Still scared

No matter how old you get, and how mentally feeble your parents become, you always fear breaking something of theirs.

“You broke the parent’s garage door opener?” My brother accused me of between bursts of laughter.

“Can we just discuss the chain of events before we start assigning blame?” I begged. “I just pressed the button.”

Breaking things in the parents’ house is a big deal, because you have to deal with Mom. We are still hearing to this day about a regrettable incident of collateral damage that happened when I was like six. Hours after my parents returned from their cross-continental trek to Alaska Mom mentioned this pitcher and the matching basin it used to have until my brother broke it.

Seriously, I don’t think she noticed but I totally rolled my eyes at that moment.
First of all, we didn’t break the basin. Our G.I Joes were on a secret mission to break into a terrorist headquarters, and had to stealthily repel from the built-in book case to by the stove the sofa. Snake Eyes tied part of his repelling apparatus to this antique iron. It was the kind that had to be heated in a fire and then used while massively hot.

So during the most sensitive part of Snake Eyes’ descent the iron lost its grip, plummeted to the counter, where the pitcher and basin sat, crushing about one-eight of the basin, which apparently also was an antique and had been passed down on my mother’s side of the family.

Mom heard the crash, came in and started yelling, completely oblivious to the fact that she was compromising Snake Eyes’ mission. Had Snake Eyes completed his mission who knows what sort of sensitive intel he could have discovered…. There you have it people, my mother is responsible for 9-11. Had her iron been more firmly secured to the bookcase when I was six, in the 80s, 9-11 would not have happened.

So yeah, I tried to fix the parent’s garage door opener, but not so much. My story is that it was having trouble reaching the ground, so I thought I’d take it off the chain and just let it cycle. This was a mistake.

Instead of stopping it slammed into the opener with enough force to open the housing and send two pieces spinning to the ground. I was only able to find one. So after a few frantic calls to the brother, and the former roommate/adoptive brother -- who didn’t pick up his cell phone because he was “Working” – I managed to secure the garage door and left the mess for the parents… who surprisingly were cool with it.