April Fool's Day

Gowk, or Common Cuckoo

a reprint; some old references to 2009
posted a day early by mistake... big, gawsie gowk that I am!

Today arrived with the morning milk, and like the morning milk, it sat a while upon the back door stoop - fresh, bedewed with beads of moisture, and cream at the top! - a big gawsie day, a day looking for love and trouble - a day of many colours: good, bad, and indifferent; a day of glycol and gristle, of candy and cinders...a harbinger of spring and summer and the early fall days to come, the great expansive kerry dance of days, lasting from Trinity until Michaelmas. Today is April 1: " This is the first day of April......  Hunt the gowk another mile. "

"Gowk" is a Scots word , meaning "cuckoo", and as unfamiliar as it probably sounds, I may safely say that I have actually used it in my writing, doing something about grackles and gowks at the time of about 40 plus years ago. My three nephews stopped by by in the A.M., soliciting three cups of tea ( courtesy the Grace Tea Company, New York, New York ). I thought it auspicious and ominous: three nephews, three cups of tea, three the kings, three the persons of the Trinity...and three the legs of Hephaestos' steam-powered......three...legged thingies that we read about in the Iliad, or at least would have read about had you been studying. So it was that, then: a day of wonders mechanical - Haephestos to Henry Ford - and perhaps our bitter herbs to eat after. We wondered at the markets dropping after Mr. Obama's remarks about the auto industry. To us, it seemed like CEO Obama was stepping up and clearing the decks and it was all business - good sign from our experience. However, markets, in their infinite wisdom and ability to act like frightened harlequins, saw it differently. I suppose Mr. Santelli was scrabbling about the floor of a mercantile exchange somewhere, yelling "Mene, mene, tekhel, up yer socialism!" - or the closest approximation thereto.

It was a good day today. The down market was followed by an up - somewhere. It was a day to take your car into the nearest auto hospice to have an evaluation of the damages of unrepaired potholes. We have had some potholes along the seam of tarmac and shoulder which resemble the Calebras Cut of the Panama Canal, and have been gaping like Ginnunga Gap for a couple of months. I saw a road grader once. As I passed, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw it disappear down the void - another addition to the DPW of Hades! The bit of doggerel on April 1 quoted above - I tell you now, just as I told the boys, sitting and drinking the Earl Grey tea - was what passed for humor in the Gaelic community; i.e., the total discomfiture and embarrassment of another human being!

Back in the day, our druidical leaders had us give human sacrifice. With the Christian community moving into the neighborhood, we - the Gaels : in order of importance, the Scots, the Manx, the Bretons, the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Irish -we felt the necessity no longer of decapitating the odd Andy Thomson and using his eyeballs to play at mib, so we turned to incapacitating a scapegoat with practical jokes. It was that same Andy Thomson we asked to go to the Chemist's with a note, whereon was writ the above " This is the first day of April, Hunt the gowk another mile ". The Chemist, upon reading said note, would tell poor Andy that he did not have the medicament or whatever that I required, but so-and-so did. He would tell Andy then to proceed to Mr. So-and-so with his letter Andy did as directed, and the cycle went on. The verb "hunt" is taken to mean to chase game, to cause it to move and run, not merely to go looking for game, so everyone is causing Andy, the gowk - it also means a simpleton - to run on another mile or so. By the end of it, everyone was laughing, and Andy couldna show his face for a fortnight.
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