The Mystery of the Holy Tupperware Lid

 

We recently got a new back deck. The old one was well past its prime and overdue for replacement. The new one, made from Trex decking material, is bigger and better in every way.

In the process of tearing down the old deck, our contractor Evan found the faded, beat-up Tupperware lid pictured above. Terry had been looking for that lid for years and never would have guessed it had somehow ended up underneath our deck.

What was most intriguing, though, was the small rectangular hole cut into the middle of the lid. When Terry sent a picture of it to our family group text chat, there was speculation that perhaps some critter or other had chewed through the lid during its long years of dark isolation under the deck.

But upon closer inspection, the hole seems too rectangular and clean to be the work of a raccoon or possum. Plus, there appear to be slice marks around the hole, which would suggest that someone had taken a knife and intentionally cut out a small square of the plastic.

When you live for many years in a house of seven people, five of whom are children, you usually assume the "someone" in situations like this is one of your offspring. You don't try to make sense of it, because there is no making sense of it. There is no logical answer to why someone would cut a hole in a Tupperware lid and then hide it outside beyond, "Well, we have kids, you see..."

Terry and I are at a stage of life where our older children feel comfortable confessing various illegal and otherwise inadvisable things they did while growing up. At least one of these stories comes out at every family gathering, and as I've said before, I am simultaneously amused, fascinated and horrified when it does.

No one fully owned up to cutting the hole in the lid and hiding it, but Jack thinks it's fairly likely that he was the culprit. He doesn't specifically remember doing it, but in his own words, "It seems like the kind of dumb thing I would have done when I was little."

So mystery solved, I suppose. The lid is no longer usable, but at least Terry can finally rest easy knowing what happened to it.

And she and I together can say a prayer of thanks that our children have all grown up safely despite occasional and egregious lapses in judgment along the way.

We once took a (failed) excursion through the woods to meet Cleveland Indians second basemen Duane Kuiper

I recently had coffee with my buddy Ann Marie. She was the one who forwarded the initial email that led to me interviewing for and accepting my new position at Goodyear. I start there in two short days and will be forever grateful to her for sending me the opportunity (the coffee I bought her doesn't even begin to repay her adequately).

Ann Marie lives in the Big Turtle condominium complex in Willoughby. When many of those condos were being built in the late 70s, my friends and I used to play in and around the semi-constructed buildings all the time.

As I related to Ann Marie, the most famous Big Turtle resident back then was a man by the name of Duane Kuiper, who played second base for my beloved Cleveland Indians. For decades, most pro athletes in Cleveland have lived on the west side of town, so it was exciting that at least one of them chose to live out in our area.

Kuiper played for the Tribe through the 1981 season, so I'm guessing it was probably 1979 or 1980 when my friends and I got it in our heads that we were going to walk to the Big Turtle condos and meet him.

To get there, you had to go through Douglas Woods, a several-acre plot of trees and trails where we hung out quite a bit, and which sadly no longer exists. At some point when you walked through the woods, you crossed the border from Wickliffe into Willoughby.

I remember emerging from the woods on the Willoughby side next to the western-most Big Turtle condos, and only then did it occur to us that:

(a) We had no idea exactly where Duane Kuiper lived. There were/are two large Big Turtle complexes, and we lacked even the first clue where his condo was located.

(b) We also had no idea what we were going to do once we got there. Knock on the door? Throw stones at his window until he came out? And would he even be home?

We simply hadn't considered any of this in our feeble 10-year-old minds until we actually got to our destination.

Our solution was simply to give up, play in the woods, and throw rocks at each other, which we used to do all the time.

We never did meet Duane Kuiper, but I'm guessing we had more fun in the woods that day anyway.