april fool's foolery

My family has never been big April Foolers. The extent of most April Fool’s jokes around the house came from my mother telling us, while we sat groggily around the breakfast table before school, that we had a hole in our shirt or a smudge on our face.

And April Fool’s Day would remain rather timid fare until the year that my dad decided he would try his hand at it. This was the morning that he told my brother, who was about five at the time, that he had a bug in his ear. I’m still not sure whether he felt that having a ‘bug in one’s ear’ was equivalent to a ‘hole in the shirt’, or if he was just trying to distinguish himself from my mom’s usual ‘hole in shirt / smudge on face’ joke and that this was the best he could do on short notice.

Now, my brother has always been a major bug-a-phobe. This is the same brother that would absolutely refuse to let anyone in the house kill a spider and then proceed to flush it down the toilet for fear that the spider would somehow come back to life and crawl out of its watery grave while my brother sat perched atop the pot. And, as if to ensure that no zombie spider would ever find its way up my brother’s unsuspecting rear end, he would scrutinize each spider squashing to make sure that it was dead, then strictly enforce a ‘garbage can only’ rule, following the squasher to the trash to witness the placement of the spider along side the old coffee grounds and crumbled up junk mail.

My brother has always felt that while bugs have a place in world, this place should remain far away from him. And upon hearing that one of these bugs had not only invaded his space, but had taken up occupancy in his ear, he ran screaming from the room.

My father ran after him, desperately trying to convince him that this was just an April Fool’s joke, and after ten minutes of consoling, the whimpers, heaving, and tears subsided and my brother was once again able to go about his morning and prepare for the rigors of kindergarten.

Needless to say, this was the first and last time my dad ever tried his hand at April Fool foolery, though the ‘bug in the ear’ April Fool’s joke has remained a staple at our house from that day forward.

My brother still doesn’t find it amusing.