Nobody's Fool
- Eat, Darling, Eat
- 19 minutes ago
- 5 min read
(by Rosie Phillips)
My mother is not someone I would ever describe as a prankster: Although she retains a slight dramatic flair from her time as an actress back in the day, and she did walk our pet cats around the neighborhood on leashes, her approach to life is generally unflappable, straightforward. She considers arriving on time to be late, prohibited me from sitting in the front seat of the car until the day I turned 13, and was the volunteer troop leader for both my sister’s and my Girl Scout troops at the same time all throughout our childhood. Somehow her inner Puck emerged on April Fool’s Day of 2008, when she decided to celebrate this holiday like it was nobody’s business.
We had never been much of an April Fool’s household. It was one of those holidays I put in the same category with Thanksgiving and Fourth of July as “American.” My fully British immigrant family living in Los Angeles, California, really only took part as an excuse for pumpkin pie or hot dogs on the grill. I have since learned that April Fool’s Day is in no way unique to America and actually has origins in ancient Rome, but its historic significance had passed us by.
On that first day of April when I was in third grade, my sister and I woke up expecting nothing out of the ordinary—a frantic rush out the door, Eggo waffles in the car on the way to school, and a heated argument over whether to listen to Radio Disney or the Cheetah Girls soundtrack (what a time to be alive). The first idiosyncrasy in our morning arose when my mother said, “How about you girls grab an apple before you leave for school?” nodding at the fruit bowl on our kitchen counter, notoriously untouched by either of us. We glanced at each other in bewilderment: Was Mommy okay?
“Sure,” I stammered hesitantly for the both of us, more to humor her rather than actually having any intention of eating an apple. I cautiously walked over to the fruit bowl, nudging at my sister to follow, and grabbed the first apple I saw sitting on top, as my mother watched with an odd amount of excitement.
I noticed a little hole where my finger gripped the Honeycrisp. Strange, I thought, my mother would never feed us apples with holes in them. When I poked my finger just a little inside the hole to investigate, I felt something…slimy. I looked up at my mother in horror and bewilderment, only to see her giddily biting her lip and watching me intently. What the heck was going on? Curious, I reached my finger further into the hole and pulled out…a gummy worm. Her face lit up like I had never seen before.
“Oh, no, I think a worm got into your apple,” she exclaimed, her theatre background truly coming out to play before confessing “April Fool’s!” Of course, my sister proceeded to find a gummy worm in her apple as well, and we enjoyed them on the way to school, leaving the apples untouched on the counter.
During the school day, the idea of April Fool’s slipped from my attention, other than scoffing at occasional lame jokes from my classmates like“Your shoelaces are untied” or “Ewww, there’s bird poop on your head—April Fool's!” When I opened my lunchbox in the cafeteria to find what looked like a soggy grilled cheese sandwich, my immediate reaction was disappointment, and a little frustration with my mother as she knew I hated grilled cheese—really any kind of cheese, and this cheese looked particularly disgusting to me, the bright orange kind that bore no resemblance to anything produced naturally from the earth except an orange itself. I stuffed it back in my lunchbox, and a generous friend shared her chicken nuggets with me.
When my mother picked me up from school that day, she asked how I liked my grilled cheese. I felt a little haughty as I reminded her of my disdain for cheese, and annoyed at her insistence that I at least try a bite of it now on the way home. I did so reluctantly, knowing that when my mother sets her mind to something, nothing is going to stop her (a trait I am proud to have fully inherited, for better or for worse).
It was the best tasting grilled cheese imaginable because it was not a grilled cheese at all. It was two pieces of vanilla pound cake with orange frosting sandwiched in between.
“April Fool’s!” said my jubilant mom. I learned that she had recently subscribed to The New York Times and was sent an email with an article called “10 April Fool’s Day Tricks to Play on Your Kids,” but I’m giving her all the creative credit here.
The grilled cheese was such a hit that I begged my mother to make it for my lunch again the very next day (she refused; I guess pure sugar for lunch isn’t in the mother’s handbook) but it became a family April Fool’s Day tradition for all the years to come. And while it lacks that initial element of surprise that a trick can provide only when it is first born, its pleasure never decreased.
As we grew older, my sister and I began to help my mother prepare the sandwiches each year, and it became a bonding experience for us—a chance for us to stand over the counter, putting aside homework and busy schedules, and spread layers of orange frosting between slices of pound cake with grins on our faces, licking frosting off our fingers. It is the story we will always have in our back pockets to bring up when we need a laugh.
I doubt that my mom knew her little prank would become a core Phillips family tradition, but I think that is what makes it so special. That is what makes her so special. Even when her young daughters were arguing about the car soundtrack (never once considering what music she might like to listen to, and I can guarantee you it was not Radio Disney or the Cheetah Girls), she still went out of her way to do something special for her girls. And April Fool’s Day went from being a “nothing holiday” in our home to one of the most treasured.
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Rosie Phillips is a director at My Gym Children’s Fitness Center and a freelance writer who lives in New York City. She can be found at https://rosiephillips.substack.com/,
April Fool’s "Grilled Cheese"
orange food coloring
frosting
2 pieces of vanilla pound cake, sliced to bread size
Add a few drops of orange food coloring to frosting and spread between slices of cake.