Living: the ultimate team sport

April Fools’ memory

Posted on April 1, 2017 Updated on April 1, 2017

My novel, REQUIEM FOR THE STATUS QUO, contains a scene where Patrick Quinn – many years before his Alzheimer’s diagnosis – wakes up his high school aged daughters on April 1st and announces that local public high school students have the day off to honor April Fools’ Day. His daughters attend a parochial school – church based – and when they hear of said day off, they become incensed.

The girls get out of bed – anger seething below the surface of their drowsy bedheads – cross their arms, and they yell, “That’s not fair!”

Patrick agrees, April Fools’ Day is no reason to have a day off from school . . . then he claps his hands together, and barely stifling a laugh, he says, “Gotcha!”

That exact scene happened to my sister and I – thus the reason why I had to include it in my novel. My father had the keenest sense of humor – a funny bone that stayed with him even while the plaques and tangles in his brain leeched the very life out of him. As a family, we were very fortunate that his humor survived until the very end. That is not always the case, as readers will discover when they meet the other characters in my novel whose disease journey is far from cool, calm, and collected.

REQUIEM FOR THE STATUS QUO, release date: July 20 2017.

Black Rose Writing, publisher.