A little March madness

A sure sign of spring around our house is when my wife transfers the yellowed Christmas wreath from our front porch to the compost pile out back.

Of course, there's also the emergence of crocuses — followed by trumpets of daffodils, clusters of pear blossoms, random sprinklings of golden dandelions and free form forsythia.

Not to mention the fact that I begin to get one crazy thought after another.

"A little Madness in the Spring / Is wholesome even for the King," wrote Emily Dickinson.

And what could be more mad than thinking of refusing to pay income tax this year. After all, the super rich got a tax break (we wouldn't want to cut into their country club fees, lest they stop playing golf, thus causing cutbacks in the employment of caddies and greenskeepers).

When questioned by the IRS, I could simply invoke the Geithner defense. (You may recall that Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, was confirmed by the Senate despite despite failure to pay $34,000 in taxes. "An honest mistake," he called it.)

It was the spring of 1982 that I came up with the idea of opening a coffeehouse and café (The White Buffalo) in the Stilwell Hotel. Consumed by spring madness, I thought I'd sit and visit, read a little, and discuss literature with my patrons over an espresso or latte while the place just ran itself.

I now know better. But alas, knowledge does not predict behavior, so I've instructed my wife that if I bring up the coffeehouse idea in the future she should hit me in the head with an iron skillet until the thought leaves me.

Smart people do dumb things. Years back I saw a doctor, an oncologist no less, step out the back door of his office to have a quick cigarette between cancer patients.

And a lot of wealthy, smart people, who should have known better, handed over their fortunes to Bernie Madoff.

"Wholly to be a fool while spring is in the world, my blood approves," wrote e.e. cummings. Still, over time, one grows tired of certain kinds of foolishness. I see hanging out in a loud, crowded bar on a Saturday night as akin to medieval torture. Young people relate stories about getting hammered and throwing up in the parking lot and I think, "Whew, I'm sure glad that part of my life's over."

But there's always some fresh foolishness to try.

Being Christian, you're probably already aware, is no guarantee against foolishness. Even in churches, like the one I go to, where the congregation sings from missals and songbooks rather than a PowerPoint projected on a giant screen above the altar, people are prone to spring madness about as much as the atheists who don't attend church at all.

On a warm spring day a man sets out to "love thy neighbor" and, before you know it, he's run off with her in his new convertible to live in the ultramodern house he bought with the cash from his 401K and life insurance. Pure foolishness brought on by spring. (As Mark Twain described it, "It's spring fever.... You don't quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!") Six months later, when the heat and humidity of Kansas summer replaces the balmy spring foolishness, the man comes to his senses and returns, chastened, to sit in the last pew.

To be sure a person has to develop a strategy of some sort to in order to make it through this time of year without doing something completely idiotic. Not just young people, mind you, us baby boomers and senior citizens have to be on our guard as well.

Kansas spring weather being mercurial as it is, watching a lot of the Weather Channel on TV is an option for getting libidinous ups and downs out of your system.

Or, one might fall back on an old adage for guidance. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop," for instance. A person can stay busy outdoors — raking leaves, planting new flowers and shrubs, and getting the mower running. As Margaret Atwood wrote, "In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."

While yardwork isn't a sure thing to keep a person from getting the spring crazies, it should be noted that the treatment at early mental institutions, aka "Asylums for Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason," relied heavily on horticultural therapy to bring people back to their senses.