Writers circle prompt: May

Mayday—

1)    Said three times, a distress signal.

2)    Pagans raise maypoles and weave their way around them for fertility and spring.

3)    Workers unite, celebration of working people.

4)    And last year, my mother’s death.

I’ll never be able to separate them now

I remember Mom telling me she was a red-diaper baby, carried by her mom and dad in May Day parades.  That marchers were beaten in NYC streets—something she was always worried would happen to me as I protested the war in Vietnam. She told me stories my grandmother never told me of grandpa unionizing a cloth factory and publishing a newspaper in the 1930s.  She said that the move to upstate NY came in the 1940s because of her family’s safety in the MacCarthy era.  How nothing changes--government hearings occur and recur and blur the faces of corporate bosses and law enforcement.  Paperwork haunts the innocent in the end, she said.  So, take no pictures and give no names if we go to NYC or DC in the front lines of anti-war protests: Soldiers are workers, too, coerced to kill workers abroad while the need for war on poverty grows.  Mom didn’t move upstate with her folks, but stayed in the NYC for her work with GE, manufacturing radios.  It was there that she met my father, at union meetings.  They married on the 21^st of February 1947, and moved upstate to live in Mom’s parents’ house where Mom became a housewife and mother. 

May Day was about workers, about uniting them at first and second about celebrating them.  Not work in the home like many women and children did, but workers earning a living through their valuable labor, workers that needed unions to fight for better working conditions.  Women’s issues and conditions in the home were not to be my issues until college when I discovered feminism.    

At this point, I did a google and wiki search for GE manufacturing of radios in the 1940s but couldn’t find any NYC locations.  Mom had told a story about a fire starting in her work station there—a fire quickly put out—because it threatened her notes on Union organizing that she kept on a shelf there.  I found nothing.  My story changed to me learning about work outside the home.

I remember myself as a bespectacled 12-year-old Girl Scout learning about work.  I attended a summer girl scout camp in the woods behind Jonas Studios—the location where sculptor and artist Jonas made life-sized moving dinosaurs for the 1964 World’s Fair.  A skinny-legged girl, I crowded around the mold-makers of fiberglass giants, asking questions and lingering to see the sweat behind graceful sculptures in the days when work was plentiful and beauty, too.  

Then, I skipped down the path eagerly to flag raising and our girl scout roster of chores.  Together two of us grabbed the bucket with too-sweet smelling pink goop to swab outhouse seats and come back again with the box of lime, and work done, scrubbed skin off fingers and arms to put on bathing suits and jump into the cool buggy lake happy to earn the reward: hotdogs and corn on the cob and songs, games and crafts: little red glass bead necklaces, yellow macaroni name tags, and pasty fingers.  Over and over, we washed hands as the day ended and skipped up the path, to linger with the dinosaur parts, climb aboard the bus home to meet "What did you do today?" I answered with few displays and many descriptions of outhouse chores and clay molds for moving dinosaurs.

 

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

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