Yet another May Day has come and gone without a knock on my door or ding dong of my doorbell. Each year I awake on May 1st, carb load with Cap’n Crunch, limber up with some light calisthenics, put on my running shoes, and wait…and wait…and wait.

I wait for some poor misguided soul to ring my door bell and dash away leaving a May Basket teaming with left over Easter candy in their wake. This is where it gets interestingly odd for all directly or indirectly involved.

Those directly involved would be the dasher and myself, of course, and those indirectly involved would be the innocent neighbor who picked the wrong time to tend to her azaleas or the unfortunate UPS driver leaving a package that’s mistaken for a May Basket teaming with left over Easter candy by an overzealous idiot in a cashmere track suit hopped up on Cap’n Crunch.

On a side note (I love side notes…they’re generally more interesting than the actual note), I used to wear a cashmere track suit in high school during chilly football practices. It was graciously loaned to me by one of my classmates, who shall remain nameless, as his father may still be wondering what ever happened to his cashmere track suit. Only a quarterback can get away with wearing cashmere. Ahhh…glory days.

Getting ran down, tackled, and smooched should not come as a surprise to anyone on May Day unless this May Day Basket tradition was merely a ruse perpetrated by a sadistic elementary school teacher entertaining themselves at the expense of the ill-mannered students they’ve been stuck with for an entire school year. I’ve chaperoned a few elementary school activities in my day and would not hold any elementary teacher at fault for such a stunt.

They are after all human and elementary students are not. They are fidgety little things with wild imaginations, a surplus of energy, and a steady stream of absurd questions and comments that pass from their brains to their mouths without the benefit of any sort of filter. Many advance into adulthood without ever developing such a filter and wind up being the subject of reality T.V. shows or columnists for their hometown newspaper. So it goes.

At any rate, if it weren’t for the May Day Basket tradition there would be little use for the cardboard tubes from toilet paper rolls, pipe cleaners, and leftover Easter candy. This also explains why many parents find piles of unrolled toilet paper on the bathroom floor on the morning of May 1st…kids aren’t so good at planning ahead. What do you expect from people that rely on “number of sleeps” instead of a calendar to plan future events?

After a long day of adorning my cardboard tube with construction paper and affixing the pipe cleaner handle I remember leaving school with my third grade buddies discussing whose step we were going to leave our baskets on. Before any of us could decide or get up the courage to follow through with the May Basket tradition some cooty infested girls broke the rules and took chase. We zigged and zagged for all we were worth and then, fearing the worst, we wildly flung our May Baskets in an attempt to create a diversion.

The diversion was successful…I guess. The girls got all our candy and we were left empty handed and confused. Some things never change.