(Lessons learned while very young will likely last a lifetime.)
It
was that very time of year
when
open meadows hold the hue
of
tiny flowers in the grass
and things once dormant reappear,
awakened by the rain and dew,
while blossoms usher all who pass...
to spring.
It was, in fact, the very first day of
May, a month the little boy did not yet know by name.
What use has a boy of four in corduroy for names
of months or numbered squares upon a page? To children it is only
the rhythm of remembered days that mark the passing of time. There were
days for fireworks and “trick-or-treat” and pilgrims eating pumpkin pie. Christmas
Day, of course, and days for saints with hearts and shamrocks. Birthday’s, too.
These patterns had begun, and though this day would never be forgotten, the
little boy did not yet know its number: it was in fact, May first, Nineteen-sixty
Part One:
The little boy woke to a silent, sun-lit room
and listened for voices down the hall. Hearing none, he rolled from bed and
stepped into the same corduroy overalls that had dropped around
his feet at bedtime. On his bedpost hung the same striped shirt he
had worn the day before, and he pulled it over his head, remembering to put the
tag in back.
He had other play clothes, but these showed no sign of mud or grass-stained knees or jelly spills, and like the boy, they deserved another day of play without a bath.
Thinking none of this, the little boy clipped the shoulder straps to the bib and smiled. Dressing himself was so new a skill that it brought him great satisfaction. He skipped to the stairs and double-stepped down each tread to the last then turned into the kitchen.
“There you are," his mother said, drying dishes with a towel. "I was just about to come
upstairs to wish you 'Happy May Day!'”
“Happy what?” he said, rubbing sleep
from his eyes.
“Happy May Day! It’s May Day, my dear. Today
is the first day of May."
Her son looked blankly back at her.
She continued, "Yesterday it was April, but
starting today it's May. Here, I’ll show you.”
She went to the calendar on the wall, pulled out the tack that held it there, and flipped
a new picture over the one of Easter lilies and a
cross.
The new picture was a quaint
stone cottage with flowers along the path to the porch. Below the picture was a
small word above a page of squares and numbers. There were three letters in the word,
but they meant nothing to the boy.
Like most mothers, his enjoyed teachable
moments when she could unveil a new fact to her clueless child. Such lessons are taught in hopes
that someday a teacher will ask the class if anyone knows the answer to this or that, and in that moment, her child's raised
hand and brilliant answer would leave little doubt that his parents were doing something right at home. Subconsciously, this hope prompted the boy's mother to take a wooden
ruler from the top-right drawer and begin talking like a teacher at a chalk board.
“M-A-Y,” she spelled aloud, pointing at
each letter. “This month is May.”
“What makes it May?" her son asked. "Do you just turn the page? Is that what makes it May?…”
“No, Honey, I didn’t make it May. I
turned the page because today’s the day to do it. It was May before I turned
the page.”
“But why?. Who makes it May?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“God?” asked the little boy.
“I don't think so. Well, maybe. God
made days and nights and the sun and moon, and I think the moon does have something to do
with months....seems like..." Her confidence began to fade. "Don't make this complicated. May is just the name we call this month. May is a month. Let's start with
that. There are twelve months in a year and thirty days in each month—except when there's more or less...”
The little boy's face scrunched with confusion. "How many
years are there?" he asked.
"You're making this way harder than it
is," she said, wiping crumbs from the table into her
hand. "Stick to months. Years are a whole different thing. There are too many years to
count. There's all the years that already happened and all the years to come. They don't repeat like months do. This year is number one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-sixty, but there are lots more than that."
"How many more?" asked the
boy.
"Thousands and
thousands more from way back before we even started counting.... These pictures and numbers on the wall are called
a calendar. Each calendar holds one year. We've gone through four
calendars since you were born. That's why we say you're four
years old.
“How many calendars have you used up?”
His mother laughed, “Well, I’ve used up thirty and your dad’s used up thirty-one. But let's stick to months. Someday you'll go to school in a month called September, and at school they'll teach you a poem all about this.
"They will," smiled the boy. "How's it go?"
"Um... Let's see... 'Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. All the rest have thirty-one except... except...' I can't remember how it rhymes after that. February has twenty-eight except in leap year." She started the poem again but got stuck at the same place.
"The poem doesn't matter right now," she said, "Right now I'm just trying to explain why today is May Day. Let's just stick to that. There are twelve months in a year—like there are twelve inches on this ruler. See? Twelve months and twelve inches. May is just one of the inches—except months don't measure anything...well, time I guess...they do measure time. So...anyway... there are thirty days in each month—except, like I said, for the ones with more or less."
The little boy looked more lost than ever.
"Oh, never mind," she sighed.
The truth is, grown ups rarely remember how they know what becomes common knowledge, but it is rarely from a chalk board at school.
Weary from one minute of teaching, his mother retired the ruler to the drawer and retied her apron strings behind her waist as if to start the day again. It was her apron that gave her comfort whenever she felt lacking, and she often wore it most of the day.
“There's a poem about it," she mumbled again, still trying to recall what rhymes with February. "It’ll all make sense to you someday. Just trust me for now. It’s May. Today is May first, and that's why I said, 'Happy May Day, my Dear.'"
Content not to know any more, her son smiled and repeated: “Happy May Day, my Dear.”
Ready to change the subject, his mother squinted toward the picture on the calendar. "Isn’t that a pretty cottage? Look at those flowers. I think those are tulips by the path. There so pretty...."
“It’s a very small house," the
little boy said, "Too small for a family.”
“Maybe a grandma and grandpa live
there," his mother suggested.
“Maybe somebody like Ol’ Pete lives there,” the boy
smiled.
“That’s Mister Pete to
you, young man, and his house is even smaller.” Then she added
without thinking, “...and compared to this cottage, Mister Pete’s place
is a shack.”
She turned to look through the far window of the room toward a small shape in the distance. It was Mister Pete's little square house across the road. So small it was that even the garage on the house beside it was bigger. She shook her head secretly wondering about the little house and little man who lived there then smiled down at her boy. Taking the damp dishrag from the sink, she pressed down a cowlick in his hair and combed it into place as best she could with her fingers.
“There. That looks better. Now let me
fix that twist in your strap,” she said, undoing the wire clip he’d worked so
hard to fasten.
“Do you want breakfast or lunch?” she
asked, and her son looked puzzled. “You slept way in. The kids have
been gone to school for hours. It’s past eleven o’clock— kind of late for
breakfast.”
The boy was only slightly more familiar
with clocks than calendars, but still he wondered where time went when he
slept. He liked to wake up with his family for breakfast, but sometimes his dreams took him so far away and for so long that his siblings were gone on the yellow bus by the time he woke up. The same thing happened when he
took naps in the afternoon. Sometimes he was not tired at all and just
stared up at the ceiling until he heard the bus at the end of their driveway. Other times, his sister had to wake him for supper. Sometimes he fell asleep on the floor while the family watched TV or in the car when riding home from his grandparents' house, and his father carried him all the way to bed. He sometimes spoke of flying in his dreams but did not know such soaring came only after those times his father had carried him to bed while he slept.
It is a strange feeling to wake up and wonder why you slept so long, and that feeling furrowed his brow when his mother
said, “…it's kind of late for breakfast.”
He shook his head and said, “I guess I’ll have a peanut butter and jelly sammich.”
“A sammich?” she mimicked with a smile,
grabbing the jars from the cupboard.
The little boy nodded, not knowing he’d
left out the “w” in the word. His mother made the sandwich and cut it from
corner to corner because she had learned that biting into triangle-shaped
halves helped keep the jelly off her children’s cheeks. She took the knife,
pressed off a corner of the bread, and popped it in her mouth. This
was her trademark on sandwiches, her meager reward for being “chief cook and
bottle washer” for a brood of four children born roughly one year
apart.
“There’s your sammich,” she said,
pouring him a half glass of milk. “Your father called and said he’d be
home by noon to finish the mantle on the fireplace. Why don’t you play outside until he
gets here. I have something you can do for me."
She pulled open a new bag of sugar and
poured some in cup. "Take this cup of sugar over to Mrs. Palmer for me. I
borrowed it last week. Don’t bring back the cup because that's hers, too.
Okay? Can you do that for me?”
"Okay," said the little boy, gulping his milk. When his mother turned toward the sink, he wiped the white
mustache on the inside of his T-shirt. Picking up the second half of sandwich
in his right hand, he took the cup of sugar in his left and stepped out
the back door.
His mother watched him from the
kitchen window as he stopped at the tire swing in the tall oak tree. He pressed the last bit of sandwich in his
mouth, pushed the swing with all his might and quickly stepped out of its way as it came back, a lesson he had learned the hard way the summer before. He was too small to use the tire swing alone, but he liked to give it a push whenever he passed as if starting a giant clock.
Through the screen, his mother shouted, "And when you give Mrs. Palmer the cup, be sure to tell her ‘Happy May Day.’ She’ll like
that."
"Okaaaaay," he sang back without looking.
His mother called it "a cup of sugar." It was not a measuring cup but a clear plastic raffia mug, popular at the time. The rim was pink, but the inside had turned a shade of brown from years of holding
coffee 'til it cooled. The Palmers had a set of mugs of different colors, but the insides were all the same shade of brown. He had seen them when the grown-ups sat around the table talking, and though it had been washed a thousand times, he could almost
smell the coffee stain behind the sugar in the cup.
