May Day

 

     “Happy May Day!” said Delbert McLain, our self-appointed, undisputed, and unpaid head of our non-existent chamber of commerce. He wears a tie. Here, in this town. ‘Nuf said.

   “By golly you’re right,” said Doc. “I have a question, Del. How are we supposed to celebrate it?”

   “By starting a business, maybe,” he said. “You know. And then joining the chamber of commerce.”

   “And paying dues?”

   “Why not?”

   “Well,” said Dud, our budding novelist, still using small buds, “how about erecting a May pole and then dancing around it waving flowers and yelling ‘hooray for May’? They used to do that.”

   There’s lots of ways of celebrating the beginning of May, it turns out. In some places it was a drunken orgy and actually gave us the word orgies. In some areas in ancient times, it was time to chase girls around flowering trees and be fruitful. If you were too old to do that, simply singing spring songs like they did at Walpurgis and Beltane would be on the menu. Well, to be fair, at Beltane, the Scots and Irish used to burn their fields and turn the cows out to pasture, too.

   Then of course, you could pick up the microphone on the jet’s dashboard and yell “Mayday!” to the tower and have them sympathize with you as you plunge downwards.

  Or, of course, if you’re of a communistic state of mind, you could always bump off a czar or two and start your own government.

   Pretty girls, new flowers and May poles sound like more fun than dead czars and plane crashes. Orgy, anyone?

Sorry to hear May Company went broke and closed. Nice people, clean sheets … oh where has the time gone?

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Newspaper columnist Slim Randles, who writes the weekly Home Country column, took home two New Mexico Book Awards in 2011. His advice book for young people, “A Cowboy’s Guide to Growing Up Right,” took first place in the self-help category, and “Sweetgrass Mornings” won in the biography/memoirs category. Randles lives and works in Albuquerque. Home Country reaches 3 million hometown newspaper readers each week

Slim Randles learned mule packing from Gene Burkhart and Slim Nivens. He learned mustanging and wild burro catching from Hap Pierce. He learned horse shoeing from Rocky Earick. He learned horse training from Dick Johnson and Joe Cabral. He learned humility from the mules of the eastern High Sierra. Randles lives in Albuquerque.

Randles has written newspaper stories, magazine articles and book, both fiction and nonfiction. His column appeared in New Mexico Magazine for many years and was a popular columnist for the Anchorage Daily News and the Albuquerque Journal, and now writes a nationally syndicated column, “Home Country,” which appears in several hundred newspapers across the country.

 

  Huntington Beach News