“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?