This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

I was eight years old in 1986. We spent our summers at a cottage on the North shore of Prince Edward Island. It was a twenty-minute drive from our house in Charlottetown, but it felt like another universe.

Our family had a small portable radio/cassette player that we called our ‘ghettoblaster’ (?!). My older brother had a copy of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, which seemed like the hardest and most transgressive music imaginable to me at the time. I was yet to purchase my own first album.

I somehow decided I was a fan of Huey Lewis. I bought my first album: Fore! by Huey Lewis and the News. Yes, the one that Michael Bateman raves about while axe-murdering in American Psycho.

When I first peeled off the plastic wrapping, I dropped the cassette (in the case) on the floor of our cottage porch. The cassette was fine, but the plastic outer case cracked. I was crushed. This felt like one of my first real possessions, and I had already damaged it.

I looked around and confirmed that no one else had seen my mistake. I quietly removed the paper cassette case lining from the broken case and swapped it with the intact case from my parents’ Peter, Paul, & Mary cassette. I knew they wouldn’t really care about their cassette case, but I feared the shame of having been careless with my precious new purchase.

With the paper-linings switched, no one would ever tell which case was which. It was a perfect crime that I’ve carried with me, along with every note and word on that album, for the past thirty-four years.