May Basket
--by Ben Henneke

Not to remember is shameful.

I'm not talking about an inability to remember names and such like trivia; that's understandable. But not to remember occasions when a heart leaps up as Wordsworth said his did when he beheld a rainbow in the sky: that's shameful. Not to remember the wonders of life: that's shameful.

Names are put upon us by others. They seldom have any thing to do with us. I can remember where you sat in my class, the girl you started sitting beside, your successes with the choir trip, all-important parts of you. It's just your name I cannot call to mind.

Not to remember the joys of a lifetime - that is shameful.

All this I thought because the first of this month someone left a May Basket at our door. I was grumpily busy holding the wooden door ajar with my elbow, so that I could manage what once was a screen door, but now is a glass- paned metal protector, all that to get to the outside where the newspaper lay, when I became aware of a new encumbrance, a folding, paper drinking cup filled with yellow rose heads: -- a May Basket!

I felt a hot rush of tears.

May could have escaped me as unnoticed as April; Spring could become as unremarkable as Easter-ending Lent had been. Regeneration of the body, exaltation of the spirit, could have been lost in grey-shaded vaporings of age. What a shame!

I cannot remember my first May Basket, but I can still feel in my cheeks the nascent smile of delight when I saw something hanging from the doorknob. and knew it to be a May Basket. I can no longer call up the first rejuvenating Easter, but I swell with joy at the memory of the first telephone call I made that was answered - not with the usual “hello”, but with a triumphant cry, “He is Risen!”

This our latest May Basket, who sent it?

We do not know. That's how it should be with May Baskets. Who thought enough of Ellen and/or me to rise early, to clip the rose buds, fill the cup, tie it with ribbons, and then steal out in the still dark morning to hang it from a doorknob or door handle?

A May Basket. The first blush of the Merry Month of May, and I have been allowed to recognize it. How shameful to have forgotten. In the past, I've been lucky to have celebrated Easter with the Eastern believers in Athens and the Western church faithful in Rome in the same year, and in Canterbury another year, and. . . and. . .

The wonders of spring I've known so long I have - as I should not --taken them for granted: bluets, and croci, pinks and yellow bells, azaleas and redbuds. Several times I've been blessed with more than one spring. Dogwood rushing down a hill in Oklahoma followed weeks later by a miracle of violets and/or lilacs in Maine.

Not to savor those moments each time as if it were the first time, not to remember --

Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa.