April Fool’s Jokes, All in the Family

Fool -

photo: Andrea Mann, creative commons license

Whew! Survived April Fool’s Day without making an idiot of myself. Here are a few of my family’s notable pranks that make me a teensy bit nervous as April first approaches.

Dream Job: Restaurant Reviewer

Our local newspaper once had a truly awful restaurant reviewer. Her reviews would go something like this: “My associate taster and I decided to try C— U——- for lunch. We started with two delicious Black Russians. The garlic mashed potatoes that arrived with our main course were spectacular, . . . etc.” I guess after a couple of lunchtime Black Russians, garlic mashed potatoes were a food she could confidently identify.

This reviewer needed a new associate taster. I’m a pretty good cook with a lot of interest in food, and my family told me they put my name in. When I received a handwritten letter saying she’d selected me, I was thrilled!! Before I called to thank her, they had the wit to remind me it was April 1.

“We need the money now!”

When our daughter Alix was about twelve, we were staying in a Naples, Florida, beachfront hotel, along with her grandparents. She was sleeping in, and all the adults were out, presumably at the beach or breakfast. Pounding on the hotel door awakened her. Two burly guys from hotel security announced that our credit card hadn’t worked and they needed an alternative form of payment immediately.

This sleepy little voice said “My dad . . .” “We don’t care about your dad; we need the money now!” “But I don’t have any money . . .” She glanced around the empty room and missed seeing her parents and grandparents peeking through the adjoining room’s door. “You have to pay us!” “But . . .” The police were mentioned.

Finally, the guys couldn’t stand it any longer and started laughing. As did we. She didn’t speak to any of us the rest of the day. The security team, though, received a nice tip.

A Mom Wises Up

Then Alix grew up, married, and lives several states away. About seven months after the wedding, my husband came into my home office and said, “Did you see Alix’s email? She’s pregnant!” “Forget about it,” I said, inured to their tricks. “It’s April Fool’s Day.” “Oh, right. I’ll send a reply saying how excited we are.”

The next day we received a FedEx package with the sonogram. An April Fool’s double-cross if there ever was one!

*****The Turner House

Detroit, house

photo: ddatch54, creative commons license

By Angela Flournoy – I deeply admire this book about two generations of an African American family living in Detroit. The parents moved north from Arkansas after World War II and had 13 children whose lives play out against the backdrop of drastically changing economic and social circumstances over six decades.

Newlyweds Viola and Francis Turner spent some of the early months of their marriage separated when he moved to Detroit to find work. Chapters about that era in the family history alternate with stories of the family’s present-day experiences. By and large, their children have many more choices than they did. The parents started out poor, the children are almost all firmly in the middle class.

Principal characters in the narrative are Charles Turner (Cha-Cha to the family), the eldest child, born in 1944, and patriarch of the family since his father’s death and the youngest, Lelah, born in 1967. Lelah has the most difficulties, many of which derive from a bad early marriage and her gambling addiction. She’s near-homelessness and shunned by her daughter Brianna. Cha-Cha is plagued by a haint, which has brought him in contact with a psychotherapist, a much younger African American woman to whom he’s unexpectedly attracted. These are secrets just waiting to burst out. Readers get to know several other family members reasonably well, too, especially brother Troy, the former soldier, now Detroit cop, and Cha-Cha’s wife Tina, who wonders whether her husband is slipping away.

With these two dramas bookending the family’s present-day story, Viola’s large dispersed family is coming together to celebrate her birthday, very probably her last. How they accommodate each other, buck each other up, revisit old wounds—every interaction seems exactly right. They have expectations of each other (“Turner men don’t . . .”) and a strong sense of their shared history. I marveled at Flournoy’s acutely observed assessments of the siblings and their motivations, for example: “The things we do in the name of protecting others are so often attempts to spare some part of ourselves.”

Now that Viola lives with Cha-Cha and Tina, a key issue is whether to sell the house they grew up in, in the largely abandoned heart of the city. Everyone has an opinion, but the long and the short of it is that the house is deep under water. Much more is owed on it than they could ever hope to recover in a sale. Sentimental ties seem hardly to justify the cost of keeping it, yet it will cost thousands to sell it.

You know these people. By remaining so true to its human core, The Turner House is “an engrossing and remarkably mature first novel,” said Matthew Thomas in the New York Times, who points out another of its strengths: “artful without being showy.” No wonder it was a finalist for the National Book Award! In Flournoy’s biography, we read that her father was from Detroit, and many of the tiny touches could only come from someone who knows that city well. It’s a beautiful book deserving of a wide readership.

Read an engaging BuzzFeed interview with Angela Flournoy here.