May Day

When I was a kid in Wisconsin, we used to get little baskets of candy on May 1st - May Day.  I once asked what May Day was about.  One of my cousins quipped that it was pay day (the first of the month), but my uncle Roland grumbled something about communists.  I didn't know what communists were but I gathered from my uncle's response that they were bad people.

Now that I'm an adult I understand that the badness of people adhering to communist ideology is not so clear cut.  Many well-intentioned but foolish or gullible people have believed in communism.  However, the wickedness of communist ideology itself is beyond doubt.  Any creed that views man as merely a physical creature, without a spiritual dimension, who is shaped and driven solely by materialistic forces is a lie.  It can ultimately only bring much misery.  Communism is an inhuman, anti-Christian philosophy and its consequences have been catastrophic.

But what is May Day and what does it have to do with communism? 

May Day actually has pagan roots.  May 1st was celebrated as the first day of summer in pre-Christian Europe.  Such activities as bonfires, dancing, Maypole decorating and the election of May Queens took place.



Maypole dancing

 

As Christianity spread through Europe, many pagan customs were 'baptized,' so to speak; they were Christianized and came to express some aspect of Christian belief.  Christmas, with many of its attendant customs, is a prime example of this.  In Roman Catholic tradition, May is observed as Mary's month and so May 1st is a celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The custom of electing a May Queen who is adorned with flowers has become the custom of adorning statues of Mary with flowers.

The socialist / communist connection comes at the end of the 19th century.  On May 4th, 1886 in Chicago, a rally in support of workers striking for an 8-hour workday turned violent.  Somebody threw dynamite at the police, who responded by shooting into the crowd, killing dozens.  This became known as the Haymarket Square Massacre.  An international meeting of socialists in Paris in 1889 called for international protests on the anniversary of the massacre in 1890.  Eventually, May 1st was adopted as International Workers' Day, or Labor Day as it's typically known around the world. 

President Grover Cleveland didn't want the United States to celebrate Labor Day on May 1st as he was afraid it would become a perennial occasion to commemorate (probably violently) the Haymarket Massacre.  That is partly why America celebrates Labor Day the first Monday in September.

May 1st has traditionally been commemorated with military parades in communist countries like the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and North Korea.  It's a national holiday in many other countries and is often marked by demonstrations or riots where property is attacked and burned. 

It's a national holiday in Poland and with another national holiday on May 3rd, Constitution Day, it makes for a nice long weekend.

The Catholic Church in her wisdom has also attempted to Christianize Labor Day.  In 1955 this day was dedicated to Saint Joseph the Worker.  Saint Joseph was a carpenter and is the patron saint of workers and craftsmen.

George the Dragon Slayer

I don't know how it started, but I've been an Anglophile since about grade school.  It may have been something I read or heard about England at school or saw on TV.

When I served in the U.S. Air Force, I was fortunate to be stationed two and a half years in England, not far from Cambridge, from 1991 to 1994.  I made some English friends there and went back for 2 weeks to visit in the summer of 1996. 

I spent time in various corners of England, meeting a lot of different people, from London in the south to Chester and York in the north.  English people who live in or near London tend to be a little cold.  (The English who live in other parts of England feel the same way about those southerners.)  And, the English who live near the American air bases aren't all too friendly with the American airmen.  But the farther one gets from London - and American military installations - the warmer and friendlier the people are. 

I experienced this when I rented a car and drove to visit an English friend in Birmingham, in what's called the West Midlands.  (By the way, driving on the other side of the road is not hard once you get the hang of it.)  I got lost in Birmingham and stopped to ask some workmen for directions.  They recognized my American accent immediately and began asking me questions about where in America I was from, how did I like England, etc.  After the unfriendliness I typically experienced in the south, the kindliness of those men was kind of a shock.  But, it was a nice shock.

Winter in England is long, dark and rainy, but spring and summer can be glorious.  When I think of summer in England I think of sunny days with fluffy white clouds casting moving shadows across vast fields of yellow rape flowers.

But I remember more of England than just those few years.  I remember the 14th century England of Geoffrey Chaucer, thanks to his great collection of stories called Canterbury Tales.  From Chaucer we know that the climate in southern England was warm enough in his time that grape wine was produced.  He doesn't mention any hysteria about climate change. 

I also remember the England of William Shakespeare (16th century), of William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens (19th century), and of George Orwell and Winston Churchill (20th century).  Thanks to the wonderful and prolific literary output of English writers down through the centuries, I and many readers can know that nation in her many ages.

April 23rd is the feast day of Saint George, who is the patron saint of England.  George was a Greek who lived in the 3rd century and never set foot in England.  Magnificat magazine sums up Saint George's connection with English history nicely: 

Saint George was martyred at Lydda (Israel) around 303, in the persecution of Diocletian.  His cult, as a soldier who died for the faith, predates the legend of his slaying the dragon, and spread quickly through both East and West.  During the crusades, George was seen to personify the ideals of Christian chivalry, and he was adopted as patron saint of several city-states and countries including England.  King Richard I placed his crusading army under his protection, and in 1222 his feast was proclaimed a holiday.

