I have some time today so I’m going to trying and knock out this blahg. 
It has been ten days since April Fool’s Day and I haven’t written a blahg since March 22nd. That is no April Fool’s joke! I meant to write a blahg earlier and even thought about having it come out on April 1st but I just couldn’t find the time. Besides, if it came out on the first of April, you probably wouldn’t have believed it.
My friend Glenda, or I should say our friend Glenda because she was my wife’s friend first, has the dubious distinction of being born on April 1st. She also has the dubious distinction of having Henderson sideburns but if you look at my picture, you’ll see I haven’t kept my sideburns; I’ve barely kept my hair. For those keeping track, I am not losing my hair, it is just becoming more and more transparent. I digress. Glenda was born on April Fool’s Day and she has Henderson sideburns despite being anything but a Henderson.
Glenda always had to be vigilant on her Birthday because many people tried to pull some type of joke on her to help her celebrate her natal day. She was very vigilant indeed because when I met her in University, she maintained that no one had been able to slip anything past her on that day. She also had certain restrictions that she believed applied about April Fool’s Day and that mainly all pranks had to be played before noon if they were to count. I’m not sure if she made this up or if it’s the rule. But then, who’s ever heard of April Fool’s Morning? I’m digressing again.
This part of the narrative is not all that interesting and I’ll jump right to the point. I managed to play a successful prank on Glenda on April 1st. It wasn’t even all that great of a joke. Over breakfast at the Dining Hall, I told her she had a spider crawling up her sweater. I didn’t know she was severely afraid of spiders at the time or I wouldn’t have chosen that joke to play on her. To say the least, she freaked. She was also very angry with me. It wasn’t just about the spider gag but that I had successfully ruined her track record of avoiding all shenanigans on her Birthday. I will tell you that I didn’t push my luck and try again in the ensuing years. My record with Glenda stands at one. I told you that this part wasn’t all that interesting.
As you might have gleaned, I am a bit of a joker or jokester or whatever the correct terminology may be. I am quick with my wits and if there’s a great opportunity for a gag or great retort, then I’m all over the situation. I don’t remember all of the April Fool’s jokes that I’ve played or attempted to pull over the years but I’ll recite a couple. Once, before our youngest was born in 1998, I told some co-workers that Jeanette was pregnant again and that I wasn’t too happy about it. In fact, my wife Jeanette was pregnant at the time and Abbie arrived in December that year. We just didn’t know Jeanette was pregnant that April. The joke wasn’t all that funny in retrospect. We had tried for a while to have a third child and it just wasn’t happening and I was getting very disappointed. For me to use this as the focal point of a hoax made it even more compelling and the people at work soon bought into it. It was pretty mild really. I didn’t let it run the course of the day and when people discovered the truth they were disappointed because they knew how much I had hoped for a third child. As I said, the joke was on me, Abbie was already on her way. If Jeanette knew she was pregnant then she pulled the greatest April Fool’s joke by not telling me.
Another joke from that reoccurring April day, that I recall, also was delivered at work. I was working for the Community Development Council of Quinte and we were working on a report about poverty in our region. We came across the name of a small town in the outlying regions with which we were not familiar. I began to do further research on the community only to find there was nothing really significant about the area. I did not immediately share this information. Instead, I drafted a phony letter from a government official in response to a request for information that I hadn’t really made. The letter detailed how the community in question was a penal colony for persons who were caught cheating on their welfare applications. Welfare is a form of government assistance offered to individuals and families who have no other source of income. Our government, at that time, was overly concerned that these most marginalized of persons were cheating the system and acquiring funds to which they weren’t entitled. The government’s over-zealousness on this issue later lead to their loss in the next election.
The fraudulent letter that I drafted was never meant to be taken seriously and I even included fake names in the document such as Dewey Chetham (Do We Cheat ‘Em) & Anne Howe (And How). The insignia graphic I used on the letterhead even included naval objects such an anchor and life-preserver even though the community in question was land locked and the Government Ministry who drafted the letter was not genuine. The contact phone number also spelled out April Fools if you checked the corresponding letter on a number key-pad. My co-workers, however, bought it hook, line, and sinker. They missed all the clues that suggested the letter was not genuine. I had to let the cat out of the bag when they started protesting vehemently and were on the verge of phoning the number contained in the letter. There was no disappointment in that joke. Everyone thought it had been well played.
