April having come and gone, it got me thinking: April Fools’ Day just doesn’t cut it. Yeah, it’s a day for jokes, pranks and assorted other mischief, some of which are repeated year after year, others which are new and inventive. Some are clever, others are downright cruel. Some result in belly laughs and guffaws, others in fistfights.
But one day isn’t nearly enough. I think we need more than just April 1 to fit in all the shenanigans.
What I mean is, I think we need April Fools’ Month.
Filling up an entire month of pranks and hoaxes would be easy to do. Take the Cleveland Browns, for example. Just about every April, they play a joke on us called the NFL Draft. It’s too early to tell about this most recent draft, but if it doesn’t pan out, I doubt many Browns fans will be shocked. After all, we’re pretty much immune to the disappointment by now.
When I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, the first month of some Cleveland Indians seasons was a giant April Fools’ joke. For no good reason that anyone could discern, they sometimes would surprisingly start out with a decent record and get you thinking that maybe this year they won’t be terrible, that they might actually be able to contend with the Yankees and Red Sox in the brutal American League East Division. But then May and June would hit and, sure enough, they’d be terrible … again. The joke was on you for thinking that year was going to be different.
See how easy it would be to fill up a whole month? The examples are endless.
The best part: We don’t even need outside participation for this. After all, how many times have you stomped around the house looking for your glasses, accusing others of moving them or somehow knocking them into the trash, before realizing the glasses in question are on your head?
Or brewing a nice, hot cup of coffee, pouring a little cream into it, then trying to jam the container of cream into the microwave?
Or, worst of all in today’s society, looking everywhere for your cellphone and rapidly becoming convinced it’s gone forever. Then, just when your blood pressure is about to hit DEFCON 1, you have someone call your phone and you proceed to cover just about every square inch of the house before finding it.
Well, in honor of our just-passed “April Fools’ Month,” here are some moments — funny now, not so much then — when yours truly unwittingly served as his own personal court jester. They’re still embarrassing and nothing I’m proud of, but hey, we’ve all been there, right? Here goes:
HAIR OF THE DOG, OR CAT, OR …
You animal lovers out there know what this is like: You’re walking through the house, look down and see a small clump of fur on the floor. No big deal; you just reach down, pick it up and toss it in the trash.
Same at our house. Back when this incident took place and I saw a clump of dark brown or black fur on the carpet, I knew it had to have come from either our cat Boo or our German Shepherd-Rottweiler mix Noel. It was a common sight, and it was a simple matter of grabbing the fur and tossing it into a waste can.
[Before I go any further with this story, I will tell you that my eyesight is less than stellar if I’m not wearing my glasses. Reading is out of the question, and making out definitive shapes of things — like, say, clumps of fur on the floor — is problematic. You’ll see why this is important shortly.]
On this night, I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I was just watching television, which doesn’t require glasses – yet. So on a commercial break, I got up off the couch and started walking across the family room when I noticed a clump of dark fur, measuring maybe 4 to 5 inches or so in diameter, on the floor. Instinctively, I reached down and picked it up.
As soon as I brought my hand up off the floor, the fur began … squirming.
Thinking it was odd that fur would move all by itself, I opened my hand, looked down and discovered that I had not picked up a dark clump of fur after all.
I had picked up, and was now holding, a very large wolf spider.
We get them from time to time in our house. They’re dark brown with big bodies and long hairy legs, and they can be at least 4 inches in length from leg tip to leg tip — although I swear I’ve seen them even bigger. They are extremely fast and when they see or feel you coming, they take off across the floor and go behind or underneath something — which is disconcerting all by itself. Why this particular wolf spider chose instead to just freeze and let me pick it up, I have no idea.
It’s fair to say the spider and I were equally startled and terrified. I let out a shout – using vocabulary not suitable for publication – and the wolf spider leapt out of my hand and onto the floor, racing to parts unknown in the house. I don’t get squeamish about spiders, but if you’ve ever seen a wolf spider, especially a big one, you know that there’s good reason to be squeamish. They look and act like they mean business, and they are great athletes – their speed and jumping ability are impressive [that’s right, jumping ability; I had one jump off the wall and nearly land on my head in another wolf spider run-in]. Seeing them is bad enough, but feeling one squirm around in your hand is nightmare-inducing.
Needless to say, my days off picking fur off the floor are over unless I’m wearing glasses. And even then …
THE CARPENTERS
No, this isn’t about the iconic sister-brother duo that helped define the ’70s with their beautiful music. This is about the brief (thankfully) time in my life when I was a construction worker (let that sink in for a moment) …
… OK, ready? First thing to know: I should never, ever be allowed anywhere near a toolbox, much less a construction site. My dad was a danger to himself with any kind of tool in his hand, and I’m even worse.
Yet, there I was, working construction. It was for one summer the year after I graduated from Akron. While I searched for a job in journalism, to make a few bucks in the interim I decided to work for my uncle’s pole building company that was based in Brimfield. It was a true family affair: Besides my uncle who owned the company, our three-man work crew consisted of another uncle (skilled carpenter), my cousin (skilled carpenter) and me (not so much). The three of us share the same DNA, which is hard to believe for reasons you’re about to discover.
First of all, I needed a job, so I guess my uncle felt obligated to hire me. Also, one of their crew members had recently walked off the job, so they were desperate. They needed a warm body — and that’s exactly what they got.
