My dad had strange taste in music. Not only that, but he would pick a CD and listen to it straight through over and over, letting it loop in the car to the point that you’d learn every word of, say, Cake’s Fashion Nugget before you even knew what was happening.
That was a lesser tragedy. Much worse were flirtations with Savage Garden, and nobody will ever forget the tragedy that was the Poe CD.
Not able to take one more run-through of “Angry Johnny,” my older brother stole and stashed the CD. There was a brief and desperate search for it, but dad was quick to accept that it was gone as there was really nowhere for it to be besides sitting in the CD player, and if he was being honest with himself he knew we all hated it too much to have stolen it for personal enjoyment.
My acts of rebellion were shit by comparison. There was one incident where we had a minor disagreement on the going price of a mowed lawn, so instead of mowing the entire yard I carved a giant Z into the grass, a la Zorro, and parked the mower back in the garage. After that, a neighbor kid did all the mowing.
Because I stayed out of trouble, it was a surprise when my dad started hounding me about a missing blender lid.
“Have you seen the lid to the blender?”
“Did you do something with the blender lid?”
He and his third wife got really into making margaritas in the blender, and the missing lid was the only thing keeping them from a summer of bliss on the porch with cold drinks in hand.
I had no idea what he was talking about. What would I possibly do with the blender lid? Why would I, a fourteen year-old boy, have any use for the blender lid, especially in a situation that involved the lid alone, no blender? You might as well ask me what happened to the whisk, or maybe a garlic press.
Of course, the safe bet was that he got drunk and lost it. He was using the blender for margaritas for weeks. How much of a stretch is it to imagine that a guy loaded on margaritas was less than careful when it came to putting away kitchen items? So by the time he started really fishing, asking left-field questions like, “Are you sure you didn’t borrow it and take it to your mom’s house?” I was pretty done talking about the goddamn blender lid already.
This was a story that I told people all the time, and a friend’s mom embraced it to the point that she once got me a gift of a blender Christmas ornament. It was so strange, this missing piece of an appliance and the attempt to pin it on me.
Which is why it was especially weird to find out what really happened a decade later.
I was walking with my brother, and we got on the topic of the blender lid.
He said, “Oh yeah. I did that.”
I know it’s just a lid to a blender, but it had always stuck in my brain. Why in the hell would he think I took it? It turned out that he wasn’t that crazy. Someone really was out to get him, and his blender lid. It just wasn’t the person he suspected.
Call it a prank, call it a cry for attention, or call it straight-up fucking with a person. But I figure that I’d let someone chain me up in a dungeon and shock me with a car battery while questioning me about a blender lid if it meant that someone who freed us from the tyranny of Poe would live free.