The Joke’s on Me

It’s April 1. April Fools’ Day.

But I’m not laughing.

When I was a kid, April 1 was the day I looked forward to annually with anticipation and jubilation. It was a day filled with fun pranks – like swapping out the sugar with salt. Or attempting to short-sheet a bed (I never could figure out how to do that!), removing all the toilet paper from the house or putting a fake mouse in Mom’s purse.

Fast forward to April Fools’ Day 2011, and those fun, innocent childhood memories of yesteryear seem like a lifetime ago. And therein lies the prank of the day: I’m realizing that they WERE a lifetime ago.

The pranks of today look a little more like this:

1. It’s 41 degrees outside. I’m sitting in front of a fire with the Cubs opener playing on WGN in the other room. Everything about the preceding sentence seems like an unbelievable wrong trick: The lingering cold, a roaring fire in April, and the beginning of baseball.

2. I still have a Christmas wreath on my front porch. And I hadn’t noticed it until a few days ago.

3. Spring Breaks – for all three kids – have come and gone and none of them involved anything that felt like “spring” or a “break.”

4. My oldest son is less than forty days away from graduating from college.

5. My youngest son is old enough to drive a car.

6. And the clincher joke came yesterday, as I was trying on some new clothes, and the sales clerk told me that one particular shirt made me look “ten years younger.” I didn’t know I had ten years of excess “look” hanging out on my body. (And, FYI, I bought the shirt. In three different colors.)

You get the point. The joke in my life – and not just on this day of foolish pranks – is the mere speed at which it is zooming by.

But I’m determined to not give in. So I’m slipping on my new shirt in hopes of recapturing a bit of the last decade which I seem to have lost. And while I do that, I hope you might enjoy this funny, G-Rated prank I just discovered on You Tube: