MAYPOLE DANCE POSTPONED

Alas, another May is slipping away, and I haven't followed up with a long-ago maypole dance I once thought to conduct for the little local boys and girls. There were plenty of them around then. They are grown now and, I suspect, regard a maypole dance as too quaint a custom to indulge in.

"What's the purpose of it?" they may ask in these non-whimsical days. Grownups and even partially grownups want something with a more substantial purposeL a fund raiser, perhaps, for a trip somewhere.

I could ask, "What's the purpose of play days and picnics in the park?" But I don't want to be confrontational. They could mow me down without a word, just an upward roll of their eyes, or a quick change of conversation, indicating a let's-be-kind-to-the-past generation.

After my tall pole erecting the purple martin house was installed in a wide-open space, I thought it would be a good and proper place to have the merry month of May festivity. I planned how I would lower the telescoping pole to a level where I could reach to attach long rolls of colorful crepe paper ribbons would have been too expensive. I would hold the rolls in place at the top of the pole by some intricate work with duct tape and wire. Then I'd have to instruct the little ones how they were to stretch the end of their assigned color of paper way out on the lawn and march, skip or dance around the pole, weaving in and out among the other participants so that the circle would get ever smaller and the paper streamers would wind down the pole in an intricate colorful pattern.

I must confess that I had a few doubts whether the children could go round and round without making some mistake in their weaving. Too, the rambunctious little boys might decide the whole thing was boring and skip several of the dancers they were supposed to interweave with in order to get the whole thing over.

I would have promised them hot dogs, ice cream and cookies at the end of the pole wrapping and, if I could hold their short-spanned attention, tell them what I knew about the history of the maypole dances that some historians trace back to the ancient Druids.

"Who are the Druids?" they would want to know, and then become quickly skeptical when I told them that the Druids lived in the forests, sometimes in the trees which they worshipped. Some of the children, especially the boys, would want to go immediately and start building their own tree houses. I'd have to explain that there were no such things as tree houses in Druid times. It would all get as complicated as the woven colorful streamers.

Then, too, May is a busy month for the purple martins. Would such a festivity traumatize them while they were either laying eggs, sitting on them to keep them warm or caring for newly hatched nestlings?

Much time has passed. This project has been consigned to my file of Other Unfinished Business.

So far I have no regrets. I am content to watch the colorful cardinals, blue jays, flickers and less colorful birds fly around the pole with seemingly no pattern at all. They make colorful loops and scallops that erase as they fly. They do reside largely in trees -- are they the modern Druids that require no colorful dancing and weaving construction? I do find bits of colorful strings and fabric strips woven into their nests. Is this some old, old racial habit the birds picked up from the ancient Druids who also lived in trees?

Spring is a time for fanciful thoughts.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.