On Father’s Day, I think of pranks
At age 10, I saved up and bought a 20-gallon tropical-fish tank, a filter, gravel, seaweed, a catfish, black mollies, guppies and a swordtail or two.
Whether that bright-orange swordtail arrived pregnant or by blind luck I bred tropical fish, I do not know, but I borrowed a floating “breeder box” from the pet shop, placed her in it, and checked assiduously.
As March turned to April, my father came into my room at midnight and tapped my shoulder. “Als,” he said softly, using the family nickname, “your swordtail is having its babies.”
I remember rolling over, smiling blearily, and saying, “You’re April Fooling me.”
Every April 1, my father would methodically knock all of us off. He’d tell my alarmed mother we had termites; easy. Tell my younger sister that the Easter Bunny was outside (she hastened to the window). And, when we lived on the Chesapeake Bay, that there was a shipwreck on shore. (Again, she hastened to the window — or was that me?)
Sometimes, there in Annapolis, Md., in the springtime, we were told we had snow — and we all dashed to the window.
My father tricked all of my siblings and our beloved cousin as well as me, but I’ve always liked games, and parried determinedly. Over the years he had to work for it: He mailed me mystery letters days before April 1, he had people call me, or, when those failed, he seized a chance simply to make me glance the wrong way.
Even when we were young adults, he’d leave an empty doughnut box on the counter, and we’d all peer in to find an “April Fools!” note. One year he set out a chocolates box. I lifted it, shook it: Something rattled. I yanked up the lid. Pebbles.
I have since played the rocks-in-box trick on April 1 on co-workers from Boston to Carbondale.
It didn’t only happen on April Fools’ Day, however. He tricked us in any season. One election year, when my mother was teaching at a high school, a student said, “Well, we know who Mrs. Osius is voting for.”
“You don’t know that!” she protested.
“I saw your bumper sticker.”
Bumper sticker? My father, a lifelong Republican, had stuck a Reagan-Bush sticker onto her car. My mother, an ardent Democrat, had been driving around with it for weeks.
On a Valentine’s Day decades before, when my parents were engaged but in separate cities, my father heard a radio ad for 100 baby chicks and a pearl necklace for $10, and sent them to her. Finally heeding two days of bewildering, frantic calls from the post office, she lugged the box home. Hordes of baby chicks hopped out and overflowed her tiny apartment, piling on top of each other and falling into the Dixie cups of water she and her roommate set out while she tried to figure out what to do.
Today, my mischievous father is forever 54, with a head of brown hair, just silvered at the temples. A few days before Thanksgiving 1984, he died suddenly of apparent heart failure while hunting on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Walking out in his waders to fetch a goose he’d shot, he stumbled sideways, lowering into a sitting position on the sandy bottom, water to his shoulders. Then his head sank under.
All these years later, I try to view an issue in the considered way my father would. I hear him saying, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it,” or the useful, “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” He’d counsel my brother to make “tolerance” a watchword; or encourage my sister to stay in a grueling bank-training course where half the trainees were failing. (She passed, and took up a rewarding career.) Yet as strong as any other memory is that of my father’s glee when he was up to something.
Each April 1, my cousin answers my phone calls in a low, wary voice. But sometimes she is the one who tricks me, claiming she’s moving or has bought a new boat. I get my mother almost as easily as Dad did and, over many years, I’ve fooled my two sons with tales of avalanches and other calamities supposedly viewed from our house on the Western Slope. Then again, they’ve gotten me back.
My father, Ted Osius, a physician in Annapolis, was gone before my sons were born. Ted(dy) and Roy have heard me talk about their grandfather all their lives. They know he hunted ducks, as do they, waiting and observing in quiet, awakening marshes and on riverbanks, and that he raced sailboats, while they pursue mountain sports. They know his personality, I realize, most of all, through his jokes.