April Fools Day came and went this year, and I totally missed it. But I don’t blame myself.
Nor do I blame Pope Gregory XIII. He was only trying to fix the calendar, in 1582 AD, that Julius Caesar had made a royal mess of, back in 46 BC.
When Julius Caesar was President of Rome (except in those days, he liked to call himself ‘The Emperor’) he had lots of ideas how to stay in office after his term had expired, and one of them had to do with revising the calendar. He was a smart guy, but he made a couple of mistakes. First of all, he miscalculated the actual length of the year; and second of all, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a group of Roman Senators were in a bad mood.
Julius thought the year was exactly 265 1/4 days long, so he inserted an extra ‘leap day’ in February every four years, to keep the First Day of Spring from eventually falling on the Fourth of July. The First Day of Spring was really important back in 46 BC, and it was supposed to fall on March 21.
But it turned out the earth takes 365.24219 days to make a complete orbit of the sun… a tiny bit less than Julius thought… so the Julian calendar gradually allowed the First Day of Spring to get out of whack. (Julius didn’t live to discover the mistake he’d made, so we can’t blame him, either.)
People let this mistake go on… and on… until it got so bad that the First Day of Spring was being celebrated on April 1. That’s when Pope Gregory XIII decided he’d had quite enough of this nonsense, and ordered Catholics everywhere to start using a new calendar (which he named after himself: the Gregorian Calendar.)
The new calendar relocated the First Day of Spring back to March 21 — where it belonged all along — and got rid of one ‘leap day’ every 100 years, to keep things regular.
But certain peasants in Europe failed to get the news about the revised calendar, and kept celebrating April 1 as the ‘First Day of Spring’. Someone started referring to these ignorant peasants as ‘April Fools’ and the name caught on.
The tradition later spread to the non-Catholic countries of Europe, and before you knew it, April Fools Day was celebrated all over the world.
Ha, ha, ha. That is a totally made up story. April Fool!
Okay, I know… that wasn’t fair. Today is actually April 2. I should have posted this story yesterday, except that… well, I can blame the Coronavirus.
The Coronavirus has done a lot of bad things, but distracting me from celebrating April Fools Day might be one of the worst. In a normal year, as we come out of a long, dreary Pagosa Springs Winter and enter Mud Season, I am raring to go on April 1. There’s nothing I want more than to fool people and play some harmless practical jokes.
But I didn’t feel like laughing this year. It’s so hard to laugh through a mask. And practical jokes aren’t exactly… well, they just aren’t practical… if you have to stay 6 feet away. Ever try to stick a “Kick Me Here” sign on someone’s back, when you can’t get close to them?
Then, yesterday afternoon, I was walking downtown — wearing my mask — and the kids were just getting out of the Middle School. As I approached a couple of boys, one of them looked me right in the eye and, pointing toward a spot on the sidewalk behind me, said, “Hey, mister, did you drop that?”
Of course, I turned around to look behind me, to see if I’d dropped something, and of course there was nothing at all on the sidewalk.
The two boys squealed, “April Fool!” and ran off laughing.
I think that was the first time I’d really smiled… in a year.
So… no, I don’t blame Pope Gregory XIII. Or Julius Caesar. I don’t even blame the Coronavirus.
We can all get fooled. Any day of the year.
We can all be fools. If we just let ourselves.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.