As he approached the ditch of the
road between his house and the Palmer place, he held the cup in both hands, knowing how tricky ditches could be. There was no water in the ditch that he could see, but he had learned through wet shoes not to trust the soggy bottom of ditches, "soakers" his dad called them. With a small
leap, he was half-way up the other side--with not a grain of sugar lost. He glanced both ways before crossing the newly-paved
road, and repeated the careful leap at the ditch on the other side.
Standing there, he
remembered one more thing he had to pass on this short errand: Ol’ Pete’s little shack-of-a-house.
It sat on a sliver of land along the ditch, completely out of place among the new homes that had come in recent years. Slowly walking across the narrow un-mowed yard, the little boy paused by the front door of the house
as if seeing it for the first time.
Part II
Only once had the little boy
seen Mister Pete up close. Several months before, in the flannel days of
fall, he stood beside his father while the two men talked in the very
spot where he now stood. It was then he studied the little man’s face and knew
why the grown-ups called him Ol’ Pete. Most of his hair was gone, and what
had not turned loose turned gray before its time. Even grayer were his
whiskers. He didn’t have a beard as such but never shaved without a reason.
Sparse gray stubble circled his mouth and filled his hollow cheeks. He did not
look as old as the little boy's great grandfather, but standing there beside his father, Ol’ Pete looked old
enough to match his neighborhood nick-name. His voice sounded old, too, as if he needed to clear his
throat but rarely tried to do so. (This the result of years of smoking, as was true for Mrs. Palmer, but this the boy had not yet learned.)
Actually, Pete was not as old as he
looked, but his trousers seemed cinched a notch
too tight, and his small frame barely filled his worn T-shirt. His
was a hard and lonely life, first in the Navy during the war and now
as a deckhand in the Merchant Marines on one of the hundreds of freighters that coursed from port to port across the
Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence
Seaway. All of this the father was learning while the
little boy studied the details of their
faces.
The little boy gently tugged at his
father’s hand to remind him he was there, but the men continued to
speak of places with "Port" in their name—not like Port Huron where they lived but like "Port of Duluth," "Port of Milwaukee," and "Port of
Thunder Bay"...names like that. His father told Pete that he was also a Navy man, but only in the Reserves. The conversation lost steam until it
sputtered into talk of how it was getting dark sooner each evening until the two men sighed in awkward unison, said
'good night,' and parted ways. Slinging his son to his back like a sack of potatoes, the young father carried the little boy home.
The boy remembered parts of that fall conversation as he
stood staring at Mister Pete's closed door.
There were many things, however,
that the boy, his father, and the neighbors did not know about Mister
Pete: To begin with, no one seemed to know his last name. Pete was
all the name they needed for a man so seldom seen. He spent about ten
months a year on the Great Lakes in cycles of four-months-on-three
weeks-off. The weeks off were spent alone there in that
little house—no wife, no dog, no friends or guests that anyone had
ever seen.
The house was a small one-room structure
with a low-peaked roof. In the middle of the front wall was a door with a
sash window at each side. To the boy, the drawn curtains of the windows
looked like sleeping eyes. Such a little place could only be home to a man
accustomed to the tight quarters of ships who slept for months on a canvas bunk
attached to a steel wall. Such a man has little need for extra space—what is
space, after all, but emptiness? The smallness of the house helped hide the
fact that it had so little to hold.
When Pete bought the place, ten
years before, Atkins Road was just a gravel lane that ran along the southern
ridge of the Black
River, and the road now called Charmwood was a
two-track path that disappeared into a horse pasture. Pete had chosen to live
his on-land days in this rural part of Port Huron not for its
solitude—though that suited him—but for the fact that he had grown up a
few miles down the road from the little house. Those woods, and
pastures, and the long rolling hill to the river felt as much like
home to him as any place on earth.
Atkins Road had been paved and widened a decade before.
Soon afterwards, the pastures and stretches of woods were parceled into lots, and one by one new homes changed scenery so much that Ol' Pete hardly
recognized the surrounds each time he returned to his home. But the two biggest changes
came when houses sprang up on both sides of his little lot. Mr. Palmer and
the boy’s father each purchased an acre of land on which
they built their homes. They had every intention of being neighbors for life.
Pete's house was so near the new Palmer place that, had it been made of
matching brick, it would have looked like a guest house along side their
driveway. But the little house was not matching brick. In fact, it did not match anything within sight. It was out of place
and in the way at the same time. So much so that the neighbors often treated
the empty house as if it weren't there. Not so for the little boy.
