April Fools 2020?

Maybe we’re all the fool.

There will be fewer April Fools’ pranks this year.

They were fun when I was in grade school. After that, I usually forgot this mock-holiday and judged it as a juvenile. Maybe I’m a Bah Humbug.

This April 1st is very ill-timed. The light-hearted holiday has little meaning on its own anyway. April Fools’ Day has vague origins in Western Europe reaching back to the Middle Ages. In the last couple of centuries, it was practiced in France known as “poisson d’avril” (April Fish) — a prank played on the unsuspecting by attaching a paper fish to their backs on April 1st. Knowing my French Grandmother’s (born in 1901) sense of humor, she would have thought this practice humorous. After all, with the lack of daily showers back then, smelling like fish was a real possibility.

People used to laugh at much simpler things. Or maybe they just found laughing one of the few simple joys they could indulge in in a world without technological distraction and where surviving an assortment of childhood diseases was a gift in and of itself worth celebrating every day.

My mother used to casually use the saying, “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die.” She’d quote it when we were about to sneak a second helping of ice cream or she’d put that extra tablespoon of rum into the Sunday morning crepe batter.

Though this saying has no exact origin except a combination of a few bible verses (Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, Corinthians, Luke), to me it always meant we should enjoy life now, to the fullest because we cannot tell the future.

I’ve had my own brushes with catastrophic physical injury to reinforce this attitude. I survived not one, but yes wait for it…. TWO serious encounters with large trucks six years apart while walking legally in the crosswalk, mid-morning in New York City. Luckily, I have developed a sense of humor about it. “I’m great! Still walk’in and talk’in,” I say. All the years of PT and rehab have given me perspective.

Had April 1st taken place a few weeks ago, in the midst of our blissful ignorance and denial before the reality tsunami of pandemic hit it might have occurred to me to joke with my husband — “I have a corona kiss for you sexy.” Now I feel gut wrenched having written this last line.

Maybe this year, April 1st is really a celebration of ourselves. How foolish and flawed we are. How easily complacent and self-absorbed. How easily we fall in and out of love. How much we need our neighbors and yet often disparage them. And, how we all are that wonderful, April Fool.