April's Fool

April 1, 2008 Why has nobody written a song called "April's Fool?" (Of course, maybe someone has and I just don't know it.) It could be a sappy ballad sung by a lovesick guy who "tries to play it cool," but knows that he's "just April's fool."

When I was a kid, my father had Puffed Rice cereal for breakfast nearly every morning, always with a couple of spoonfuls of sugar. One April Fool's Day my sister and I filled the sugar bowl with salt and then watched, bursting with anticipation, as Dad prepared his breakfast, pouring out the cereal, adding the milk and then topping it off with the "sugar." We howled with glee when he took a big bite of salted cereal and made a horrible kabuki face and spit out the cereal. He laughed so much and got so involved with telling our mom about the great prank the kids had pulled off that he absent-mindedly repeated the whole procedure, salt-sugaring a second bowl. We laughed even harder. The incident became an oft-told day-the-pig-fell-in-the-well story, and I only recently, these decades later, stopped to consider that his gaffe with the second bowl -- and maybe even the first -- might well have been staged for our benefit.

Ah, to be April's fool.


TODAY'S SCORECARD
AM - 8:23 too crowded; 8:40, window seat

TODAY'S TRAIN SONG
"In the Pines" by the Louvin Brothers
("The longest train I ever saw went down that Georgia line/The engine passed at six o'clock and the cab went by at nine .... The longest train I ever saw was nineteen coaches long/The only girl I ever loved is on that train and gone."

TODAY'S TRACKSIDE SIGNAGE
KEEPING
JERSEY
STRONG

WORDS TO LIVE BY
"The worst meal I ever had was wonderful."
--Robert B. Parker's detective Spenser, in Promised Land