Happy April Fool’s Day!

I hope you enjoyed a prank-filled April 1. I mean that sincerely … a day without a good prank is just, well, a day.

I come by my practical-joke predilection honestly — I’m from a long line of pranksters. In fact, in our family, April Fool’s Day is somewhat superfluous; it’s almost too obvious.

For example, if you spend more than three seconds looking for something — the ketchup, a can of soda, your left shoe — then you have fallen prey to our most common practical joke. If, on the other hand, you are the one caught in the act of moving, which usually has to take place in a split second while your victim’s back is turned, returning the item is usually accompanied with a sheepish grin.

My father was a consummate prankster, while my mother was more likely to leave funny notes in my lunch box when I was attending graduate school on the weekends. But my dad, ah … my dad. In the days when Colorado had just one area code, all we needed to dial were the last number of our prefix and four other digits to place a call. So if someone should ask for the number of, say, the A&W, my dad would rapid fire five random digits, and people fell for it all the time, me included.

One of my own minor pranks is to remove the barrels of ink from my colleagues’ pens (and then put them somewhere on the table or the desk). I also take advantage of telephones from the workplace. When one of my colleagues in Colorado Springs agreed to leave a voice mail for my sister; the message went something like this: “Ma’am, I’ve got a pile of your parking tickets here in front of me. There are 543,000 residents in El Paso County and you have amassed more than anyone else. Please clear this up by calling my assistant, Andrea Doe-ree-ay, you know like the sinking ship…” At that point, you can hear me cackling in the background.

Of course, this was only fair, because my sister is the queen of pranks, such as moving the car when one of her kids left it running outside the house while retrieving something from inside. Or leaping out of the back seat in her “scariest mask,” leaving one little boy shrieking as only little boys can, and leaving another frozen, open-mouthed.

But her best prank is now legend in our family. When my nephew came home from Sea Camp, a marine science program in San Diego, he was excited to show a crowd of us the DVD from his underwater experiences. Have you ever tried to purposely break a disk? It’s harder than you might think, and my sister was out on her porch—with a different disk—trying to shatter it and get it into the case in my nephew’s backpack just in time. The look on his face was priceless.

We may be pranksters, but we’re never mean or cruel and we never, ever do any damage. But we do create laughter, a lot of laughter, the kind of laughter that leaves tears streaming down our faces. The kind of tears that I am enjoying right now.