A Time to Play Your Music

Inflation threatens and taxes are due, but spring is here

Shakespeare sang of the darling buds of May, Tennyson of a young man's fancy, and Eliot of the mixing of memory and desire. Mary Ann Gaiownik, 32, a waitress at the Pontchartrain Hotel in Detroit, last week offered another description of the season that was sweeping across the nation. "I love it," she said. "You can open the windows of your house, and you can open the windows of your car and play your music as loud as you want. Spring means I don't get depressed and I don't cry."

Spring is, of course, nature's season of liberation, of the Japanese cherry trees bursting into pink blossom along the Tidal Basin and the great Vs of black-headed geese soaring northward toward Canada. But it does not come easily or without risk. Easter brought to Boston a snowfall of 1.3 in., a last dusting on the 85.1 in. that have engulfed the city during the past winter, the worst in 30 years. The day after the seagulls returned to International Falls, Minn., a traditional sign of spring in the coldest town in the lower 48 states, a fierce ice storm hit Chicago. Huge shards fell from the Hancock Center and Sears Tower onto the streets below, and electric lines gave way in downstate Illinois, leaving nearly a million people without power.

Spring is the season of floods too, and in Mott, N. Dak., the Cannonball River was running through the southern end of Main Street last week, and 92 families had to be evacuated. On the Pacific Coast, the hills around San Francisco are green for the first time in three years, but the Pacific Coast Highway was narrowed to two lanes for long stretches because of the mud slides. In Los Angeles, many overflowing drainage systems sent rivulets flowing down apartment corridors.

Apart from the weather, spring is a state of mind, one that expresses itself in rituals of celebration. The beach at Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for example, is once again a jungle of young bodies celebrating each other's youth and strewing the sands with beer cans. At New York's Radio City Music Hall, temporarily rescued from destruction by being designated a city landmark, the legendary Rockettes observed Easter by wearing bunny ears, and crowds lined up for what was announced as the last show in the 45-year-old art deco theater. In New Orleans, this is the week of the jazz festival, the biggest in the country. Both Dixieland and progressive sounds emanate all day and night from the fairgrounds, the French Quarter and from riverboats cruising the Mississippi.

The sun changes the names of the games. The hockey season is melting into the Stanley Cup playoffs, and the news from Florida is that the Kansas City Royals have a hot rookie named Clint Hurdle, and the Red Sox's aging Luis Tiant has an ailing finger. This week politicians will be appearing at a variety of stadiums to fling out the first balls of the season. Down in Texas, meanwhile, the hard-hitting rightfielder of Houston's Wheatley High returned to action last week after a federal court ruled that Linda Williams, 18, could no longer be banned from the team just because she is female.

On playing fields all over the U.S., in fact, the Title IX ban on sexual discrimination in schools has brought regiments of girls into competitions they rarely attempted a few years ago. The basic spring sport this year, though, and one particularly favored by women, is simple running. Hardly a city park or suburban road is without its sweatsuited joggers bounding along in pursuit of fitness. Last week several thousand joined in New York's first annual 10-km race, and at least 5,000 are preparing to run in the Boston Marathon later this month.

Other spring rituals are more grave. It is planting time, and though a group of farmers in Springfield, Colo., ploughed under their winter wheat crop last week in order to protest the low prices they were getting, thousands more turned out to break ground for new crops. A few still drove the family horses across the fields, as their fathers had before them, but the more common sight on the prairie was the giant smoke-puffing multirow plough, its operator in his glassed-in cabin whiling away the time by listening to Dolly Parton on his stereo.

Perhaps the most awesome of all spring rituals is that of Form 1040. What medieval rulers extracted by torture, millions of Americans give up voluntarily. They not only pay federal income taxes averaging $2,020--the equivalent of everything they earn between Jan. 1 and Feb. 20--but they spend hours assembling the necessary forms: W2, Schedule C, Form 1099. They compute their medical bills (more than 3% of adjusted gross income) and their stock dividends (minus $200 for joint returns) and their donations to societies for the preservation of cats. Last week an enterprising reporter in New York took a reasonably typical case history to six different offices that advertised their skill in filling out tax forms.

All six, including two branches of the Internal Revenue Service, filled out the forms incorrectly. The charges for services rendered ranged as high as $75.

After the federal income taxes are paid, the local authorities want their share. James Nelson, a lithographer in Topanga, Calif., paid $600 in property taxes last year and now confronts a bill for $1,778. "The thing that's bugging us," he says simply, "is not having enough money." Many Americans feel the same way every time they go to the supermarket, and their suspicions were confirmed last week by the Department of Labor. Beef prices climbed 4.1% during February, and meat prices generally helped send food prices up 1.2%. The overall cost of living climbed another .6% for the month. Unless something is done, that will work out to an annual inflation rate of 7.4%, the highest since 1975.

Such figures are disturbing. "Economic issues are constantly on people's minds because they get them where it hurts," Atlanta Poll Taker Claibourne Darden observed last week. But others saw such concerns temporarily overcome by a spring sense of wellbeing. Boston Pollster Rob Duboff was asked what issues really worry people these days. His answer: "Nothing much." It is, after all, a time of great prosperity, and the vast majority of Americans are living well and enjoying it highly. There are problems and discontents, of course, but in April they somehow seem soluble. Mike Martin is a bus driver from San Rafael, Calif., and his wife Alice works part time as a bank teller. When asked her ambitions at this season, she said, "I just want to redo everything in the house." In spring, that is a laudable ambition--and one, at least, that probably can be attained by fall.

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