Fool

In one week my Dad will be eighty nine years old. On that day, he will be two things- one new and one that he’s always been. The first thing he’ll be is a little bit older- the other is that he will be recognized once again as an April Fool. In truth, if one were to be walking around pointing fingers and calling names, fool would not be one that would come to mind for my Dad. As it was, because of this birthday designation, I had a rather skewed view growing up of what a fool was meant to look like. There were only three houses on the short, side street where I grew up, and in the third house at the end there was yet another person born on the first of April. Her name was Zara Bowles, but the neighborhood kids had another name for her. She was Zara the Witch, although I don’t remember quite how she got that moniker, other than she rarely came out from her house tucked behind a wall of trees and shrubs except to drive by in her car, and as far as any of us could tell, she pretty much never smiled.

    There was not a lot of humor in our house either, if one is counting such things, and attempts at jokes were kind of on the lame side. As I recall, there was an April Fools day ritual that we went through a number of times through the years- I cannot say for sure how often it was repeated. We had a small breakfast nook in the kitchen where most of our meals were consumed. There were windows on the south and west walls of the nook, which itself was barely big enough to contain the table and chairs my Mother selected for that space. My Dad sat at the west end at the head of the table. To his left was a cabinet with a black and white TV on top that spewed nightly news during dinner. I also saw Walter Cronkite shed a tear for the fallen JFK on there, and a few days later saw Lee Harvey Oswald catch a bullet to the gut from Jack Ruby. But none of that is very funny. Our family April Fools joke ritual happened to my Dad’s right where there was a small table which had a two-slotted toaster on top. As my Mother was into having things the way they were supposed to be, the toaster had a cozy over top of it that matched the curtains in the nook.  Patience please, the joke is coming. For a number of years, before my Dad sat down for his breakfast, one of us would “sneak” in and remove the toaster from beneath it’s protective décor and replace it with some other object- a cardboard box or a grouping of water glasses that would help to make the cozy somewhat conform to the shape of a facsimile of the toaster. Then we would wait for just “the right time” to ask Dad to make some toast.

    While you all are struggling to regain your composure, I will state fairly clearly that humor was not a regularly consumed staple in our family. I was often admonished “don’t be so funny” or “don’t be so smart”, which didn’t always work so well with me. My parents never understood why I came home with Bill Cosby comedy albums- in looking back there may have been more than one reason for that. And when I came home from college to find that cable television had arrived, and that instead of audio clips from their various vinyl LP’s, I could now watch actual television shows in their entirety from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It was somewhere around that point that my parents really thought I had lost my mind. That became, of course, not quite such a worry after my Mother learned that the first violinist from the Rochester Philharmonic was a bigger fan of the Python Troupe than I was.

I do not find humor in many things these days, probably because there are so many things all around that are so profoundly not funny. One of the things I was remembering recently over on the funny side was a similar bit of April Fools anticipation that I felt on the Island when Jay Becker’s Beachcomber would come out with their annual Island nonsense. What was best about these stories of ridiculousness that masqueraded as truth in the pages of Island news was not so much how funny they were, but rather how people reacted to them while forgetting the spirit of the day that spawned them. I can think of one story in particular that reported in no uncertain terms that a group of long haul eighteen wheelers had decided that Vashon would be a great place to have a road rally, in their trucks. There were flarings all around of incredulity and disgust that anyone would even think of doing something like that out here- I do not remember if any petitions had been drawn up by the time most were reminded of the date of that particular paper’s publication. I just recently found out that a story I had been hearing for years about how there had been plans around the time of the birth and death of the Supersonic Transport jet that Vashon had been considered as a location for a landing field long enough to accommodate the SST’s takeoff and landing requirements. As it turned out that story came from Mr. Becker’s predecessor, Nelson Phillips.

    There was also the year that the very authentic looking “Burger King, Coming Soon” sign appeared on the vacant corner across from K2 and the ensuing teapot tempest that brewed and dissipated. One can only imagine what might appear on the K2 side of the street this year. I am not going to be the one who takes it any further than a suggestion, though. Judging from the 400 or so entries the last time I looked before disconnecting from the Facebooks Vashon All thread in that regard, it seems that humor is the last thing on anyone’s mind. As for my april fool Dad, I will probably make him a card without a joke or a pun. It will probably be a picture of some Spring scene around here- he was always fond of seeing Rainier when he visited. He’s made it this far, I don’t want to rock his boat too much. And I’d rather save boat rocking for where it’s needed.