April Fool’s Day: The Meaning of the Season

Few Holidays have undergone such transformational changes as what we now call April Fool’s Day. The change reflects our cynicism toward all things humorous and betrays our loss of faith in comedy. Our materialism and love of money have forced this once noble and meaningful holiday into the back row where we barely notice it behind Easter, Christmas and Mother's Day.

The history of April Fool’s Day is actually fascinating and worth a closer look as it may give us limited inspiration come the day. The story starts, as so many funny stories do, in tragedy. During the fourteenth century, at the rise of the first waves of the Black Death, a girl was born into a peasant family in the north of England, near modern day York. Her father died a few weeks after her birth, not of the plague, but rather from a Saracen arrow in the Holy Land. Her mother, forced into extremity by debilitating poverty was unable to feed the girl and sent her with traveling friars to the abbey inside the walls of York. There she was raised as an orphan at St. Mary’s Abbey where she was expected to eventually take orders and join a convent. In this case, our young heroine joined the monastery at Harrowthorpe, where she was expected to be demure, obedient to the hierarchy (at the top of which sat Christ) and to live a life of solemn prayer and reflection. This she was unable to do.

The annals of history are full of records of nuns who rebelled against their orders and departed or were punished (sometimes severely) for their behavior. It is important to remember that our heroine was not a willing supplicant. Although records are fuzzy at best, it is clear that on several occasions she was threatened with expulsion, though it isn’t obvious at what age she began to show her disobedient side. All we know is that she eventually took all she could and began an annual tradition in her own honor.

The Abbot of St. Mary’s Abbey in 1336 was Thomas de Walton. He is one of the only Abbots on record to have resigned his position as it was common for abbots to die in their role having served for their entire life. However, de Walton was about to experience the savage revenge of a sense of humor gone amok.

The nun in question has only the name of her religious order, but we will call her Sister April. Throughout her novitiate she had regularly been punished for her lack of obedience. In one preserved parchment, her superior had a scribe write in Latin, “ Unus non habet sensum, ut obediat”; this one has no sense to obey. Punishments were severe and cruel. We can assume that she was forced to self-flagellate (to whip herself with barbed lashes in imitation of the cat-of-nine-tails used on Christ before the crucifixion), or was otherwise tortured. A favorite was to dunk the offending person into first scalding water and then ice-cold water and then back again. Many were given prison sentences (there were always dungeons beneath the Abbey) and some were tortured to death. Sister April, bruised, bloody and in deep agony for her shenanigans may have been strong-willed enough to mentally endure, but at some point her patience and tolerance of the power structure which abused her broke.

As she was nursed and tended by one of her order in her tiny prayer closet, the embers of pent up rage were kindled against her superior and the entire enterprise. Although there is no evidential anchor to when the idea came to her, history shares with us the consequences of her decision. 

This same year, a delegation from Rome was set to arrive to “inspect” the Abbey of St. Marys and all surrounding monasteries and convents. The survey was actually a prolonged process of grilling (sometimes literally) of the members of the orders to look for examples of heresy and of apostasy. News of the imminent arrival of the emissaries from Rome had reached every corner and the Abbot was hopeful that their visit would be short and sweet. Sister April began to make her plans in anticipation. In an apparent turn of helpful obedience, Sister April offered to help a small group bring supplies to the monastery. This was a regular weekly event, but her new helpfulness surprised and pleased her superiors, so she joined the small band of carts and horses. One of their stops was a mill that ground flour. Before the monk who baked the bread could make his order, Sister April had gone in and requested double the normal amount. The miller agreed and several strong young lads carried sacks of flour to a cart. Once their provisions had been gathered, the group turned back, singing hymns and enjoying the brief excuse to be outside the monastery walls.

Back at Harrowthorpe convent, Sister April took charge and ordered that only half of the flour be taken to the sculleries. The rest, she said, must be taken to the belfry. No one argued. Each week, the same band of provision seekers went out to get food and supplies. Each week, Sister April ordered double the provision of flour and ordered that half be taken to the belfry. Eventually, there was an entire pile of flour, carefully stacked against the walls of the bell housing. Each day, between her requirements for prayer and study, which she dutifully attended, she would sneak away to the belfry to begin her final stage of the plan. 

Harrowthorpe’s belfry stood over the main entrance to the walled convent. The ancient stone structure was solid and had become part of the recognized skyline. Although the bell was used to signal holidays, other times of prayer were signaled through a lesser belfry on the north side that had been built much more recently. The arrival of the emissaries of Rome would be heralded by the ringing of the main bell, though, Sister April knew, so she finalized her plans. Through an intricate series of pulleys and rope, a member of her order could step inside a small vestibule within the main archway and, drawing down the bell rope, cause the bell to ring. Sister April had, through the cunning appearance of newly found piety, weaseled her way into being the one who would ring the bell. Pleased with her change of demeanor, her superior allowed this.

On the day the emissaries arrived in York, they sent a small boy ahead to signal their coming. On the first day of the visit, of course, the delegation would stay at St. Mary’s Abbey, but within a week, the boy would alert them of their coming to Harrowthorpe. It was later March and winter had yet to withdraw its frozen mantle of ice and mud. News came that the delegation were to be welcomed in the morning on the first of April. Sister April made her final preparations. 

Among the thirty or so inquisitors, scribes, delegates, Abbot de Walton and his own entourage, there were a handful of Italian and Spanish priests who were the vanguard of the procession. Their leader and the head inquisitor was Ezzelino Spietato, a bishop who was known far and wide for his ruthlessness and tyrannical nature. The dour Italian rode up on a white palfrey and smiled at the superior of Harrowthorpe. His smile did not reach his eyes. They stood just below the belfry tower. Rain lashed down as they exchanged the pleasantries of their respective orders and the scribe of Spietato handed over the papal orders surmounted by a heavy red wax seal imprinted with the papal signet. Sister April saw the Abbot nod and she reached—with devilish glee—for the bell rope and pulled in order to solemnize the moment.

The wind howled through the ancient stone edifices. Iron-grey clouds lowered over the city, pelting the godly, the noble and the peasant alike with icy rain. The strong hempen rope engaged the complex series of pulleys and finally began the swinging of the iron bell. Suddenly, like a blizzard, huge clouds of white powder smashed down from on high. Thomas de Walton, the superior of Harrowthorpe monastery, the delegates, the scribes, the porters and every sundry person in the train who were already soaked to their bones with cold rain were covered with clouds of flour which coated them and blinded them and choked them and bowled them over into the mud at the gate.

Sister April, safe inside her vestibule, removed her habit (under which she had put on the clothes of a peasant lad) and grabbing a torch from a sconce on the wall, stepped out into the archway, where chaos held sway, and set her habit on fire. She may have, had she been schooled in anything but her orders, understood that an open flame in contact with the flammable flour cloud would cause an explosion of incredible proportions. However, this orphaned and exiled child only knew that she wished to send a message. Nevertheless, the flour that clouded the air ignited in a huge explosion that propelled anyone yet standing in all directions. Perhaps only the pelting rain saved all but a few that day from incineration.

Sister April, it is told, narrowly escaped the flames and ran down into the town to hide in the inns and brothels until she could make a journey far away. Whatever became of her is not truly known. If she was killed by her practical joke, her legend lived far beyond a nine-days wonder. The flames kindled with the flour that had not been hurled into the crowd and caught the wood beams and structures of Harrowthorpe Monastery which promptly burned. The Abbot was forced to resign by papal order when tales of the joke eventually reached Rome. Ezzelino Spietato was killed by the blast, which likely saved many lives since he had racked up quite a number of ‘confessions’ in his time as inquisitor.

