The Spring comes in with all her hues and smells,
in freshness breathing over hills and dells:
O’er woods where May her gorgeous drapery flings,
and mead washed fragrant by their laughing springs.
— John Clare
May is a month full of memories. Mother’s Days, Birthdays, May Processions and the happy thought that the school year is near its end! It is spring in Philly. It is a month that seems made to standout as the years went and go by. The fact that I have a birthday in that month helped some years ago, but today it’s not quite the same. Some good news about my birthday is I am reminded each year that I now have the same number of years as Bill King, who has a birthday in March. Can you guess who reminds me? There is also the birthday of my sister Marge, a few days before mine and two years in time. Now too we have many friends who have birthdays in this month giving us even more reason to remember it. Friends like Lou Rosetti, Joanne Hegerman, Shirley Pyle, and Bill King’s wife Bunny. So we have a May made up of birthdays and spring weather. The weather here however is closer to summer since the humidity started to rise again.
In my desk calendar on May1st,it reads, “Labor Day (M)”. Labor Day for me is the first Monday in September. It is the closing of the summer season. I think what the ‘(M)’ after “Labor Day” may mean Mexico. If any of you can give me an better answer I’d be most grateful. It may be a reference to the fact that the First of May has over the years been a day of activity of labor and laborers. It was a protest day for communism as I recall and many unions in opposition had a counter parade or program. Around Eisenhower’s time there was created a “Law Day” which was May 1st. I know the Bar Association in Philly had activities and even maybe a parade. If that’s what the (M) and “Labor Day” means on my calendar then I can understand, if not I’m at a loss.
May brings May Processions. As a young altar boy I participated in May processions. I’m not certain they were on May 1st or just one of the Sundays in May. They are still held in many churches even today. I put the words “May procession” in for a search on the net and found pages of processions listed. They indicated where and when in case you cared to attend. So the tradition goes on. I thought with Vatican II there was reduction in devotions to Christ’ mother since it was in some circle getting out of hand. I carried a candle in those processions and we ended up after a walk around the school and the church building placing a bouquet of flowers on her altar. In my childhood days at St. Francis de Sales in West Philly there was a separate altar for Mary dominated by a large statue of her.
As we noted above May usually brings good weather. We have the increase in humidity so we begin to feel the heat and put on the A/C. We however this year are not half way through May and have had uncomfortable days due to some 200 brush fires. The wind has blown the smoke in to our neighborhoods though thankfully the fires are miles away. It makes breathing difficult. We also are reminded during this month that the Hurricane season starts on June 1, so be prepared. But this year we’ve already had one named tropical storm, Andrea. So even in paradise there are weak spots.
May brings thoughts of the school year ending soon. Now in Florida it is not thoughts of it “ending’ but it ends! But my memory is when June brought the end of the school year and at one time even as far as the third week. There was one time in my life when that mattered a great deal. I had a political science major and education minor. The education minor meant I could teach in the system if I spent some time practice teaching. I forget the precise number of months. I got the opportunity in my senior year of doing so. From about the middle of March onward I was teaching the ninth grade students at a parochial school. Technically they were members of the Roman Catholic High School but were located in the parish school building. So I ended my college education teaching. I was excused from attending any other classes and I can’t recall if I even had to take exams. I had a class of nearly 35 boys. All came from the neighborhood of Girard Ave below Front Street. They were a rough group. In fact I learned later that the nun who had been teaching them was taken off the job due to a nervous breakdown, I believe that these young tough guys probably caused part of it. So you can imagine how I looked forward to the school year ending. I never did get the license to teach. For one thing due to the credits earned in college I had qualified, according to their requirements, in only one subject, Latin. So to teach some other subject or subjects I would have had to return to school and earned credits in them. But instead of that I entered Law School and following that the U.S. Marines for over 4 years. By the time I finished those seven plus years I decided to take up the practice of law with my Dad. Interestingly enough I did teach again and it was at the St. Joseph’s College night school. It was a means of filling in the gaps of income now that I had some seven mouths to feed aside from my own and my spouse. The same director of Education at St. Joe’s offered me the job to teach “The philosophy of secondary Education”. I did that one semester and then he asked me to come back to teach another class. The classes were comprised primarily of teachers from the Parochial schools who had to earn these extra credits to be certified. I was asked to teach “Educational Statistics”. I balked since I had never had a statistic course, but the director insisted I could do it out of the book. So I accepted the job. I announced to the class on the opening night that I was no expert in statistics and as matter of fact I was learning them for the first time along with them. I think I added something like and ‘of course the teacher will not fail’. An unexpected event occurred because of those remarks some ten years later. I was representing a man in a divorce action. His wife had an attorney. Either he or the wife’s attorney told me that his client, the wife, had called me a ‘deceiver’. She arrived at the conclusion he said since she had been in that night class on statistics. She somehow took my remarks about teaching from the book and that the teacher not failing as deception! I explained in detail to my client, her husband, what actually happened. He didn’t fire me and we got most of the things we wanted from the divorce agreement.
As we get older we get wiser, or so the adage or proverb says. “Wisdom comes with age” In the 1950’s a psychoanalyst in a work on the phases of life development identified wisdom as likely to be a by product of aging…or as some put it is: “older and wiser”
I’ve often jested with my co-older friends asking, “When do we get this wisdom?” So having a birthday to remind me I’m getting older I though about the ‘wisdom’ part. To answer my inquiry I suddenly found in the NYTimes Magazine an article on the subject. It was there that I learned about that psychoanalyst treatise on life phases. This article was about the recent attempts by psychologists and psychiatrists to see if aging brought wisdom or as they phrased it, “the older and wiser hypothesis”
They couldn’t answer the question. The first mistake was they never defined what wisdom is. So how could they find out if it existed in older people or not. They took brain scans, ran innumerable test via question of difficulties and how people responded and recorded them. The whole endeavor reminded me of Horgan’s book “The Undiscovered Mind” which reported the years of psychologist and psychiatrists have studied memory, consciousness, free will, and the mind and were still unable to give a material or physical explanation. They did the same here starting with ignoring the end they were seeking, i.e. what is wisdom? Like those things in Horgan’s book they had to acknowledge their existence but couldn’t put them in materialistic terms. One of the definitions of wisdom is knowledge of causes: why things exist or knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action. In other words a “belief” which these scientists continue to ignore yet which seem to guide all of us in any important decision we make.