April Fools Day

I wonder who thought this one up? Prank people and then say, "April Fools!" as if that makes it all better. Granted, most of them are harmless annoyances. Like when the students plastic wrapped their teacher's desk when I was student teaching, or students in Willamina doing silly things to the teachers' rooms. The condoms on the doorknobs went a bit too far, but still harmless.
I always played at least one on my kids as they were growing up. You'd have thought they would have figured it out, but even when they said, "Yeah sure." I always said, "No really! Look." It was always a creature of some kind out in the pasture, a horse or wild animal. We've always had deer wandering about and fox and blue herons. So I would say something fantastic and they would believe. But that is because they were kids, innocent and willing to accept the fantastic and even miraculous.
I just completed listening to an audiobook by Dean Koontz What the Night Knows. Horrifyingly weird, as all of his books are, but there was one scene where the protagonist is talking to a defrocked priest about the malevolent presence in his house and asks the man for help. He declines and then says that perhaps God has pulled himself back from us and manifests only in those of pure innocence like animals and children. This is a theme of Koontz', but one that I tend to hold myself. I am not a religious person. I do believe in heaven and hell, 12 years of going to church can do that to you.  But that there is evil in the world and that it can manipulated by something other worldly, totally can wrap my head around it. As I can wrap my head around the miraculous. My only experience with it, is when my son Brandon was born.
He was a big baby and my contractions were minor, but when I had contractions his heart rate would go down. This scared me. When it was decided that I was going to have a C-section I was given a spinal. As the doctor began to cut into me I said I could feel it, he said no you can't, so I wiggled my right foot. I got a general, though I was awake. When they completed the incision and reached in for him this is what I heard, "Wait. One, two three loops of cord around his neck." The doctor looked at me, "Someone was looking out for you two." "If we had let you do it naturally we might have lost him." Many would say it was the doctors reading the fetal monitor. But my response is, why didn't my contractions get harder? Why didn't I dialate? My body knew, at that moment in time my body was an innocent like an animal or child free to just accept. Sounds lame even to me, but I know that something stepped in and saved my son from death or a dibilitating handicap.
So on this April Fool's Day, I say a truth and if you don't believe then it is you who are the fool.