Two hundred years later, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and abbeys all across England and had them largely destroyed. St. Mary’s Abbey lies in ruins which can be seen today. Of the convent at Harrowthorpe nothing remains except the legend of The Fool. Sister April’s deeds spread across the nation island and grew in the telling. Some (but not all) chose to honor her in the same way that some honored the saints by playing small jokes on their family and friends on the anniversary of the fire. By the decade and the century the nun’s deed became a kind of myth of tradition. Mischievous boys would tug on their sweethearts on the ear and shout “April’s Fool” in her honor. Brothers would put salt in the inkpot of their younger siblings. Someone would put vinegar in the wine, while another would place a small rodent in the privy to hector a mother or an aunt. Tales of the fire and of the sacking of the Abbot faded with time, but not of the joy of the joke on the first day of April. 

Today, nearly seven centuries later, we still tell jokes or play pranks on our friends and family, but with no understanding of the history of a disobedient nun and her deadly prank one rainy day in York in the year 1336.

Sleep Talking

A little more than a year ago, several interminable weeks passed where I struggled to get a complete night's sleep. I either couldn't get to sleep or I would wake up with a handful of hours to go before the alarm sounded and I lay there arguing with myself about why I couldn't get back into the healing dreamless. It was more than a little upsetting but it wasn't my first bout with intermittent sleeplessness. I knew that, sooner or later, I would get back to regular slumber patterns but like all such disruptions, it was agonizing in the moment. It was like the voice that Macbeth thought he heard which said: 

“Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep: the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,

The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,

Chief nourisher in life's feast.”

Insomnia can be caused by a number of things: too much sugar or caffeine in one's beverage intake or an unhealthy diet. It can also occur because of psychological problems; too much stress at work or with the bills. Insomnia may be a side effect of a lifestyle or medication. A significant disruption of the body's sense of where it is within time can cause serious damage to slumber. However, although any of these might have been the motivating factor for my inability to get forty winks, it was most likely idiopathic insomnia, which is a fancy term for “who the heck knows why this is happening?” Anyway, although in the middle of the night while I tried to understand my stupid brain's refusal to let me plummet into golden slumbers, whatever instigated the problem seemed moot. I couldn't get my beauty rest and that was obvious and horrible.

The family was gathered around the breakfast table one Sunday during this time when I was unable to get rest and the subject of insomnia arose when our youngest mentioned that I looked like deep fried hell. His description was apt. I felt like it too. I was beyond haggard, beyond even the borders of exhaustion. The world felt like clear jello and I was moving through it numb and dumb and staringly, as though I was semi-catatonic. He told me that he used melatonin for his sleep issues and that it really helped. It was not my first exposure to melatonin, of course, since it had become a commonly available supplement on display in the aisle at the market where St. John’s Wort and ground Wolfbane could be purchased. I had previously avoided it mainly because I was loath to develop a dependence to any substance. 

Other aids, whether available over-the-counter or by prescription, had developed notorious reputations for causing the people who used them to rise from their beds like vampires and paint the nursery or plant rows of tulips in a recently excavated hole in the basement floor and yet retain no memories of their nocturnal actions the next day. One drug—Ambien—had become infamous for its side effects. So much so that some celebrities or notable personalities used the pill as a scapegoat when they inevitably said something racist on air or displayed their genitals to an unsuspecting assistant. I wanted none of it. I had spent enough time in my life with consciousness-altering substances.

Although melatonin is not a drug in that sense, he reassured me, I still had trepidations. Despite its apparent efficacy, any sleep aid had to survive a gamut of questions and requirements in order for me to try it, no matter how desperately I needed to fall into the arms of Morpheus. Fortunately our kids are avid researchers and why should they not be? Their parents are a teacher and a reference librarian respectively and they understand the importance of well-cited, verifiable sources when they look things up. The boy had done his homework on the topic. It still took a lot of convincing, but I eventually conceded that it was the best option for what ailed me. It was not habit forming, didn't require a prescription, is a naturally occurring substance within the body and was relatively inexpensive. I still held off for a while, perhaps out of sheer stubborn determination to get through my insomnia unaided but I had no more reservations about melatonin.

