April 1, 20226
Well, we’ve made it through
March successfully, and here we are on April’s launch day.
Now, please feel free to
correct me if I’m wrong. But it seems to me that it’s been a long time since we,
as a society, acknowledged the existence of “April Fool’s Day”. I’m not sure what
the reason could be for that. But this morning I found it slightly diverting to
venture forth some theories on the subject.
Perhaps we are now a culture
far too sophisticated to take a morning to harmlessly prank and tease our
neighbors, friends, and in some cases, those considered to be the thorns in our
sides.
And hey, not even a full day
was designated for the observances in the first place, at least not in my lived
experience. What was with that? Every other noted day was the day of note for
the whole day. But April Fool’s? It was a very real thing that noon hour was
the point at which all pranking and tomfoolery was to cease and desist—or else!
But I digress.
Maybe we simply short
circuited our propensity for foolishness. My possibly faulty recollection puts
the point at which celebrating the day waned to have been in direct conjunction
with the frenzy of anticipation of the historic date of January 1, 2000.
Folks indulged in such
foolishness, creating a months-long, daily increasing fear of the approach of
the new millennia that the term “Y2K bug”
was coined, and believed real. Do you recall the speculation wreaking event-horizon
level havoc across our newly established technological age? Hell, after that
display of human “sophistication”, there was no foolishness left within us
thereafter to dedicate to even one morning a year.
But that can’t be it, because human
foolishness is a never-ending story, truly knowing no bounds. We couldn’t
simply have just used it all up.
There is one other way of
thinking about things I came up with, and I wanted to share this one last. As
is always helpful, we should briefly consider something else, the
acknowledgement of which also (and maybe not so unconnected) has fallen out of
fashion: considering the history of the situation. Looking at the history of
any situation is always a worthwhile endeavor. Hence the saying: if you don’t
study the past how can you step into the future?
Why was it that April Fool’s
Day became popular thing in the first place? Its existence stretches far back,
not just several decades or centuries, but, some claim, millennia.
How far back? Why, we’re
talking as far back as the adoption of the Gregorian calendar (1582), or before
that, with Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1380s). There are even those who
believe that the day goes all the way back to Ancient Rome and the Festival of
Hilaria—yes, even before the birth of Christ!
If that last theory of the
origin of April Fool’s Day is true, well, what on earth could have happened so
quickly (in the historical sense), so unexpectedly, to have knocked all need
for a single morning dedicated to human beings expressing their inner foolishness,
their complete inanity? Why, for a cherished tradition to just slide right off
the human consciousness like that, there must have been something so traumatic,
so damaging, so unnatural….
Here the author
pauses, shakes her head and takes a moment to look around her. She scans the
news, the daily horoscopes, and even the annals of various social media
platforms. Her eyes widen in a sudden epiphanous moment. Her face undergoes a
transformation of expression sliding right from avid curiosity to abject chagrin.
Never mind. I completely
understand. There’s more than enough foolishness surrounding us at this moment in
time that we will likely, henceforth, file the observance of April Fool’s Day
under the heading of “quaint”. Carry on. Nothing to see here.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