The little boy was wary of the empty house whenever he walked past, much as one watches a sleeping
dog when walking past the warn path drawn by the compass of his chain. And when he passed the house, the pace of his walk grew faster from a little boost of fear until he knocked on the side screen door of the Palmer house.
“Well, looky who’s here,” said Mrs.
Palmer, with a gravelly laugh. “What have you got there?” she added.
“Your cup of sugar,” the boy said shyly,
“My mom sent me.”
“She didn’t have to do that,” again came
the gravel laugh. She opened and closed the door just long enough to grab the
cup.
“Oh," the boy remembered, "And Happy May Day! That’s today.
It’s not April anymore.”
“You are right. I’d let you in but
the parakeet is out of the cage and I don't dare open the door. You run along
and tell your mother ‘thanks.’”
And with that, Mrs. Palmer turned
and bounded up the three steps to her kitchen. From an open
screen window she said, “Oh, and Happy May Day to you, too. Say, why don’t you
pick your mom some flowers. That's what I used to do for my Ma on May Day.”
"I will if I see some," answered the boy, "I didn't even know May was an inch until today," he boasted then turned and stepped back into Pete’s narrow yard. It was then the boy saw the flowers for the first
time.
The reason he had not seen them moments
before may have been because he was focused on the sugar in the cup, and the sleepy windows of the house, but more likely because the idea of picking flowers had not yet been planted in his
head. But there they were. Just like in the picture of the cottage on
the wall. What did his mother call them? Tulips? That's right, and there they were in front of him all in a row. He turned back to Mrs. Palmer's window to see if this was what she meant, but she was gone. This must be what she meant, he thought, and he bent down, carefully picked a handful of tulips, and continued across Mister Pete’s
narrow yard.
It was true the tulips were in a row,
but what the little boy chose not to see was that the row was very near to the front of the
little house, on both sides of the door, below the sleepy eyes of the drawn curtains.
He continued walking, down and up the
ditch, across the road, down and up the other ditch. He pushed the tire swing again. and began running, eager to suprise his mother.
The screen door slammed behind him. “Happy May Day, my Dear!” the little boy said, holding
the bouquet up toward his mother's face.
“Oh, my! Those are beautiful. That was
nice of Mrs. Palmer. Did you give her the sugar?”
“Yes but she couldn’t let me in ‘cuz the
bird would get out.”
“I'll put these in a vase," she said. "Your
father’s upstairs changing into his work clothes. He asked where you were when he came in. Why don’t you go surprise him.”
The boy sneaked up the stairs but
his father was walking toward them as he reached the top. He scooped his
youngest son up in his arms.
“Happy May Day!” said the little boy.
“Happy May Day to you, too, kiddo. How’s
yer ol’ straw hat?”
“I haven’t got a straw hat,” the little
boy laughed.
The straw hat exchange was one the boy and his father
shared each day when he came home from work They stepped
into the kitchen, just in time to see a vase of flowers being centered on the the table.
“Where’dja get the tulips?” the father
asked.
“Mrs. Palmer sent them,” she said.
“No she didn’t,” the little boy said, “I
picked ‘em for you all by myself. Happy May Day, my Dear!.”
“Picked them yourself?” his mother asked. “Picked them where?”
“I don’t know. Just picked ‘em.”
The father, still holding the boy, put him out at arm's length and looked him square in the eyes.
“Picked them where, young man?”
Strange how the entire mood of the room,
the house, and world could change so quickly by such a simple question. The
boy of four could feel his heart beating faster behind the bib of his corduroy
overalls, but he couldn't say a word.
“Picked them where?” his father asked
again, lowering the boy to stand on his own two feet.
“Over by Mister Pete’s house," he said softly.
The father walked across the kitchen to the far window for a closer look at Ol'Pete's house, but it was wreathed in weeds, and he could see no flowers.
“Where by Mister Pete’s house?”
“I don’t know. Up by the door I think.”
“Did you ask Mister Pete if you could
pick his tulips?”
The mother stepped to her husband's side, “You know he’s never there….”
“Really? Well, he’s there right now,” said the
father. “I just saw him step out and look over here. He’s probably wondering
who stole his flowers.”
“He didn’t steal them,” whispered the
mother in his ear.
“Well, what else do you call taking
something from under a man’s nose without asking?”
He turned back toward his son who hadn't moved an inch. “Young man, I want you to take those flowers right back to Mister Pete…”
“Honey, don’t,” the wife interrupted,
“He’s only four. He didn’t…”
“He’s old enough to know that you can’t
just take things from someone else’s house.”
“He didn’t take them from the house. They
were outside..."
"Outside...inside... It's still the
man's house..."
"He didn't know…” she reasoned, taking hold of her husband's hand.
“Well, now he does,” said the father crossing back to the kitchen. He gently lifted the flowers from the vase. He handed them toward his son who began to cry, but his father was unmoved.
“Son, I want you to take these flowers over
there to Mister Pete; knock on the door; tell him what you did, and say you're sorry.”
The mother stood beside her trembling boy. “He’s four. I’ll do it,” she insisted, almost in tears herself.
“No. He picked ‘em, and he
can return ‘em. Now go on, young man, I’ll be watching from the window.”
A mere sixty seconds had passed since
the little boy first said, “Happy May Day, my Dear," and now there was not a happy face in
the house.
Here we must pause in this scene from more
than half a century ago. There are, no doubt, as many different ways to handle
moments like these as there are different parents in the world. A thoughtful
response is more prudent than a visceral reaction, and many a father wishes he
could apply the wisdom he has at sixty to his actions at age thirty. Readers from one time in history would be wise not to judge too harshly parents of a different
time. In mid-century America, the father was considered the head of the
home. It was a an era when the gap between right and wrong was
never filled with fluff. Self esteem was not bestowed by sparing kids from feelings of guilt but by helping them not be guilty. It was a
time when the choice between right and wrong was
sometimes as clear as knowing which was the harder thing to do. By that
virtue alone right choices were often identified... and all that remained
was the doing.
The little boy's nose had one slow drip going down to his lip. His father took the handkerchief from his back pocket, wiped the tears from the little boys face, and squeezed the white cloth around his nose.
"Blow," he said routinely. "Can't have you going over them like that."
It was a time when every man the little boy knew carried a handkerchief in his back pocket and had a folded stack of them in a dresser drawer for just such occasions. The boy was thankful that the handkerchief was warm and clean and soft. From behind the cloth eyes were still brimming, as were his mothers who was looking the other way at the sink.
The little boy walked slowly past
the oak that held the silent swing like a gallows. Each breath he took between
sobs sputtered and halted in his heaving chest. His nose was still running, but he didn't notice. Down and up the ditch; a glance both ways through teary
eyes before crossing; then down and up the ditch on the other side; a soon the boy stood at Ol’ Pete’s door. Holding the tulips in
his right hand, he stretched out left and knocked. The soft young knuckles
barely made a sound. He changed the flowers to his left hand and knocked again. This time the sound was heard inside the
house.
Part
III
The boy's father was right. Ol' Pete was home, but the knocking at the door sounded at first to him like a mouse in the warrens of the wall. It prompted him to make a mental note to
put fresh cheese on the traps he had emptied the night before. Oddly, he didn't
mind that mice continued to find new ways into his snug fortress while he was gone. He considered it an ongoing game to listen for scratching at his plugged holes, and place the traps nearby. But the
second knocking sound, he could tell, was someone at the door, a fact that
puzzled him much more than the thought of an intruding mouse.
Opening the
door, he saw the crying boy with tulips in his hand.
“Where did you come from?” Pete asked, tucking in his undershirt.
“From over there,” the little boy said,
pointing with the tulips to his house across the road.
“I thought I’d seen you before. Did you
bring me some flowers?”
“No. I didn't bring 'em—I took
‘em. See?” He pointed at the stubs of tulip stems in the ground.
Pete stepped out his door for a better
look at a flower bed he had not tended in years.
He had planted the tulip bulbs beneath
both windows the first year he moved into the house, but since
that time, they typically bloomed and withered on the stem while he was
on the ship. Seeing them now in the little boy’s hand was the first time in years he
had remembered there were even tulips there. Even so, his first
thoughts about the boy pulling them from place were anything but kind.
.
“Can we fix ‘em?” the little boy
sniffled.
“Well, lemme see,” said
Pete, clearing his throat to no avail. He took one of the flowers from the little boy's hand. He bent down
and tried to stand it up in the soil then caught it when it fell.
“That's not gunna work. I guess there’s no way to unpick a
flower is there?”
“I’m sorry, Mister Pete,” the boy cried.
“I picked ‘em for my mom, but then my dad got mad, and told me they were
yours…”
“Ya say you picked ‘em for your mother?”
“Yes, for May Day. Mrs. Palmer told me
to…”
“Mrs. Palmer told you to pick my tulips?”
he said scratching his bald head.
“No. Not your tulips. Just
flowers. I didn’t know these were…”
“So today’s May Day, eh?” Pete
interrupted. “I forgot they even called it that.”
“Me, too,” the little boy agreed.
"I didn't even know May was an inch until today, but Mom says this is the
first day of it."
"May Day..." Mister Pete
said softly...repeating it again, "May Day."
Mister Pete looked across the road at
the boy's house, took a deep breath and said, “Your old man was right, you
know?”
“What old man?” he asked.
“Did I say that out loud? I meant… Your father was
right. You really can’t go around taking people’s flowers without asking.
