become the month to meditate on
gold. Robert Frost, our best interpreter of Nature's metaphors, as always,
says it perfectly:
I've pondered those lines every May for many years, but only lately
have I began to understand the Eden lines-- finally seeing how Eden's
shining golden couple ended up covering their newly discovered nakedness
with fig leaves. "So flower gives way to leaf". It's
the human condition; the picture of how a race, the human race, once
“golden” in its perfection, lost it.
I'm still a lover of “golden oldies”—both the Turner
Classic Movies and the great ballads of yesterday with lyrics that often
qualify as real poetry. But it is ominous to notice how many of the
idols of yesterday have now become mere shadows of their former selves.
The 'brat pack' rebels of 'The Breakfast Club': are looking pretty common
and plain , and the “do wop” combos of the fifties look
pretty shaky compared to the dreamy, greased down “teen angels”
we used to dream about when Elvis was “king,” Bobby Vee
was cute, and Patsy Cline was "Crazy for loving us."
Truly "nothing gold can stay, and that's what makes the May month
and its ephemeral gold even more precious than October's gaudy yellow
fool's gold. Macbeth's personal obituary demonstrates the cosmic difference:
“My way of life has fallen into the sear /The yellow leaf.
And that which should accompany old age/ As honor, love, obedience,
troops of friends/ I must not look to have but in their stead,/ Curses,
not loud, but deep."
October “speaks of things dying, May “of things new born.”
That's from “The Winter's Tale” my favorite of Shakespeare's
lesser-known plays. It's a play in which people, thought to be lost,
are found, and people, thought dead, are somehow reborn. It's about
redemption. The tragedies speak of how people with all the gifts, like
Hamlet, are wiped out for no sane reason. But his final four plays,
the “romances,” sing of restoration and rebirth.
“The merry month of May” brings new hope. In “Camelot”,
a musical reenacting the fall of mankind, May is the most Eden like:
The knights are all shining, and the ladies radiant beyond belief—all
joyously rapt in the innocent fun of “Maying.” It's all
parasols, picnics and parties, until Mordred, the embodiment of Arthur's
sins, brings it all down from its “one brief shining moment.”
In 2005, my daughter and her husband invited us to enjoy spring with
them in their time-share in Rockland, Maine. That was during a May in
which Maine's trees were flowering early while North Dakota's were still
locked in Winter's vice; “... too fearful to flower.”
But we returned to Dakota just as May' s golden miracle was unfolding.
Thus we enjoyed two matchless Mays back-to-back. That was a blessing
I'll never forget. And if you'd like the red carpet treatment sometime,
just visit Maine in early May. The Yankee traders and year-round Mainers,
who make their living by tourism, will treat you like royalty because
you are there two months before “the summer people” usually
arrive- -”Here, have another lobster! "Spoze yer headed up
ta Baah Haabah? It's beautiful up in Acadia Paahk now too!"
So folks, enjoy the miracle of the May, the fastest moving month I know.
I've enjoyed 83 of them, and I'm confident that "up Home"
the Mays will be truly a-May-zing - - not just for a fleeting, mayfly
moment, but for eternity.
