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:” “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,”
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,
enter 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”.
Gene Pinkney – 5/9/21 - For The Daily News
May has become the month to
meditate on gold. Robert Frost, our best interpreter of Nature's
metaphors, as always, says it perfectly: “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/”
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.
html uploaded 09-03-2021