I don’t even know where to start, but I’ll start here: My uncle who owned the company is a graduate of Rootstown High School who served as an Army infantryman in Vietnam. He was a sharpshooter whose tasks included protecting and, if necessary, “clearing” the perimeters of forward field hospitals. He doesn’t suffer fools, yet here he was with a fool of a construction worker on his crew. I could list these stories in a 1 through 10 ranking or by alphabetical order, but I’ll cut them down to the best of the best (or worst of the worst, depending on how you look at it) and keep them brief. Here goes:
– HAMMER TIME: We’ll start with a benign one. We were putting up a good-sized warehouse in Streetsboro, and it finally got to be lunchtime. It was a big job, so the three of us were famished and couldn’t wait to dive into the food we had each brought from home. I was in the mood for a tuna fish sandwich that day, so I had packed a can of tuna along with some mayonnaise, bread, chips and a pop.
So as we’re sitting there outside the large, partially framed structure, I grab the can of tuna out of my lunch bag and realize I had forgotten to bring the manual can opener. I asked my uncle and cousin if they happened to have a can opener. “Nope,” they answered, and they just kept on eating, wolfing down their lunches while I held what was now a useless can of tuna in my hand. I said, “Well, I have a can of tuna here and I have no way of opening it. I need a can opener.” They burst out laughing. “You’re going to be awfully hungry when you get home today,” my cousin snickered through a mouthful of food.
That wasn’t an option. I had to eat. So one of them suggested I take a hammer and chisel to the can and just chisel around the edge and open the can manually. Perfect!
So I grabbed a hammer and chisel, set the can down on a sturdy surface, placed the chisel right on the edge of the can where the can opener would go, brought the hammer down and … nothing. I did it again; still nothing save for a little mark. It looked like I was indeed going to go home hungry; I was getting exasperated. “It’ll work, you just need to hit it harder,” my cousin said.
Taking his sage advice, I brought the hammer down on the chisel with significantly more force than the earlier attempts – and promptly sent tuna flying in every direction, the juice splashing all over my face and clothes. I thought my uncle and cousin would have to be resuscitated. But I didn’t think it was funny: My can of tuna fish had been reduced to twisted metal, with most of its contents scattered in a several-foot radius around us.
Worst of all, my cousin’s prediction was correct: I was extremely hungry by the time I got home.
– DAZED AND CONFUSED: Here’s one right out of a “Three Stooges” script. On that same job, my uncle and cousin were up on the second level framing the structure, and I was the grunt worker below handing things up to them. Somehow, the things they needed and the scrap heap ended up right next to each other, so any time they needed something, I had to avoid the scrap heap to get it.
Well, on this particular occasion, there was a shovel laying flat on the ground, face up, between me and the thing they urgently needed (you know where this is going).
As I hustled past the scrap heap to grab the thing, I inadvertently stepped on the scoop end of the shovel – which, of course, sprang straight up and almost took my head off, just like you’ve seen a hundred times on TV and in the movies. It proved that I didn’t need a tool in my hand to be a danger to myself.
Like this next story.
– (ALMOST) THE FALL GUY: OK, different job now … We were putting up a garage-type structure somewhere in Portage County, and we had it fully framed and only had to shingle the roof and we would be done. I hadn’t had much luck at this particular job site (like most others that summer), including the day I swung hammer to nail, whiffed and nearly took my thumb off (my thumbnail still hasn’t completely recovered, and that was 1993). As soon as the hammer smashed into my thumb, I heard my cousin exclaim from the other side of the building: “Ouch, that one’s gonna hurt!” It sure did.
But I got off light that time compared to what nearly happened the day we were shingling.
We were mostly finished and only had to put the ridge cap shingles on. The three of us were on the roof together, and my job was to place each shingle in its proper spot on the ridge and hold it steady as my uncle nailed it into place. Once one shingle was done, I would scoot backward a foot or two and repeat the process for the next shingle.
About 15 to 20 minutes in, as I was once again scooting backward after my uncle had nailed a shingle down, he suddenly looked up and exclaimed, “TOMMY, STOP RIGHT THERE. DON’T MOVE!!!” I stopped, wondering what was going on. Then he said, “You’re about to go over the roof. Just scoot back toward me.”
I did as he said, and as I glanced back, I realized I was only a few inches from falling backward off the roof from a height of about 15 feet. In fact, I’m pretty sure I had actually been over the edge a little, I just hadn’t noticed because I was so engrossed in the work. I’m absolutely amazed that the worst thing that happened to me in those five or so months was a damaged thumb nail and a possible concussion. It could have been orders of magnitude worse.
The thing that still sticks out the most from that time, though, was one morning when I pulled into work and was greeted by my cousin. “You gonna try to give us some more comedy today, Tommy?” he smiled. “I don’t need to try,” I said. “With this job, it just comes naturally.”
So, in the end, I guess I did find an aspect of construction I was good at: slapstick comedy. Which was on my mind the other day when I grabbed the shovel out of our garage and headed to our flower beds to dig up weeds. More than three decades have passed since that hot, humid August day in Streetsboro when I stepped on that shovel, but you always remember things like accidentally cracking yourself across the head with a blunt instrument.
That is, if you’re able to remember them.
Tom Hardesty is a Portager sports columnist. He was formerly assistant sports editor at the Record-Courier and author of the book Glimpses of Heaven.