My Sweet Little Felon

It was because of a couple of apes that my sweet, innocent boy became a felon. No, he hasn’t been convicted yet. No, he hasn’t even been charged yet. But my little boy is most certainly as guilty as any felon ever has been.

The boy had been waiting for quite some time for Netflix to send the third installment of the Planet of the Apes movies to our mailbox. He waited as the teenager kept secretly moving sports movies up to the top of the queue. He waited as his mother kept secretly moving award winning documentaries to the top of the queue. Finally, after weeks of waiting, it was the boy’s turn to get his movie.

The boy didn't usually get the mail. But on this day, he was in a hurry to get his ape movie. The boy walked to the end of the street with the keys to the mailbox in his hand. The metal box housed a number of locked mailboxes for the neighborhood. The boy put the key into box number 14, turned the key, took out all of the mail inside, locked the box back up again and ran home with the pile of mail.

The boy was disappointed to find that the Netflix envelope was not in the pile of mail. I was surprised to find out that none of the mail was for our family. I was a bit embarrassed to see that all of the mail the boy had brought home was for our neighbor. The boy was shocked to find out that our mailbox was actually number 16.

I had no idea how the boy opened the neighbor’s mailbox with our key, but I knew I had to put the mail back. I had to cover for my boy. I had to undo his crime. We tried to make the number 16 key open up the number 14 box again. We tried to unsteal the mail. We couldn’t do it. The key wouldn’t work. The criminal boy and his “accessory to the crime“ mother stood in the street with the stolen mail in hand. We were dumbfounded at our bumbling inability to unsteal the mail that the boy had stolen so easily only moments before.

We ran home and pulled the blinds shut. We looked up stolen mail on the computer. We found that if you willfully take mail from an authorized depository and have that mail in your possession, with the knowledge that it had been stolen, then you can be charged with a class D felony. The boy was screwed. And having already read half of the neighbor’s stolen Country Home magazine and given their bills a serious once over, I speculated that I wasn’t much better off.

We nervously hid out in the house for the next few hours. We peeked through the blinds each time we heard a car, hoping it wasn’t the neighbor. When the husband and the teenager got home from basketball practice we sent the teenager to the mailbox to get our real mail. We sent the husband to return the mail “accidentally delivered to our box” to the neighbor. We told them nothing.

As our family sat and watched the Planet of the Apes that night, the boy and I tried to forget our eventful afternoon. We were ready to shake our criminal pasts. We were ready to be good, law abiding citizens. And we vowed to each other, that this unfortunate incident should never be spoken about again.



Check This Out!

The snack of the week here at Slightly Exaggerated is dried cherries and almonds. The retro entertainment of the week is Dan Fogelberg songs, especially the lesser known, Times Like These. And the movie of the week is, of course, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, especially if you’ve already seen the first two in the series. Feel free to watch it with the blinds open.