On a Lighter Note... Oh What an April Fool I Am

[Thank you for all of your comments and kind words about my last blog post.  I appreciate all of the support I have received.  But now it’s time for a chuckle instead of a cry.]

This morning at 6:43AM I awoke to my husband shouting, “Get up!  Broken glass!”  Thinking that someone was breaking into our home, I opened my eyes and began searching my mind for a weapon / defense mechanism / plan and (sadly) came up with nothing.  It’s nice to know that in my state of sleepy panic, I could not think of the baseball bats in the corner, the ferocious hound snoring in his crate, or even the cell phone on my night stand.  Nope, I drew a blank.  It didn’t matter much anyway because my husband was already opening our bedroom door and confidently striding out toward whatever horror lay beyond without hesitation so, with some vague notions of We are a team, we must stick together, I followed him.

Don’t worry.  The only terrorists in our house were the ones who live here.  Our cats had knocked a basket containing random crap off our kitchen counter onto the floor, sending screwdrivers, old cameras, jar lids, binoculars, and cell phone chargers scattering across the hardwoods.  (See?  Random crap.  Why, what do you keep on YOUR kitchen counter?)

Hubby sighed and said, “Whew.  It was just this.  I thought they had broken a glass and maybe someone got cut.”   He started cleaning up the mess until he noticed that I was in a teary ball on the floor, trying to grasp the concept that I would, in fact, live to see another day.

This led to an early-morning conversation between hubby and me in which I stressed that he should probably insert the word “cat” or maybe even “minor non-life-threatening incident” into his next wake-up call, and he pointed out that, A) he can’t believe that I slept through the sound of a crash ten feet from the bed, and B) if someone does ever break into our home perhaps I should call the cops instead of collapsing into a ball on the floor.

Me:  “Whatever.  You scared me.”

Him:  “Pretty good practical joke, huh?”

Me:  “Do you even know what today is?”

And then we both laughed, because of course, today is April 1^st, the day of foolers and fools, and my husband got me without even meaning to.

The reason why that annoys me so much is because in my family, April Fool’s Day is not taken lightly.  It is planned for, developed, schemed, and executed.  If you have to take a day off work, so be it.  If you have to hide in your car between the hours of midnight and 3AM to make it work, that’s what you’ll do.  It’s serious business.

Last year on this day, my dad (the original prankster) and my brother (perhaps the most dedicated) spent their time double, triple, and quadruple crossing each other up in Dallas, while I (4 hours away in Austin) convinced myself that I was their target and spent the day trying to discern truth from lies on the telephone and flinching every time I opened a closet door.  I basically, after a lifetime of having to be on my guard, pranked myself.

But my husband comes from one of those strange families who don’t scare each other or lie to each other or try to make each other look like idiots.  (I feel sorry for him sometimes, thinking about what a sad childhood he must have had. ) So he doesn’t get into these holidays, never thinks to pull a prank or plan a trick.

 

And that’s why it irks me that he scared me so bad this morning.

That’s ok though.  The joke’s on him.  Because when he finally wakes up and tries to get dressed, he’s going to realize that he can’t find any underwear.  Nope, the only ones left in the house are the comically small Spiderman undies that I once bought him as a gag.  Guess he’ll have to be my superhero today if he ever wants to see his boxer-briefs again.

“We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.”  

~Japanese Proverb