I always used to enjoy the first of April. I love jokes, pranks, and japes of all kinds. A day when the merry pranksters and smirking jesters rule the roost? Yes, please! For years I would delight my friends and coworkers with my little tricks and spend the whole day in stitches watching corporations fool their customers.
But all that changed after my son Jerome was born. My Jerome is the true April Fool.
Ever since he was born, he's been a near-constant source of devious tricks and strange plots. He knocks on windows instead of doors, scaring the creeps out of our gentle neighbors. He used his mother’s credit card to order a case of soy sauce packets that he chews like gum. He went door-to-door selling stamps and had to be dragged back home by the ear by the chiding mailman. My thickheaded boy has such a reputation that even the USPS knows he’s a fool!
But Jerome, the fool, was back hawking American flag “Forever” stamps the very next day.
It’s ruined this whole holiday for me. I can’t even enjoy pranks anymore. Even the most excellent of corporate jests now leave me cold. Where is the joy I once found in fiendish, smirking tricks? If the devious minds at Zappos.com showed me with a straight face that their website now offered a shoe made of Trump’s hair or some such nonsense? I wouldn’t bat an eye remembering that my bad son Jerome is probably roaming my house at that very moment writing misspelled swear words with alphabet soup again.
I bought him that can opener as a gift to use on Boy Scout trips and he mocks me by spelling swears in soup on our counter! You see what I’m up against? You see how foolish this dopey boy of mine is?
Nothing would give me more joy than to love him fully. My boy, he’s smart, and he can be sweet and kind. He does well in school, is a whiz at computers, and is gentle with animals. But despite his grades, his school tears their hair out over his ninnying nonsense!
He programmed the school computers to send emails to the faculty with filthy limericks about what different teachers had been doing in local businesses. He greased every eraser in the school; They flew from every teacher’s hand and nothing could be erased in the whole school for a day. Pandemonium! He planted flowers on the soccer field and managed to gather such a variety of different bulbs that the groundskeepers had to deal with blooms arriving week after week for the entire spring.
I don’t think he’s malicious. Just an imprudent chowderhead who guzzles bad milk “to see how his stomach will quake,” a jape which makes his mother cry.
So please, out of respect for my formerly favorite holiday, please don’t tell me about the fun pranks that my friends and favorite brands are playing. I wish I could laugh about the new car that features a shower inside of it (Mazda, you devils!) or a taco that is also toothpaste (dios mios, Del Taco!), but tragically my meatball of a son has ruined it all for me.
I am burdened by Jerome, my personal April Fool, who at this very moment is probably cutting up his poor mother’s workout clothes to make twisted flying machines that will zip around and leave stains on our clothes.
What an absolute fool.