I Was Just kidding!

There is no way to hide it. I might as well tell you now: I was born on April Fools’ Day. Please hold the wise cracks. I heard them all already! My mother, when she was reflecting on her age, revealed to me an incident that occurred on the day of my birth. My mother was resting in a hospital bed, after going through the strains and pains of child birth. The surgeon, who delivered me, came in with a happy smile and said: “Congratulations, Mrs. Estrin! You have given birth to a handsome baby boy.” She thanked him and he quickly left, only to return a few minutes later. He said: “I apologize for the error but you are the proud mother of a beautiful baby girl!” My mother thanked him again, but five minutes later he came back saying that: “It was really a girl, and then paused and said: “No, it’s a boy.” My hysterical mother’s eyes widened, and her jaw dropped, when the surgeon laughed, and said, with a wink in his eye, “Congratulations, you have given birth to a handsome April Fool baby boy”!

This was the beginning of a life of playing practical jokes, doing tricks, and making wise-cracks. I know now that these tricks were solely for my benefit, rather than my audience. As a 12-year-old, I tossed a lit firecracker, behind a sleeping guard, in a house under construction. I am sure it did not amuse him. I didn’t wait around to find out.

Some jokes left all the participants laughing. Others did not end well. In Graduate school, I noticed that a fellow student has blown glass into a glass series of tubes designed to allow a complex chemical reaction to take place. I noticed that this glass monument had not been used for a very long time. An idea flashed in my evil mind! I gathered glass fibers and carved a rubber giant spider out of a piece of black tubing. When it was finished, it looked like the whole glass tube apparatus was covered with dusty spider webs, guarded by the spider. The other students laughed and we forgot about it. I heard later that the prank backfired and I got the student in trouble. The professor noticed my work of art in a walk-through in the lab. That was probably OK but, after he came back again and again, he realized that this graduate student hadn’t been there for a long time. The student got in trouble and I still feel badly about it. As I got older, my jokes got more sophisticated but the punch line was still “I Gotcha”!  for example, when we got married, I often put a sculpture of a head in the refrigerator to elicit a scream from my wife. Here is an image of what Mitzi saw when she opened the refrigerator on April Fool’s day.

Today, however, marked the end of my bad behavior. I was playing ping pong at Pelican Preserve with other players, including Marc and David (two-time champion of the Pelican Preserve Annual Ping Pong Competition). David was resting in a chair, after playing earlier and just returning from a funeral in Maryland. He was excited to tell me that he visited a home very close to mine and beamed: If I you were home, we could have visited you and Mitzi”. I laughed and snapped back: “Now you knew why we left!” David got up and walked, with chair in hand, up to me and, without a word, he hit me full force on my head with the metal chair. I was confused and felt the warm blood pooling around my head. Soon, the throbbing pain seemed to lessen and the loud voices and screams disappeared. I thought I heard the sound of an ambulance. My breathing stopped just before I could say my last words, “I was just kidding!”

Except for the ending, this story is true. (This is either my way of saying: “I am sorry or April Fool! I was just kidding!” You decide!)

^©Norman F. Estrin, Ph.D. “I was Just kidding.” Jan. 15, 2019.