A creepy musical mystery chills the heart of suburbia

In disaster movies, often you open your front door and a tsunami hits you in the face. Last weekend, something very similar happened to me, except drier. As I stepped out onto the porch I heard music. Horror movie music. The kind of music you hear when a guy is about to pop out of your roses with a machete. It was thin, reedy, electronic. Super creepy. It seemed to be coming from my neighbor's hedge. 

The tune...wait for it...was "Happy Birthday."

If you have ever seen a horror movie, you know better than to approach a hedge, so I took precautions. I set my phone on "video" and hit record. In the clip, the crunch of my neighbor's parched lawn under my feet is clearly audible, the drought a constant reminder of my own inevitable death.

My neighbor's car was parked in his driveway. Black. Not a good sign. I thought maybe he had left his phone in the car and his ringtone was on endless repeat, but what kind of jackmope uses "Happy Birthday" as a ringtone? 

No. As I got closer I could tell that my first impulse was right—the creepazoid tune was coming from inside the hedge!

I turned to my daughter, who is a college student and full of ideas. She was on her phone, googling "enchanted hedge cures," I hoped. No. Turns out she was just trying to capture Pokemon characters in the street, which is a thing you can do now with an app, apparently. 

I went around the hedge and trespassed on my other neighbor's lawn. Yes. Music. Up high in the hedge, loud. But why? How?

We decided to walk the dog and ponder some options. As I stood across the street watching my dog foul a third neighbor's dying lawn, the lady at the second house poked her head out her front door and looked incredulously at her hedge, then disappeared back inside. She just moved in. Paid a fortune too. Right about now she was thinking "That !!#%&$! realtor."

I came back with a stepladder and zoned in on the tune. After fondling foliage for a minute, I found the culprit—the little device that goes in singing birthday cards. No card. Just the circuit and batteries. Did a bird drop it there, or did some teenager think it would be funny to mess with our suburban chill? I will never know, but I did save it. Halloween is not that far away.

. . .

Just another unsolvable mystery of life

It all started, as so many things do, with junk from under the passenger seat. Not ancient French fries. No. On the way to school last week, my son reaches under there and comes up with an empty kiwi-strawberry Snapple bottle. 

"Whose was this?" he asks. I have no idea. I haven't had a Snapple since 50-pounds-of-Bill-Clinton ago. 

That night I ask my wife, "Hey, did you have a Snapple when you drove my car last? Or did Laurie have one?" 

"We went in Laurie's car that day," she says. "Besides, I haven't had a Snapple since they tore that Saddam statue down." 

I text my daughter at college. She's home once a month or so. "I can't remember when I last had Snapple. Especially kiwi-strawberry," she replies. (She's a boba connoisseur.)

I rack my brain about who's been in my car. I email my friend Dave. "Yo, that day we went out geocaching, did you drink a Snapple?"

"I did not," he writes back, almost defiantly, because he only rolls with Gatorade. 

Turns out nobody drank a Snapple in my car. I might guess that nobody wants to confess to leaving trash under my seat, but that makes no sense, since they know I'm the first to leave trash under my seat, at least if the seat's already piled high. 

I flash back two decades. I came out one morning to find my car door ajar and a huge pile of Kleenex on the passenger seat. Someone, I suspected, had used my unlocked car overnight for an amorous escapade. The park near us was known for such vehicular prostitutional activity, and I guess they figured the cops wouldn't be looking at driveways.

But coming back 20 years later just to plant a Snapple bottle? Just to mess with me? I find that far-fetched. And I watch "Game of Thrones," so I know far-fetched. 

To recap: I didn't drink the Snapple, my wife didn't drink it, my kids didn't, nor did anyone who has ridden in the car that we can remember. I sometimes leave my sun roof open at work, so it is theoretically possible that somebody lofted an Abdul-Jabbar quality sky hook, and the bottle miraculously then lodged under the seat. Possible, but not likely.

Buddha famously said, "Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth." Clearly, Buddha never had a car.