Meanwhile, true restfulness continued to evade me, so on one particularly dragging, droopy day he offered me a chewable tablet to take before bedtime. I cannot remember much except that it obviously worked. I slept like a rock, if rocks sleep. Pardoning the obvious cliche, I felt like a man in the desert who finds an oasis. My body and brain had been ravaged night after night by seemingly unending wakefulness and then finally, I rolled off the edge of insomnia’s beetling cliffs and into sweet oblivion. After that, I purchased a bottle of sugar free melatonin gummies to keep on the nightstand and began using it nightly. 

As long as it was working, I kept using it, fearing to return to that place of unrest high on the rocks of the island of insomnia. I was motivated by the idea of lapsing back into the fitful, flailing restlessness that would eventually become a flat inability to catch even a nap overnight. That was a forbidding possibility to face especially now that I had decent restfulness back in the daily routine. If sleeplessness returned, I knew that I would again become that half-awake, shambling creature that yawned and gibbered and snarled all day like an old dog. The long term consequences of not sleeping were plain. During the day, when I ought to be spry and sharp, I would be unfocused and blinking stupidly, dozing at stop lights and in my office and being more than usually ill-mannered. Following those symptoms come the deeper issues; loss of memory, confusion, unhealthy eating habits and soon enough, serious health problems not to mention hallucinations, paranoia, delusions, hearing voices, cosmic dread and finally, a full-on psychotic break. 

No thank you.

So I kept taking the melatonin gummies before bed. Perhaps it is ironic to note that the plaguey things had begun to be less efficacious than when I first got them. I would fall asleep hard then wake up a few hours later and need to roam the halls like a Victorian ghost, yawning and moaning until I felt tired enough to get back in bed. I more than once startled our youngest and his partner, when they would wander over into our kitchen to borrow an onion or hot sauce and there I was, like Jacob Marley, half awake and staring sightlessly.

I was unhappy with these new proceedings. So I upped my dose. I was exercising regularly during this period too and I felt that the combination of a strenuous workout and the melatonin would help me find a good night's rest. I refused to go back to straight up insomnia. Even so, I became worried that my issues with being unable to kip were developing an immunity to both. Regardless of how tired I was or when I had my last cup of strengthening Irish Breakfast Tea, around midnight, I would pop awake, fired out of dreamland and into wakefulness like a man from a cannon in the circus show.

It was around this same time that our son—he who introduced me to melatonin—began to make plans for a cross-country journey to take a new job. He would move from Asheboro to Portland, Oregon in the early Fall. The scheme was still fairly unsettled, but while we were all playing in the pool one roasty June day, he lightly discussed possible strategies to make the whole thing workable. From then until August, he solidified his itinerary for the trip and during that time it was decided that I would go with him, acting as a copilot and helping to drive. I will not write more about the trip (because the events of that amazing experience are recorded in more detail elsewhere and will be available in due time) except to say that I decided to use the opportunity to stop chewing the melatonin gummies and to get back to regular, unaided ZZZs. In August he spent a week in Oregon to hunt for an apartment and get familiar with the city. When he returned, the three hour time difference shattered him. Instead of giving in to temptations to take a midday siesta, however, he went back to his regular east coast bedtime schedule. This seemed to force a reset in his circadian rhythms and he admitted that he was consistently snoozing like a baby.

When we finally departed in October the many time zone crossings, the unpacking of his furniture and the long haul driving exhausted me. All of this coupled with a red eye flight home (in which I went a total of 36 hours without closing my eyes) seemed to reboot my circadian rhythms. Two weeks after our adventure, we turned the clocks back to standard time and coupled with regular exercise, my inability to drift into Snoreland vanished like a nightmare on the wings of dawn. 

As of this writing, insomnia in its fullest sense has departed. I have not yet needed to dip into my melatonin stores, either. The Spring time change has not yet disrupted my sleep (anymore than usual) either, despite the longer days and darker mornings. I still exercise regularly (though not at the YMCA) and I feel in mid-season form. I go to bed most nights quite tired and wake up refreshed, if groggy. My nighttime dreams are less psychedelic but that's an agreeable alternative to the swirling, brightly colored flower explosions that melatonin-induced fantasies caused. Sleep truly has knit up the ravelled sleeve of care.

