April Fools: Mom & Dad

My parents, God bless ‘em, have been showing increasing signs of their age for the last couple of years as these baby boomers begin the journey into the autumn of their years. I’m sure they would both take offense to this, as Mom is not quite sixty and neither one has officially retired from working.
But after purchasing a second home in Arizona, purchasing burial space in their hometown’s cemetery, and increasing their alcohol consumption, it’s pretty apparent that their mindsets are beyond that of a typical middle-aged couple.
And there’s an obvious pattern to their repetition of stories (more so in my Father) and in their general aloofness (more so in my Mother).
For example: every Christmas, my Father tells anyone who will listen how he and I rescued his parents when they got stranded in a town several hours away on Christmas during one of the season’s worst snowstorms. Admirable? Yes, but they’re family and who in their right mind would allow their parents (or Grandparents) spend Christmas in a fucking Hardees?
No shit: that’s where they waited for us until we got them.
My Father repeats this story every year, typically after a few martinis or glasses of wine and typically with a Johnny Fucking Mathis Christmas album playing in the background.
Add that to the list: when you get old, you buy Johnny Mathis Christmas albums.
Now my Mother is a different work of art. The aloofness has always been there, it’s just that it required a little more effort on my part to get it out of her. And usually, she would catch on fairly early that she was being ribbed. My Grandmother (her Mother) is the same way only much worse; it runs in the family, so I’m probably next in line.
My Father lives half the year in Des Moines for work and when he returns home on the weekend he’ll often bring a copy of Cityview, the local independent weekly free paper. I met them at a restaurant over the weekend and Mom started to go on how Prince was going to buy the Hoyt Sherman Place in Des Moines to “expand his sex appeal in the Midwest and strengthen his Paisley Park empire.” She continued that he would play 30 shows there during the month of April, being joined on stage by members of The Revolution and with Sheena Easton being the show’s opening act.
Sidenote: I listened to Prince’s 1999 on the way to meet my parents, which was a strange coincidence when my Mother started to talk about his recent Iowa real estate purchase.
I was fairly amazed about such information and wondered how my Mother (and my Father, who also reaffirmed my Mom’s story) came across this information while yours truly hadn’t heard about it.
“Yes!” She said. “It’s in the paper! We’ve got one in the car. You can take it with you and read about it.”
So I did.
I read about how Price was going to turn Des Moines into the next Branson. How admission for his 30 shows would be free to the public if they wore purple. And how the shows would begin at midnight and “concluding at 2:37 a.m.”
“I don’t know the significance of that.” She admitted.
By the time I got home, I had a chance to really sit down with the edition of Cityview to read through it. The line in the Prince article that stood out was how he would announce more details about the April concerts in a press conference scheduled for “Sunday.”
Today.
April 1st.
“This is a bunch of bullshit.” I thought.
And sure enough, every article I read in Cityview was bullshit.
It was their annual April Fools edition, and my Mother (who was now several hundred miles away) had failed to comprehend the obvious clues in the article and throughout the magazine that everything was intended to be a joke.
She even missed the headline article of how “Namaycush,” “the Midwestern species of the North American Sasquatch” was recently sited at Gray’s Lake, a park in Des Moines.
Out of pride, I was required to call my parents to inform them that the Prince story, and indeed the entire publication, was an April Fool’s joke.
I expected a little more from my Father, who also appeared to be taken by the ruse. In fact, he once relayed a story at how funny it was when people took another Cityview April Fool’s joke seriously: a story on how Paul McCartney was going to play at the Val Air Ballroom, a venue too incredibly intimate for Macca to actually consider.
With a hint of defensiveness, my Father explained:
“Well, I didn’t actually read the Prince article.” He justified. “Your Mom was reading it to me on the car ride up while I drove.”
So hat’s off to Cityview for completely taking my parents in on their recent April Fool’s edition. For me, it’s both funny and a little frightening. Not only because it reaffirms the fact that they’re getting older (and, as a result, a little more gullible), but also because I understand that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.