Another April Fool’s Day has come and gone. Did you get caught? Did you catch someone? In the past I have stated in this column that I am anti-practical joke because I find them neither practical nor funny…usually. Laughing at the expense of someone else’s embarrassment strikes me as “cheap humour” but there is always an exception to every rule and April Fool’s Day usually provides that exception.
Case in point…a couple of years ago my youngest sister’s first-born son had just begun a relationship with a girl while he was in his second year of post-secondary education. The struggling student was, as many do, juggling his and his parent’s finances around considerably to get through school. His mother didn’t object too strenuously about his new girlfriend but warned him that he had better “stick to the books” and “get your education” because there was a long, long life ahead of him to “sew his wild oats”, or some such words of wisdom.
Can you imagine her dismay, displeasure, disappointment and shock when, on one particular early April morning, while everyone was rushing to get out of the house to work and school, he announced that he was getting married and he showed his mother a picture of the huge $4,000.00 diamond ring that he had just purchased on lay away from a prominent jewelry store downtown for his new-found girlfriend?
“Do you think she’ll like it?” he asked.”
I’m afraid I cannot relay her reply in this g-rated newspaper but suffice to say there was some “colourful” language involved as she challenged both his memory and his intelligence while raising her blood pressure to dangerous levels, turning her face to shades of red very rarely seen as her window-rattling screaming alerted nearby neighbours that she was more than a little displeased with something going on in her house. It was an A+ conniption fit if there ever was one.
His laughter enraged her all the more, so between his giggles and her yelling it took a few moments before he could get her calmed down enough to look at the calendar while he finally blurted out “APRIL FOOLS!”
They were THIS close to riding an ambulance together to the hospital. She from a heart attack and he from a Mother attack! See what I mean about “practical” and “funny”? It’s a subjective subject if you ask me and it all depends on whether you are the joke-ER or the joke-EE.
My sister eventually got over the shock of it all but she swore she’d never get back the year of her life that her son took away from her that April 1st morning!
“The first of April, some do say
Is set apart for All Fool's Day;
But why the people call it so
Nor I, nor they themselves, do know,
But on this day are people sent
On purpose for pure merriment.”
-Poor Robin’s Almanac 1790.