I know that I will again have battles with sleeplessness but if they begin to drag out into weeks-long campaigns, I can reach for the gummies. It is pretty certain that a period of insomnia will return again, but in the meantime, hopefully I can avoid it via diet and exercise and careful adherence to a nightly routine. 

Break(ing) Time

In just a few days, we will all participate in a required behavior that calls into doubt all of our strongly-held beliefs about time. We will set the clocks forward just one hour, contributing to near universal temporal dysphoria which will last until just before it is time to adjust them back again, in the Fall. Although I have no real preference except that the government keeps its hands off our clocks, I dread the time changes mainly because of what it reveals: time is a ruse.

There have been a lot of bills introduced to stop yearly time changes. Actually there has been one bill introduced over and over by the same person. This somewhat oafish Florida representative hit on a rare insight when he suggested that the double clock changes each year limited daylight in a way that prevented the vacationers that fill his state’s coffers from enjoying the hot and balmy weather, there. The latest iteration of the so-called “Sunshine Protection Act'' has stalled yet again, however. Because Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a federal law, individual states are prohibited from adopting their own time, which makes for some unhappy constituents. However, a stalled bill at the federal level implies that no end to DST will be forthcoming. Standard time, which is what we are enjoying now, will revert to whatever it is when the sun rises at 5 and sets at 9 in mid June.

The great sci-fi author Douglas Adams once said “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.” I have always heartily agreed with Adams and so did Kant. According to the dour German idealist philosopher, time is a construct that we apply to the world in order to understand the tiny changes that occur at any given (ahem!) time. Our brains see the world in a very specific way. In order for our perceptive mechanism to parse reality into digestible bits, we developed the ability to understand that time passes and the world we see shifts as it does. Little did we know that the construct of time would become a debilitating chain around our ankles fostering a rise in the deep and unhealthy addiction to measuring and keeping track of what “time” it happens to be. Kant is not rolling in his grave. This great thinker apparently had a severe daily schedule which he followed to the second thanks to several clocks around his rooms.

We have become thralls to time in a way that marks us not as prime cousins of our great ape relatives (who don't need clocks) but as groveling supplicants to circular lords whose faces convey magical measurements and dictate our days. We may feel this gives us mastery over time, but the reverse is actually true.

It's not hard to look back to when our ancestors first began to show promise in rising from their grassland bowers to start using tools and giving names to one another and note that primordial man did not have a wristwatch on. For thousands of years we marched along with the natural clockworks provided to us by the sun, the moon, the tides, the stars and our internal biological imperatives. Humans are by and large diurnal creatures, functioning in the daylight, so we instinctively know when the sun is up and we tire and retire when the day is waning. There is no doubt that for a very long period in our fraught and stressful first millennia, humans were fairly good at knowing what part of the day they were in without needing a watch or clock. They were probably happier.

One of those ancestors had a brain wave as he watched a full moon rising over the veldt on the way back from a hunt and decided to count how many “brights” came and went before the moon was full again. This was probably the same titan of thought who decided that a small L-shaped cluster of stars “looked like a bull”. The counting of days slowly merged into a sectioning and sub-sectioning of the duration of days and nights. A likely scion of the family who created the genius above made notches on a tree as the sun's light rose or sank, and divided those final numbers into evenly counted bits. Soon enough he would have discovered that the sun's light moved both laterally, diagonally, cast shadows around standing rocks or trees at different parts of a day and shed light later and later or earlier and earlier. At some point after that, a willing convert to the blossoming time religion went a mile down the path and did the same thing on another tree. Thus horology was born. Soon enough, they would discover many other phenomena of the apparent passage of time and the many changes each day could show on the face of the planet.

Though these two stellar members of our race could have no idea, their observations and curiosity were the first steps toward the tyranny of ‘Big Chrono’. Today, we all mark each minute, each second, each hour, each day like good supplicants. Most of us, if not all, have countless clocks all over our homes. Our communication devices, our devices, our ovens, microwaves, televisions, our computers and smartphones, all have clocks prominently displayed. We hang clocks on our walls despite this proliferation and wear clocks on our arms. 

