Saturday is you-knowwhat day. The first day of April.
No idea how it came to be associated with fools. No idea how - or when - people came up with a plan to add food colouring to a carton of milk, plant grass in a co-worker's keyboard or swap the signs on the men's and women's restrooms.
Decent ideas, all of them, and no doubt among ones that will be played out everywhere in a matter of days.
Somewhere, someone is planning - as we speak - to stuff toilet paper in the children's shoes, replace the Oreos'filling with toothpaste or fill the soap dispensers with pancake syrup.
Me? I've tended to be more the victim than the perpetrator, caught off guard when the husband would tell me his parents were coming for a month-long visit, that he was being transferred to Mississippi or that he'd decided to take up ballet.
I was fooled, and often.
And these, really, are the ways the day is supposed to be played out. Forget the pancake syrup and the food colouring. In true April fool's style, the idea is to convince someone that something outlandish is true. In other words, to make the victim a fool.
The husband has been a master of the prank.
Forget the co-worker's grass seed. Want to really play the co-worker a fool? Send along a note - with appropriate letterhead, of course - saying that he or she has been promoted to manager of human resources. Tell the neighbour that a family with 15 pit bulls is moving in down the block. Tell the son that his old bedroom has been found to contain ancient artifacts and that you're going to sell it to the highest bidder.
Come Saturday, I will be on guard. The husband is not likely to be fiddling with the Oreos or the milk cartons, but he may well inform me that our property is going to be part of a mega mall or that we're going to be on the Wheel of Fortune couples'show or that he's learned he's a long-lost cousin of Barry Manilow.
"Did you hear," he might say, completely nonchalantly, "that BC Place is moving to Tsawwassen?" "What?" I might say.
"When? Why? Where?" "To where the rec centre is now," he might tell me. "And when I say moving, I mean it - literally. It's going to be hoisted on top of 182 flat-bed trucks moving one in front of the other. Can't happen until the new bridge is in place because, of course, it would never make it through the tunnel."
At this point, of course, I will realize I've been duped, and give him a shot in the arm.
Shot in the arm or not, the husband is plotting - at this very moment - to get the best of me.
I will be wary as much as I can, and watch for anything crazy. But if he raises the Wheel of Fortune thing, I'm really hoping it's true.