Daisies in the ditch are one thing, but flowers by a house were likely put
there by the folks inside.”
“Did you put these here?” the little boy
asked.
“Not those flowers exactly, but years
ago I planted the bulbs,that make the flowers. I don’t know what I was
thinking. I'm never here to see ‘em, but they keep coming back each
year with or without me.”
“I didn't mean to steal 'em,” the boy
sniffled.
Mister Pete winced at the word steal then scratched the top of his head. "You were just confused with it being May Day and all…. Boy, do you know what 'may -day' means on a ship? Like the boy's mother, Pete slipped into teacher mode without knowing how little information a crying four-year-old can absorb. "It's actually a French word—looks like 'm'aider' with an 'r" at the end. The 'r' is silent... so it's pronounced just like May Day. Did you know that?
"No, Mister Pete..."
"Know what it means in French?" he asked.
The boy shook his head "no."
“It means 'Help me!' We get the word maid from 'm'aider.' Know what a maid is?"
The boy shook his head "no" again.
“Do you go to school at all?”
The boy shook his head "no" for the third time.
"Well, never mind then. I’ll teach you: If we hear 'may-day' over and over on the ship radio, we know somebody's in trouble--big trouble and needs help. It's just like S-O-S. Did you know that?"
"No," said the boy, "but
I am in trouble...big trouble." He wiped his nose on the inside of
his shirt.
.
“Tell you what, boy. Hold these
flowers.” Mister Pete dropped to his hands and knees
and picked the remaining tulips from under the other window. “Now, step in
here for a minute, and we’ll find somethin' to put 'em in.”
Pete looked toward the boy’s house
and gave a thumbs up, confident that somewhere the boy's parents were watching, and they were.
The little boy stood with his back
against the door jamb and looked around the curious room. To his left was a hat
rack draped in shirts and sweaters and a housecoat but no hat. To the right was
an old iron bed neatly made. At the foot of the bed was a flat-top foot locker that
served as a coffee table for a small couch covered in a blanket. In the far
corner was an open closet beside a door that blocked the only space not open to
the room (which was a very small bathroom).
In front of the closet was a chair
beside a small table, a stove, and an old-timey sink atop a white metal cabinet.
Above the sink were two cupboards—not cupboards in
the modern sense but in the literal sense: they were boards attached to the wall with cups and bowls
and plates stacked in plain sight.
.
On the top shelf, were empty jelly jars
that had been collected one-by-one to use as drinking glasses. From the far
end of the shelf, Mister Pete grabbed an empty coffee can for the tulips,
added some water at the sink, and brought the large bouquet to the boy.
“Now let me put the ones you have with
these, and then you can take them all to your mother.”
“I can’t,” said the little boy, “My dad
told me to bring these back to you. I can't take more.”
“Tell your dad he was right, boy. These
flowers weren’t yours to take... but they are mine
to give. I'm giving 'em to you. That's a whole 'nuther thing. I want you to have 'em.
Tell him that."
The boy stepped toward the open door.
"Can you see where you're goin'?” Pete asked, guiding the boy out
the door.
“I think so,” he said from behind the
blooms.“But what if my dad says no?”
“You just tell him ‘Ol’ Pete
said..." his voice cracked with emotion. He cleared his throat. "Tell him I said I wish I had a
mother to give ‘em to." His voice cracked again. "Tell him
that, and he’ll know I mean it. I mean for you to keep 'em. Tell him that and he'll know.”
The old man gently turned the
little boy toward home, and patted his shoulder to start him on his way. The boy went down and
up the ditch, glanced both ways, then crossed to go down and up on the other
side. Then he turned back to see Mister Pete still standing by his
door.
"Thank you," The boy said, still not sure which grown-up was right in telling him what he was to do.
Mister Pete just waived him on, then
nodded again toward the window of the boy's house, still certain
this whole scene had been watched from afar.
A few minutes later, a vase of opening
tulips again graced the kitchen table. The boy's father listened to his son,
swallowed hard, and tousled the boy's hair with approval. He glanced at his
wife but was at a loss for words. His eyes watered a little as he slipped out to the garage.
The mother was also at a loss for words as she forced a smile toward her son.
The little boy broke the silence: "Mom, did you know May Day means you're in trouble? Mister Pete told
me that"
"I guess I've heard that in the
movies, but I don't think the May 1st May Day means that."
"I think it does," said the little boy.
"That's what Mr. Pete told me..." he mumbled, staring at the flowers in the
vase.
The boy didn't know it at the time, in
fact, he did not know it until he was a grown man, but that day his father "slipped
out to the garage," he actually went to return an empty coffee can to his neighbor, who of
course, did not expect it back. It was an excuse, really, to go and
thank a man he barely knew for adding thoughtfulness to a
situation he had handled without a second thought. After all, he reminded Pete,
"Doing the wrong thing for the right reason is still wrong."