Even before the spread of technology like personal computers and smartphones, clocks were everywhere. Our quaint downtown has a clock by the railroad tracks that splits east and west on the main drag. There used to be a big flashing clock made of light bulbs on the highest bank building in town that flashed between the time and the temperature. As if this wasn't enough, you could dial a specific telephone number for the time and temperature at any point in your day if so inclined. This was regardless of the fact that we have clocks built into our vehicle dashboards.  Before that, church bells would ring out the quarter hours, so that everyone within hearing distance could know what time it was. In the small town I grew up in, there were several churches that did this, providing little excuse for those of us who were out past when the street lights came on. In the town we live in now, the steam whistle used to mark the breaks for mill workers downtown would blow at seven, at noon and at five. The churches don’t ring their bells and the steam whistle is gone, but our dependence on clocks has become so ubiquitous that we don't even notice it anymore. 

Our insistence on knowing what time it is is based entirely upon an underpinning of time being important for every aspect of our lives. We have to do things and those things have specific start and end times. Doctor’s appointments, jury duty, and job schedules make it hard to argue that time is meaningless especially when I have to be at work promptly by 9. I could explain to my bosses that my circadian rhythms didn't wake me in time for the department meeting, but as covered by chronographs as my home, car and limbs are, I have no excuse. Even if I sleep through the alarm, it’s pretty hard to claim ignorance of the time. That doesn't stop people from being “late” to work or appointments, of course. In fact, there has been a rash of people disregarding time, but that’s a topic for another essay.

The gods of time have, like their religious counterparts, undergone a rather significant growth in power and with such expansions come schisms. Early chronography was primitive at best. At a recent work outing, the presenter remarked that we should take a moment to admire the seventy year-old sundial adorning a dias in the midst of their arboretum. She then quipped dryly that they are often asked by visitors if it still works, to gales of derisive laughter from the audience of mostly librarians. Not being able to read or understand a sundial is one thing. Not being able to tell time is another.

Horology, the study and measurement of time, has undergone several changes, the most recent of which was the move from analog to digital clock. The analog style (round or square face  encompassing twelve numbers with hands swinging around a central pivot indicating hour and minute) has gone out of style, at least for younger generations. The digital clock, where the hour is represented by the leftmost number and the minutes by the right numbers past a colon are easier to read and understand. The analog clocks in our library's central pillar have always been incomprehensible to anyone younger than twenty. I know full-grown adults who still cannot read an analog clock.

My own denomination is military time which indicates numbers not usually associated with run-of-the-mill time tellers. Most analog and digital clocks begin their first half of the day with 12 and begin again when the clock hands cycle the face and twelve noon is indicated. Not so my old Timex Army Recon watch. Beneath each hour number was another number, from thirteen to twenty-three, so that instead of using 12 as the final hour of the day, you began at zero at midnight and then preceded from twelve to thirteen, the hour after noon and so on to fourteen and onward until zero again showing the full 24 hours in one day. Devotees of this style of time-telling are usually active duty military or veterans, nurses, EMS and me and my brother. 

Aside from being infuriating for regular folks, this slightly more logical application of numbers to time is nearly completely feigned. I don't care what time it is. I have long ago given up worrying about the day or the hour. Lost in the woods without a watch and my smartphone battery having died, one day will soon blend into another until indistinguishable. My body's internal clock may help me to figure out when to sleep or when to rise, when to eat or evacuate my bowels, but the need to know every minute of every day will slip quietly into blank obscurity. Since I do not intend to get lost in the woods any time soon, though, the despotic rule of the time-centric life will continue.

My only challenge as we proceed to spring the clocks ahead one hour will be to make sure that—like my father before me—each damned clock in our house has the exact same time, so that I don't time travel between rooms, like crossing the international dateline backwards. Until the double time change is finally expelled from our nation’s time-centered culture, we will have look forward with dread as the days get longer in the evening, and anything like a regular relationship with time continues to evade us.