The Book of Revelation in the Bible describes Satan as a dragon.  Considering the spiritual warfare that Christians are engaged in with the Enemy (which we ultimately win because of Jesus Christ's death and resurrection), all Christians are dragon slayers.

April 23rd is also the anniversary of William Shakespeare's death (1616).  I took a senior-level seminar on Shakespeare at college and it was a great experience.  We read and analyzed 6 of his plays.  I read each of the assigned plays twice because I got so much more out of the second reading.  Also, it being a high level seminar, we students were expected to come prepared to contribute to the general discussion.  After analyzing each of the plays, we watched a film version of that particular play.  It was an intellectually challenging course for me.  Our professor, Dr. Sandra Patterson-Randles, was Chair of the English Department at my college and she demanded a lot from us. I worked harder in her courses than in any others.

There is so much more I could write about my time in England and my love for her history and literature.  England is a relatively small nation of around 53 million people.  However, England's people and history have made a disproportionate impact on the world's imagination.

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Death Be Not Proud

by John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.



Reading, Writing and Arithmetic

My daughter Emilia is in the first grade this year and has been learning to read.  She was frustrated in the beginning but the more she learned and the more confidence she got in reading, the faster her progress became. 

I can't say for certain what got her over 'the hump' of her early frustrations, what it was that kept her going.  However, I'd like to think that my wife and my reading regularly to our children from an early age contributed.  Both our children love being read to and Emilia especially has always been good at remembering the stories we read to them.  She seemed fascinated by the fact that Mommy and Daddy could decipher those black marks on the page into interesting stories.

It's a joy to listen to and watch (yes, watch) Emilia read.  She runs her finger along the letters of new words and sounds them out and then moves on to the next word.  She's become pretty quick at this too.  It's also a joy to see how learning to read has opened up the world to her.  Over and over again I've witnessed her satisfaction when she's read and understood words on signs, food packaging, book covers, in store displays, etc.  There's a small library in the grade school here and Emilia is a regular visitor.   Last week she came home with about 12 books, which I think is the maximum the students are allowed.  And, she reads them - to herself, to her brother Adam, even to her teddy bear.

DOG

Much has been written about human language, specifically the phenomenon of a person uttering verbal sounds or writing symbols that a listener or reader understands as referring to particular things in the real world.  Let's take the word dog for instance.  How is it that the sound of the spoken word dog and the squiggly marks that form the shapes of the letters D, O and G signify a four-legged furry animal with a tail that wags and a tongue that hangs out in hot weather?  And then there's the same question about those words four, leg, fur, animal, tail, wag, tongue, etc.  And that's English.  The creature we call dog in English goes by pies (Polish), chien (French), hund (German), perro (Spanish) and hundreds of other designations around the world.

Of course animals communicate in various ways: dogs, bees, apes and whales immediately come to mind.  But I think only the seriously unreflective person would fail to recognize that human language is unique.  Nothing in the animal world comes close to the complexity and beauty of human language.

Human language is a clue to our divine origins.  The book of Genesis explains that "In the beginning . . . God said . . ."  God spoke the universe into being.  Saint John's Gospel begins with a brief recapitulation of Genesis in the light of the Incarnation of Christ: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be."

For a better explanation of how human language shows that we were created in the image of God, I recommend the book The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other by Walker Percy.  Percy was an American novelist from Louisiana.  Any good American library will either have The Message in the Bottle on hand or available through inter-library loan.  Percy's novels are worth reading too.

Adam naming the animals

(notice the divide between him and the animals)

Writing

I once had dreams of being a professional writer.  Because I was an avid reader, I had a better than average vocabulary at school and my teachers told me I wrote well.  That fed my vanity and eventually led to the ridiculous dream of writing for a living.  It wasn't meant to be, of course, but the itch to write remains. 

It's not bragging to say I am a fairly decent poet.  A handful of my poems have been published.  Someone once gave the good advice that a writer, after finishing some piece of writing, should hide it away for at least 6 months and then look at it again.  Then the truth will show.  If the piece of writing is good, the writer will know it.  If it's bad, that too will be obvious.  I'm gratified to say that a couple dozen poems I wrote many years ago are still a pleasure for me to read.

These days the writing that pleases me most is what I write for and with my kids.  I've written a poem for each of my children's birthdays, including the day they were born.  In recent years the birthday poems I've written are little stories set to rhyming verse which I then illustrated.  Emilia and Adam like them very much and from time to time they ask me to re-read them.  Emilia and I have even collaborated on a couple of silly little stories.  She suggests ideas for the story, which I write, while she does most of the illustrating.  Then we put it all together into a little book.  The kids insist on keeping these little booklets with their other books on their bookshelf. 

