orichalcum

Today would have been my maternal grandparents' 65th wedding anniversary. My grandmother was always slightly embarrassed and amused by the date, while it held little resonance for my grandfather.

Of course, it all got muddled a bit because they also repeatedly lied about the specific date. You see, my mom was born on October 25th. Yes, that's right, about 7 and a half months from today.

In many ways, my grandparents' marriage was a sort of cosmic joke that ultimately worked out. My grandfather was a Jewish doctor, of Russian ancestry, who had grown up in Germany before first fleeing the Nazis to France and then later hiking across the Pyrenees to catch one of the last ships out of Portugal bound for the U.S. Once he got to New York City, he promptly enlisted in the Army with the hope that they would send him back to fight the Germans. In the military training hospital in Newark, as he waited for deployment, he struck up a casual romance with an Irish Catholic nurse, the youngest of ten children, daughter of a train conductor, who had dropped out of high school to take care of her dying mother. They were both also involved with other people at the time - my grandfather had an attachment to Marc Chagall's daughter, who he had met on the boat from Portugal, and my grandmother was dating an Italian Catholic guy from her neighborhood.

But my mom happened, and my grandfather found out he was being sent to the South Pacific, because the U.S. Army was smarter than to send an angry Jewish doctor to Europe where he might be imprudent. And so my grandparents got hastily married, perhaps both thinking that my grandfather was unlikely to come back, and when the baby was born, my grandma traveled cross-country to Colorado Springs to show her to my grandfather right before he left.

And then, two years later, my grandpa did come home. And they lived together for the next 53 years, and had two more kids, and died within six weeks of each other - sometimes more happily than other times, but carving out a life and family together.

So for me, April Fool's Day isn't about gotcha moments. It's about the truest form of humor - the matching of two seemingly incompatible elements in a way that produces first surprise and then laughter and pleasure.