A Nod to Odd April
April is a funny month. Not just because it begins with April Fool’s Day and ends on National Hairball Awareness Day. It’s no laughing matter, people! Just ask Cat Benatar who’s curled up on my sofa licking her . . . “Hey! Do that in private!” She’s such a rebel. “Go play with Katy Purry!” Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, the capriciousness of April.
For us Vermonters, this month is unpredictable with a capital W. As in weather. Just try to guess what coat to wear. I remember an April snowstorm that dumped over 15 inches in the early 80s! Thank goodness I was extra warm in my mile-high shoulder pads and scrunched-up leg warmers.
How about when April brandishes temperatures over 90°? Literal heatwaves! No wonder my daffodil buds are hunkered down holding daily meetings to discuss the viability of blooming. Will it rain? Snow? Sunshine? It’s quite the heated debate. I’ve seen their agenda and clearly they have other reasons to meet including a dog named Rocket, who is apt to trample through their masses, and our neighbor’s early tulips, acting all superior with their glowing orange petals and ruby red centers. Well, what can you expect from the common daffodil of the genus Narcissus; surely we can’t be surprised by their excessive egocentricity.
This baffling weather business makes getting dressed in April akin to a game of chance. Just like playing slots in Vegas where you pay to pull a lever simply to see you’ve lost, we pull an outfit out of our closet with the same dismal odds. Wear sandals on some lovely spring morning and you’ll be using that same shoe to scrape ice off your windshield so you can drive home. Chance wearing corduroys and a fleece to work on some frosty morn and by noon you’ll be as sweaty as Hulk Hogan in the ring.
Even television history speaks to April’s mercurialness. In April 1962, CBS hired the venerable Walter Cronkite as news anchor; one of their best decisions ever. Then, Aprils later, the same network abruptly fired the trailblazing Smothers Brothers only to replace them with Hee Haw! You know the show; its best-known song was “Pfft! You Was Gone!”
Yeah, yeah - a lot of great things have happened in April. Paul Revere did his famous Midnight Ride thing, it’s Shakespeare AND Buddha’s birthday, the Human Genome Project was completed, Handel’s Messiah, the best-known choral work in Western music, debuted, and after a break of a mere 1,500 years, the first Olympics of the modern era was held. Oh yeah, and Cake Boss premiered.
Yet, many weird things have happened in April too. In 1976, the two-dollar bill resurfaced! Why the heck would the US Treasury reintroduce that oh-so-impractical denomination when its only apparent purpose was for thrifty grandparents to stick it in your birthday card? And April 1943 featured the first intentional ingestion of LSD. Though, truly, I’d rather hear the story about its first unintentional use.
Another April milestone? It’s the month the first YouTube video was uploaded. Who knew it’d lead to bazillions of cat videos. I admit, perhaps a few feature Cat Benatar and Katy Purry with their sister Cindy Clawford. But they don’t hold a candle to Maru, a cat in Japan with the Guinness World Record for most views. We’re talking well over 300 million who have watched this cat. Play in a box! Maybe more people are unintentionally ingesting LSD than we know.
I’d like to end this discourse on April, a word that’s been around since before there were buttons, with a bow to her quirky and changeable nature. It’s not her fault she got tagged with being both National Fresh Celery Month and Straw Hat Month. I’d like to think April wears these monikers with pride. After all, since 1976, she’s also National Humor Month.