Arithmetic

Margaret Thatcher used to remark that she learned the essentials of economics by keeping the books for her father's grocery store in Grantham, England.  If only the current occupant of the White House and many current and former members of Congress had a similar background!  Mrs. Thatcher was one of those rare politicians that combined strong character and will, clear thinking and speaking, and a correct economic philosophy.  I was blessed to grow up at a time when Ronald Reagan was the US President, Margaret Thatcher was the British Prime Minister and Karol Wojtyła was the pope (John Paul II).  God gave the world far more than it deserved by raising those 3 individuals to positions of political and moral leadership at a time when the world seriously needed them.  Since then, only the Catholic Church has kept up her end with firm moral leadership under popes Benedict XVI and now Francis.

God bless you, Lady Thatcher.  Rest in peace with our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Play Ball!

Pirates pitcher Bill "Bugs" Werle got Bill Nicholson to hit a high infield popup in front of the mound. As trained, he called for an infielder to make the play. "Eddie's got it! Eddie's got it!," he yelled.

Then, he watched the ball fall untouched as catcher Eddie Fitzgerald, first baseman Eddie Stevens and third baseman Eddie Bockman looked on.

It's that time of year again.  The baseball season has just started.  One of the most beautiful sounds to a baseball fan is the sharp crack made when a wooden bat squarely hits a baseball.

I played Little League and Babe Ruth League baseball as a kid, as well as softball as an adult.  The only 'home run' I ever hit was the little league variety.  As I recall it started with a slow infield grounder.  The third baseman threw the ball past the first baseman into right field.  After the right fielder chased down and retrieved the errant ball, he heaved it back to the infield where it eluded a couple of infielders and bounced into foul territory on the third base side.  I of course was running like blazes around the bases and crossed home plate with my 'home run.' 

I've attended a handful of major and minor league games, plus an old-timers' game, in my life.  Of all the home runs I witnessed, three stand out in my memory. 

The first happened at the very first big league game I attended at Milwaukee County Stadium in August 1982.  Brewers slugger "Storm'n" Gorman Thomas hit one in a losing effort. 

Another was at a game in Milwaukee in May 1994 when Seattle Mariners star Ken Griffey Jr hit one.  He hit 630 home runs in a 22-year career marred by injuries.  Without losing time to injuries, he might have passed Hank Aaron's career home run mark of 755.

The third home run I remember actually happened between the other two.  It was a major league old-timers' game at the old Mile High Stadium in Denver on June 15th 1991 (I still have the ticket stub).  43-year-old Dave Concepción, who had retired from baseball 3 years previously and wasn't regarded as a power hitter (101 total home runs in 19 seasons), hit one that night.  The ball landed in the left field bleachers just a few rows down from where I was sitting.  I was serving in the Air Force at the time at Lowry Air Base, Denver.  The organisers of the old-timers' game had given away some free tickets to members of the military and that's how I ended up being at the game.

Gorman Thomas

 

American essayist Gerald Early has been quoted as saying, "There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: The Constitution, Jazz music, and Baseball. These are the 3 most beautiful things this culture's ever created.”

 

I think I'd have to agree.  I mean, there are many other great and beautiful things American culture has created - but these 3 are the really big ones.  As an American expatriate living in Poland, I've come to appreciate these things even more. 

 

Also, these 3 three things have made their mark on the wider world, including here in Poland.  The obvious one is jazz, which is popular worldwide.  There are some fine Polish jazz musicians - Thomasz Stańko and Michał Urbaniak come immediately to mind.  The US Constitution was a major influence on the short-lived Polish Constitution of 1791.  That constitution was a much needed reform of the Polish political system.  Unfortunately it came too late as tragically weakend Poland was soon swallowed up by her powerful neighbors. 

 

And baseball?  Amateur baseball teams have existed here since the 1960s.  On a visit to Poland on July 4, 1989, President George H. W. Bush met with some young Polish baseball players in Warsaw.  About 10 years ago I attended a couple of amateur league baseball games in the Katowice area.  I remember watching one game that ended when the pitcher picked off the runner at second base!  I've watched and listened to thousands of major league games and have never witnessed one of them ending that way.

 

 

And finally, this.  Baseball fans can be a long-suffering and patient lot.  The game can thrill you but it can also make you want to pull your hair out.  This is especially true if you're a loyal fan of a particular team.  My late uncle Wilfred was a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan.  This is a team that last appeared in the World Series in 1945 (remember that year?) and last actually won it in 1908.  The team has become synonymous with futility.  They lost 101 games last season. 

 

I've heard tons of Cubs jokes over the years.  Here's one example:

 

Well, at least the Chicago Cubs are trying. They installed a new pitching machine the other day. Unfortunately it beat them 4-1.