This story set a personal record for "mosts." Most readers, most downloads, most comments, nearly 100 within three days of posting. Add in lowest scores, and the result is a clunker.
While I have other stories pending, personal vanity dictates I revise the original version. A heartfelt thanks to readers who offered suggestions.
All the usual warnings apply. Any mention of a person, place, event or thing is coincidental and is not as an accurate portrayal. No one under 18 engages in sex.
Many negative and traumatic events in my youth caused me to hate pranks and especially detest April Fool's jokes. I stated my distaste so often that my kids rolled their eyes as they grew older. When my wife of 20 years played an April Fool's joke on me, I never considered that possibility.
My name is Declan Callahan. I'm one of six siblings, four of them men - including one set of twins - and two of them women. I'm also the youngest male. Even when I turned 18, my parents were only 50. Growing up, my older siblings sometimes played pranks on each other. But they always exempted me once they understand what I experienced at school.
To understand why I hate pranks so much, I need to cite several examples of practical jokes played on me during my elementary and high school years. As a newcomer to John Jacobs Elementary the year I started first grade, I found it difficult to fit in. Hair colored like a carrot, ears that stuck out and my short height that meant many of the girls were taller than me, made me an easy target.
My father, a housing contractor, moved to Centerville because two large computer chip companies were building new plants. Demand for new housing ran strong. In response, the county changed the zoning on large tracts of marginal farmland. Dad and others cashed in. Between the time we moved to the area and the time my second set of twins went to college; the population grew by a factor of ten.
Steve Ryder, the tallest and biggest in my class of 23 students. welcomed me on the first day. I soon discovered his smile concealed the actions of a bully. He started calling me "elephant ears," and "carrot top" and told me I ran like a girl. My one older sister went to the same school. She and I were of the same height at the time and looked alike in our faces and hair color.
He and his buddies liked to corner me in front of the girls and pull my pants down. I got my head shoved in the toilet so many times I lost count. Complaints to the school administrators went unheeded unless a physical injury resulted from the prank, which never happened. "Boys will be boys," the school principal told my mother one day.
As newcomers and outsiders in the community, dad didn't want to make waves. Steve's father ran the largest existing factory in the area. Steve emulated his father in that they presented a pleasant face, but everyone lived in fear because of their power.
Dad told my three older brothers not to attack Steve because that would make him go after me harder. He knew how to egg his buddies on, so they got the blame. One of my classmates, Greg Adamson, tried to get retribution by playing a prank on one of Steve's buddies. In response, they filled his locker full of pig shit.
I tried to get back at him once after he kept leaving items like frogs, snakes and women's underwear in my high school locker. I left a frog in his. In return, he put pot and illegal pain pills in my locker. Possession of pot resulted in an automatic jail sentence in our state, even for juveniles. I sneaked it out of the locker and buried it in a foundation form. Crews poured concrete into the form the next day.
The worst trick wasn't on me directly. On April 1 of my seventh-grade year, Steve and his friends placed paper sacks of dog and cow manure on the porches of four duplexes my father's company was constructing. Like most kids that age, they cared only for their trick and didn't pay attention to the weather forecast.
High winds came up soon after they left their packages and blew the burning manure through the open windows and doors. All four duplexes and three nearby houses burned to the foundations. Despite insurance paying most of the rebuilding costs, the fire nearly caused my father's company to go bankrupt.
Times were changing and physical pranks and jokes were getting people in trouble as I entered high school. Steven and his buddies merely adapted to the new rules. They continued to target me because of my red hair and ears. Anything I planned to submit, I always double checked because they liked to swap out senior English short stories with an XXX rated story, for example.
Steve's constant attacks left me uber-sensitive to pranks and especially April Fool's jokes. I continually made my sentiments well known. I repeatedly made the statement in March and anyone who heard it rolled their eyes. If my employees played April Fool's pranks on each other, they did it away from work.
I'd been the brunt of so many of Steven's efforts that my parents agreed I need to go out of state for college. We lived near the state border, so the college I attended wasn't over three hours' drive away. Once away from my tormentor's influence, I shone.
I added six inches in height and 60 pounds of mostly muscle. Because of my small size in high school, I joined the wrestling team and continued wrestling in college. I never won a championship, but I always added team points. In college, I met Liesel Jorgensen, and we fell in love. She took accounting. I considered business as a major, but went in another direction.
No one else in my family worked in the medical field. From my various injuries in sports and from injuries related to pranks over the years, I gained a strong admiration for physical therapists and took that major with a business minor.
I came from a family with many twins, including my mother. Several of my dad's cousins were twins. It wasn't a tremendous surprise when Liesel discovered she would have twin girls. Fourteen months after our marriage, we welcomed a set of fraternal twin girls.
We held off on having more children. Liesel came from a large family, too. We both wanted a boy. Three years later, another set of twins came long, this time fraternal boys.
Marin has red hair, and Meara does not. Same with the boys. Grant has red hair and Greg's is black. The four children never suffered the level of teasing and bullying I did because they were larger in stature, and the school district changed its policies. As the area grew, Steven's father lost his influence, and bullying became a sensitive topic in schools.
According to my mother's research, if a couple has a set of fraternal twins like we did, the chance of having another set of fraternal twins multiplied by four, making it 1 in 12. Nearly all my parents' siblings' families contained at least one set of twins.
Once the ultrasound revealed Liesel was having twins again, we found a house that a contractor hadn't finished because he ran into asbestos in the insulation and the HVAC ducts. Using services provided by many of my cousins and friends, we finished the project in three months. Somewhere over the years, various owners converted the 1892 Queen Anne style three-story house into a boarding facility with 16 small rooms on the two upper floors and an addition.
During my sixth year out of college, a local gym went up for sale. My father helped me finance the purchase. A good gym and physical therapy practice feed each other. Liesel expanded her accounting business and employed eight other people. We always tried to make time for each other, but with a set of 19-year-old and 16-year-old twins, that didn't happen as often as we wanted.
The cataclysmic event happened the year Liesel, and I turned 43. Over the past year, Liesel's parents died. In the fall, another gym went up for sale. We decided together to purchase it, but two weeks before the close on October 31, the couple who owned the gym died in a vehicle accident.
The three children couldn't decide how to proceed, understandable considering the season. Faced with a building foreclosure and unable to determine the income and expenses, they agreed to sell it to me "as is" with an adjustable price depending on what I found. We agreed the sale would close on the last Friday in March to allow us enough time to go through the existing records.
Add into the package the absence of our twin girls, who often helped their mother. They excelled at sorting through disjointed records. She told me some farmers put their receipts in shoeboxes throughout the year and delivered them to her in late March.
To help, I took Friday, March 29 and the following Monday off and go through the new gym's records. Before I started, Liesel told me that at least three containers of a plastic file box size or larger of records were missing. My wife's natural sense of order made searching simple in one way, but harder in another. If a person misfiled one sheet or folder, a search easily overlooked the missing document.