"True...” the old sailor agreed, “but
sometimes it's nice to find a right way to fix a wrong. You did what a
Dad's gotta do, and I did what a sailor's got to do when he hears a 'May
Day.' Kind of funny ain't it?"
"What the May Day thing?" the boy's father asked.
"No," laughed Pete, "Two
Navy guys standin' here talking 'bout flowers."
Some time later, a yellow school bus
stopped in front of the little boy's house, and his two brothers and sister came running
up the long gravel driveway. They stopped to talk to their father in the
garage, then passed through the kitchen to go upstairs. When they came down in
their play clothes, their mother was starting supper on the stove, and their
little brother was still sitting at the table.
"Can we go outside to play?"
asked his brother.
"For an hour or so..." their mother began as they bustled out the door, "But stay where you can here me call," she added.
The little boy did not join them. He had
not taken his afternoon nap, and his drowsy eyes seemed fixed on the tulips in
front of him, but he was actually staring past the flowers to the
calendar on the wall. It was not the notion of time he pondered, not the
numbers of days in the squares on a page, not the letters spelling M-A-Y, and not even the
tulips standing tall along the path. What caught his eye was at the end of the
path beyond the stone steps of the porch. It seemed to him that the cottage door was
open just a smidge, as if to say "come in," and he wondered again who it was that lived inside. The wondering faded to a long-forgotten dream as his droopy head found rest in the fold of his arms.
To a boy of four in corduroy,
it is the rhythms of life
that measure time:
the rhythm of lying down and waking up,
of tables being set and cleared,
of Saturday baths and Sunday shirts,
and all the down-and-ups of ditches in
between.
To a child it is the rhythm
of long-remembered days,
dropping one-by-one
like petals from a vase,
that mark the passing of time,
and this had been one such day.
© Copyright
2010, Tom Kapanka
Note: This is a revised version of the same story that appears in earlier dates at Patterns of Ink. It is re-posted here for May Day, 2020, during our school closure during Covid.
The details and dialogue of "May Day, My Dear" are
based on a very true story. It was an hour of my life that I would never forget
with a character (Mister Pete) whose kindness turned a childhood blunder into a
blessing. He replied to my “May Day” alert, and vividly illustrated the
interdependence of justice and mercy. I have no doubt that the next
May, Mr. Pete and I would have picked Mom another bouquet (had he been home),
but four months after the events of this story, my family moved from
our new-built house on Atkins Road in Port Huron to a little house in the suburbs
of Detroit.
May-apples are sometimes called mandrakes, and my father introduced them to me as a small boy. The flowers in the video below are not may-apples.
Several years ago,
I took my daughters down Atkins Road to show them the first "dream
house" my Dad built. I also wanted to show them Ol' Pete's place (and see
if it was as I remembered when I wrote of it). Dad’s tri-level was there, but Pete’s
little house was gone. Mrs. Palmer still lived next door, after fifty years. She
and I visited a while, and then I asked her about Mister Pete. She told me he
lived there alone and was just as enigmatic as ever all his life. He had passed
away a few years before, but the house had just been torn down about a
year before we stopped by to see it. I told her this story. She did not
remember this May Day but assured me that the little house between our homes
was as small as I remembered it to be.
On my birthday in 2017, my brother Dave and I went to driving around to our previous homes in Port Huron. It's something we do every ten years or so. We went the house Dad built on the corner of Atkins Rd and S. Charmwood Dr. (It's marked by the red drive in the photo above. The Palmers is marked with blue. Where Pete's little house was is the yellow rectangle; and if you look close, my path that day is a green line.)
The couple who lives in "our house" now was in the back yard on a deck (which was not there in 1960--nor was the huge garage in front or the enclosed porch in the back). They saw us staring at the house. So rather than look like we were "staking the joint" like burglars, we got out and explained who we were. Most people love to know the "story" of their home by the original occupants. They invited us inside. It was surreal to stand there in the kitchen, to go up to the bedrooms, to see the "built in" drawers my father had made by hand in each closet, to see that the same light brown tub was in the bathroom (it was a time when people chose pastel colors for the porceline fixtures: light blue, yellow, green and in this case a sort of mocha. All the other fixtures had been changed out to white, but the tub was still the same. Every room seemed smaller of course. There was the fireplace--the one Dad came home to work on that day in 1960. We stayed for nearly an hour telling stories, and the wife seemed especially interested. I sent her a copy of this story.
