Mayday, mayday. Houston, we have a problem.
The Mercedes has begun making a distinct scratching noise from the right front wheel, the sort of sound you might hear if you scraped the inside of a large soup pot with a knitting needle. Evan and I were going to tune the car up tomorrow, but instead he says we'll look at the brakes. My Honda (the one I destroyed last fall) made a sound like that once and I didn't feel like looking at it, so the dealer replaced a lot of brake parts, and $400 later, the sound went away.
May Day. I feel like I should be out around a maypole somewhere in a park, the way you always see in movies or books about the Renaissance. When I was at Anwatin, we'd sometimes make little art projects about May Day and spring, posted up along the walls in the hall outside the room door, with our names on them.
I found a couple of things like that in a box in Minneapolis. Some of them might have been from as far back as kindergarten. The whole circle of seasons represented in little oddball scraps of colored construction paper, trimmed with those little round-tipped safety scissors. I wasn't allowed to have scissors with a point until 6th grade. But there they were, snowflakes with the fold marks still showing. A brown turkey that was cut out using a tracing of my right hand as the template. Big pumpkins that always had bright green stems pasted to the tops. Pumpkins in the real world have brown, gnarly stems by the time the pumpkin is orange.
There was a song I remember for May Day:
On May Day, On May Day,
I woke up at daybreak
And went down to gather
A basket of May.
I had no idea, at the time, what a "basket of May" was. Living in Minnesota, I was pretty sure I knew what a basket of February might look like, but May confounded me.
A lot of the things we do as children are little time-release capsules. You're not supposed to understand them at the time, but years later, you understand and you're glad someone planted it there.
I always enjoy your comments. It's been a while since anyone left any.