april first

When I was in high school, my dad and I fought all the time. It's almost funny now, because we are actually friends, but when the threat of flying fists hung in the air, my boyhood home was entirely devoid of humor. I would spend a rather large portion of my conscious day scheming ways to either annoy him or push him close to rage, and one way I thought to do just that was to play an elaborate April Fool's Day joke on him.
The plan called for my high school girlfriend to call the house, and in a frantic, teary voice, ask to talk to me. If memory serves, my sisters were supposed to avoid the ringing phone and leave the answering to my dad. I would listen intently for a few minutes, ask a few pointed questions such as "are you sure it's mine?" and hang up. The punchline would apparently be for me to tell my dad that my girlfriend was pregnant. April Fools! Fisticuffs. Curtain.

Thankfully, I never got around to acting like such a total asshole. I think I knew deep down that I hoped to someday return to a place of friendship with him, and that if I kept lobbing missiles across the wall we had built, that reality of reconciliation would grow less and less possible. I'm glad that even embroiled in the idiocy of 18 year old testosterone, I never let things get too out of hand.

Instead of being known as the day my father snapped and killed me, April Fools Day is going to have another important connection in my mind's memory. Peter Knuti was born on April 1, 1982. He died on another spring day during my junior year of high school. Before he lost his battle with cancer, he was my best friend growing up.
Peter was raised in a house just down the street from mine. He and I had the same scrawny blond look that is so fashionable amongst the youth in suburban America. We played soccer and baseball together, and ran amok in the woods behind a neighbor's house until our moms would call us home for dinner. We spent a huge amount of time together, and I remember thinking that we were nearly interchangeable. That is, until he was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

The details are slightly fuzzy after this many years, but I know Pete was in and out of the hospital for months before the doctors got his disease into remission. It seemed like all was well with him again. I would see him walking the halls of our school and remember that we had so much shared history, looked so similar, but that we were no longer interchangeable. He was a cancer survivor. All I had survived during the time was my parents' divorce.

During the years following their split, the frustration I felt towards my mom and dad ebbed and flowed. In high school, though, I was dragged back to that feeling of abject frustration, and found myself much more at odds with each of my parents than the immediate years prior.
In a strange coincidence, the anger that I felt towards my folks for being human and deciding they wanted different lives returned at the same time as Peter's disease. Though his cancer had been in remission for enough time to allow most of us outside of his family to forget, it returned despite our willful ignorance. When it did, things went sour in a hurry.
I never saw Peter after he checked back into the hospital. I know they amputated his leg in a last ditch effort to separate him from his eventual killer, but even that drastic step was insufficient. Before he passed away several weeks after his amputation, he was able to call the school and speak with his old classmates. It never occurred to me then, but he was saying goodbye. Our final conversation ended with me saying "See ya later." I still fucking regret that.

He has been dead for 10 years. Happy birthday, Pete. You motivate me to live.