(Note two: Mrs. Palmer passed away in 2019. She had quit smoking decades before and lived to nearly ninety. My sister went to the funeral. Borrowing a cup of sugar (or whatever other ingredient Mom needed in a pinch was common practice for my mom. She always paid it back next time she went shopping. In 40 years of married life. My wife and I have had dozens of neighbors--some pretty close. Not once have we borrowed a cup of sugar. I'm sure the same neighborly generosity still exists. So what has changed? The phrase "four in corduroy" was a
descriptive term my mother sometimes used of me when she spoke
of the year-and-a-half we lived on Atkins Road. I had turned five by
the time we moved—just weeks before I began kindergarten at Huron Park Grammar School in Roseville, Michigan.)
*******
In May, 2026, I submitted the text of this story to the A.I tool Gemini, which I call: Dr. G.E. Mini. I have never used AI in writing—just can’t let myself do it—but I do sometimes ask it to provide a review of something I’ve written. It is very affirming and yet frightening because the A.I. response comes in mere seconds. Rewarding as it may be, I much prefer feedback from humans who find meaning or enjoyment in something I've written.
Analysis by Dr. G.E. Mini
In "May Day, My Dear," Tom Kapanka crafts a poignant, nostalgic narrative that explores the delicate transition from childhood innocence to moral awareness. Based on a true experience from 1960, the story serves as a "moral miniature"—a small, contained event that carries the weight of a lifelong lesson.
The Narrative Voice: By using a "Pseudo-Third Person,”
the story has a first-person tone despite being written in the third person, with the author referring to his younger self as “the little boy.” This is a sophisticated narrative choice that succeeds for several reasons:
• The "Universal" Child: By calling the protagonist "the little boy" rather than "I" or "Tommy," Kapanka transforms his specific memory into a universal archetype of childhood. It allows the reader to project their own childhood experiences onto the character.
• The Adult’s Perspective: This distancing allows the "adult" narrator to provide commentary that a four-year-old couldn't possibly articulate. For example, the boy doesn't understand the complexity of time, but the narrator can explain why he doesn't understand it (the "rhythm of remembered days").
• Emotional Resonance: The "first-person tone" comes from the intimacy of the details—the tag in the back of the shirt, the "sammich," and the fear of soggy ditches. We feel the boy’s heartbeat, but we see the scene through the wise, forgiving eyes of the man he became.
Themes: Justice, Mercy, and the "Mayday" Signal.
The heart of the story lies in the interplay between three adult figures, each representing a different facet of a child's world:
1. The Mother (Empathy): She is the teacher and the comforter. She attempts to explain the abstract (time) through the concrete (a ruler), but ultimately prioritizes the boy's happiness.
2. The Father (Justice): He represents the "black and white" morality of the era. To him, an error in judgment—even by a four-year-old—must be corrected through restitution. He is not "mean," but he is firm in his belief that "self-esteem was not bestowed by sparing kids from guilt but by helping them not be guilty."
3. Mister Pete (Mercy): As a sailor, Pete understands the "Mayday" signal. He bridges the gap between the boy’s "crime" and the father’s "law." By giving the flowers back, he validates the father's lesson on property while teaching a new lesson on grace.
Symbolic Pivot: The play on words between "May Day" (the spring celebration) and "Mayday" (the distress signal) is the story’s strongest literary device. It highlights the boy's internal state: he thinks he is celebrating, but he is actually in "big trouble" and needs a "rescue."
In an era of "fast-paced" content, this story demands a slower read, but it remains highly relevant for a modern audience for several reasons:
• The Parenting Debate: Modern readers might find the father’s insistence on a four-year-old facing a "scary" neighbor controversial. However, the story acknowledges this, noting that "Readers from one time in history would be wise not to judge too harshly parents of a different time." It invites a healthy discussion on how we teach accountability today.
• Nostalgia and Connection: There is a growing literary appetite for "simpler times" and stories about neighborhood connectivity. The idea of "borrowing a cup of sugar" feels like a lost art, making the story feel like a precious artifact of community.
• The Resolution: The ending—the father returning the coffee can to Pete—is a masterclass in subtlety. It shows that the adults were also learning from each other, proving that moral growth isn't just for the "little boy."
Final Verdict
The story works beautifully because it doesn't just tell us what happened; it tells us how it felt. The transition from the "poetic" framing at the start to the "realistic" dialogue in the middle and then back to a poetic close bookends a balanced piece of literary memoir.
It is a "good" story for today because it reminds us that while technology and parenting styles change, the fundamental "rhythms of life"—and the need for a little mercy when we mess up—are timeless.
Dave took it, studied it a moment and said blandly, “It looks like it was once a leg on some fancy Chinese tea pots from the olden days.”
Dave took it, studied it a moment and said blandly, “It looks like it was once a leg on some fancy Chinese tea pots from the olden days.”