So you can see that I take April Fool’s Day seriously. I sometimes take weeks to concoct the perfect prank. One year, however, I didn’t play an April Fool’s joke and that backfired on me. I don’t know why I hadn’t taken advantage of the day to pull one over on my co-workers. I know that they had expected something but it never came. The following day was quite different and didn’t work in my favor. That April 2nd was a normal work day and according to my morning ritual, I dropped off our two oldest children at the home of some friends down the road.
I had to be at work early and these friends had two daughters who went to the same school. They agreed to put my children on the bus with theirs so that I could be at work on time. On the way to Bruce and Jane’s (the names of our friends in case you were interested), I encountered a strange situation. Their house was ten minutes down the road and there were only a handful of houses and a campground between our two homes. Passing the campground, I spied an ostrich walking on the road in the direction that I was driving. Yes, I said an ostrich. This part is all true. My children were reading books and when I cried out that there was an ostrich on the road, they didn’t even look up. They both believed this was my missed April Fool’s Day joke. Only when I slowed the van, did they look up from their books to find that I had been telling the truth.
The ostrich kept his pace trotting in my front of my vehicle for about half a kilometer and then he ran off down a side road just past the campground. We all were stunned and didn’t know what to think of it all. I continued on down our road and after a bend in the road, I encountered an older man and a young girl wrestling with another ostrich. I rolled down the window and informed the gentleman that there was another ostrich down the road. He yelled at me that he knew that and would I please just go. I guess when you’re wrestling an ostrich you don’t have much patience and manners are the first thing to go. 
By then, I had guessed that there must be an ostrich farm somewhere nearby. I took the fellow’s advice and continued on to Bruce and Jane’s and dropped off my children. I left it to my children to tell our friends about our strange encounter.
At work, I recounted my morning experience only to have no one believe a word. Frankly, I wouldn’t have believed it if it didn’t happen to me. I tried all day to convince my co-workers of the ordeal with the ostriches to no avail. They, like my children, were certain that this was the prank that should have been played the day before but I had waited to make it more convincing. My wife call at lunch time, as she always did, to see if there were any issues with the children because she was the one who always picked them up from Bruce and Jane’s on her way home. She also did not believe my ostrich tale. I urged her to check with the children and ask them what happened on the way to school that morning. I was sure that when she did that, the children would lend credence to my story.
When I arrived home that evening, my wife informed me that the children had not told her anything about ostrich’s when questioned about their ride to school. I was flabbergasted. Here was a great experience that no one believed had happened. I wasn’t sure why my children didn’t back up my claims. I called them into my wife and I and asked them what happened on the way to school. They replied that nothing had happened and it was a normal journey as usual. Again I was flabbergasted. I mentioned the ostriches and asked why they didn’t recall them from this morning. Their answers were simplicity. The experience with the ostriches did not happen on the way to school. The ostrich encounter had happened on the way to Bruce and Jane’s. So when questioned about their ride to school they thought they were being asked about the bus ride which had been uneventful. It’s all about the questions you ask.
Eventually I was vindicated with my wife. It took longer with my co-workers. I had to eventually bring one of the children to work to corroborate my story. I could have said they were elephants instead of ostriches for all they believed me. I am glad, however, that they weren’t elephants. I never did find out where the ostrich farm was but for a few days after this event, a ball of feathers lay dead on the ice near the campground. Obviously one of the ostriches had made it that far and had died there. I had noticed it but didn’t know where I could report it. If it had been an elephant, it would have gone through the ice and the no one would have been any the wiser. At least I was…wiser that is. I’ve since curbed my April Fool’s Day jokes. How can you even top the joke that you never played?
Tags: April Fool's Day, False Ducks, Ostrich, Scott Henderson