What to get ‘Baba’ for her 100th birthday? A parade!

Mary Ellen May has had a lot of great birthdays — a lot — but none as great as Saturday’s surprise parade.

May — known to all as “Baba,” the Slavic word for grandma — knew it was her 100th birthday. She was delighted by the lawn balloons, her sparkly sash, and plastic tiara. But she thought she was sitting outside with her two daughters and sons-in-law to pose for pandemic-safe family photographs.

At 1:45 p.m., she heard the sirens and honking. “What’s that?” she asked her daughters, Judy Godick and Sandy Kestner.

Five local fire engines, assorted police and municipal vehicles, and about 35 balloon-festooned cars carrying her five grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, neighbors, and friends drove slowly down Colonial Drive in Wallingford, Delaware County.

“This is all for you, Baba,” said Godick, whose home was the backdrop.

“I can’t believe it,” May said, then started beaming and waving like the Queen for a Day that she was.

She didn’t readily recognize people, but that wasn’t because of age-related forgetfulness.

“Baba, don’t you recognize me?” asked her grandson Christopher Kestner as he walked up to her wheelchair. He pulled down his mask for a moment.

“Christopher!” she exclaimed.

Godick was as thrilled as her mother, who had spent much of the last week in a hospital, being treated for a urinary tract infection, a potentially life-threatening ailment for a centenarian.

“It’s been an emotional, draining week for us,” Godick said.

But that’s how May’s life has been — full of the extraordinary in the ordinary.

“Baba is everyone’s moral compass, ultimate role model and mentor,” her family wrote in a birthday tribute.

May’s parents were of Eastern European descent and came to the United States from Austria in 1903. She grew up on a farm in Centralia, Pa., where her father became a coal miner. (Decades later, the town would be razed because of an infamous mine fire in a coal vein underneath it.)

After both parents died when she was in her early teens, May and her six siblings — she was in the middle — stayed on the farm, grew their food, and basically raised one another during the Great Depression. May says her vegetarian diet, begun of necessity in childhood, is the secret to her longevity. That, and Brandy Alexanders on New Year’s Eve.

“Baba said that as a child, she could never understand why there were food lines in the Depression. She wondered why they didn’t just go to the basement and get some jars of food,” recalled Godick.

The orphan managed to graduate from high school, with honors, and married Bernard May, a miner. After he narrowly survived two mine explosions, they saw the need for a change. The couple moved to the then-booming city of Chester, where they eventually bought a car repair shop with a gas station. “Baba applied her math skills to become the bookkeeper of the family business,” recalled Kestner.

After her husband died at age 90 in 2007, May began alternating months living with Godick in Wallingford and Kestner in Centreville, Del. Centreville is not far from where May’s hero, Joe Biden, lived.

“When my mother went to mail her ballot for President Biden,” Kestner recalled, “she turned around, held it up, and said, ‘This vote is to dump Trump!’ She can still be a firecracker.”

Saturday’s festivities were capped with a commemorative certificate that Jack Gresch, the Nether Providence Township fire marshal, presented to May.

“That’s beautiful,” May told him. “You’re an angel.”