April Fools

This was on my daily sarcastic desk calendar at work today.
I thought it was rather fitting.

Dear Baby,

You didn’t think I was going to miss a holiday did you? I know you didn’t think I was generalizing when I said I celebrate them all, because by the time you read this I suspect you will know me quite well, and you know that I certainly can’t skip a holiday like April Fools’ Day.

Oddly enough, April Fools’ Day holds a special place in my heart. When I was a little girl your Grandpa Steve used to regale me with stories about his great grandparents (i.e. your great great grandparents), Hazel and Raymond Leavitt. His stories were so vivid and filled with nostalgia that I almost feel like I knew them even though they passed away before I lived a day of my life. He clearly loved them and they played an important role in his childhood, and I remember the stories as if they were my own.

Well now baby, I have one for you. You will never meet your Great Grandfather Bill Morris, and to that I feel very sad because I know that he would have loved you so much. I spent a lot of time with him growing up, and one of my (and Uncle Ben’s) favorite pastimes was to play April Fools’ Day pranks on him. Great Grandpa Bill was a prankster himself. He never hesitated to fool us when we were least expecting it, and it was a perpetual war between us. Usually, as the younger and more clever of the competition, we got the best of him. He’d get so mad at us, and we’d laugh hysterically (much more so than when we were the prank-er rather than the prank-ee), and the war would wage on.

I will certainly recount many of these pranks to you as you grow, but that is not what my story today is about. In the Great Fools’ War of the early 1990’s, your Uncle Ben and I surely won some battles, and Great Grandpa Bill won some too. But ultimately, it was he who won the war.

All my life, all of Grandma Tracy’s life—and God knows for how long and how many people—all thought Grandpa Bill’s birthday was on March 31^st. That is what he told us, and what reason did anyone have to question what the man said? We celebrated it on March 31^st, we had cake, we sang happy birthday—to my knowledge, there wasn’t a single person in the entire town of Turner that was the wiser.

On May 18, 2011, he passed away. It was not unexpected, but any time that you lose someone you love it is painful and sad, and I certainly felt a pang in my heart to have him out of my life. But before he died, he wrote his obituary (apparently this is a thing that people do, and I was not aware of until Great Grandpa Bill’s death), and when I opened the website link to the Lewiston Sun Journal to read it, there it was for the world to see:

“He was born… April 1, 1925, a son of Henry and Rose (Dorr) Morris.”

The SOB had fooled us his entire life! All this time he had been playing April Fools’ Day jokes on us when really he WAS the April Fool! Literally! Grandma Tracy swears on her life that she didn’t know this. Joanne and Gary say the same. Maybe Mammy knew, but she is a locked box… you can’t break that old bird. Certainly everyone in Turner (and he knew everyone in Turner) was shocked. I’m sure it has happened before, but it must be only in the rarest of circumstances… a lot of people got a good laugh reading an obituary, myself included.

And that, Baby, sums up your Great Grandpa Bill, who played the final prank of them all.

Love,

Mom

P.S. Back in the day, I had an old blog detailing Grandpa Steve's renovations to our house. Grandpa Bill was my blog's biggest fan, but as he did not know what a "blog" was, he and Mammy called it, "The Blob." Grandma Tracy had to print it out for him, but he loved it. This Blob post is dedicated to both you and him.

The Three Stooges...Great Grandpa Bill, Mammy, and Grandpa Steve.

It's funny how both of these pictures showcase Grandpa Bill in a suit
because most of the time I saw him he was in his tighty whities and a white v-neck tee.

Naberta Farms =
Nathan & Alberta Farms
Great Grandpa Bill's cow farm. His full name was Nathan William Morris.
Classy hat.