May 3, 2007

• Sarah Herrera & Oreo

  

  Oreo, circa 1985

  Many years ago, my roommate Daniel and I were fresh out of college and living in a small house in Chicago.  We both worked at different banks and we had been sharing a car for a year and it was getting unmanageable.  One day the bank he was working for had a “repo” or repossessed car that they needed to sell to recoup the loan money.  The reason the bank had repossessed the car was that the car’s owner was dead.  Her name was Sarah, and she had committed suicide……IN THE CAR.

  Now, as creepy as that was, we were recent college graduates, sharing a car, and living in Chicago.  We really needed a 2nd car but couldn’t afford one.  The car that Sarah killed herself in was a Mercury Cougar in mint condition, save for the driver’s side window that had been broken to retrieve Sarah.  We were told her death was by carbon monoxide, but that’s really all we knew.  The bank offered us a deal; pay off the remainder of the $1000 loan and the car was ours.  So we split the money, (actually I lent Daniel his half), and picked up the car “as is”.  (By the way Daniel, you STILL owe me $500…I know you’re reading this too…so PAY UP, or your 4 kids won’t be getting anything from me for Christmas this year, LOL  )

  So, after obtaining a copy of Sarah’s death certificate (which I still have by the way, I’ll have to scan it one of these days), we picked up the car from the bank’s parking lot and drove it home.  We were both a little freaked out, because the windows still hadn’t been fixed, and all of Sarah’s things were still in it.  For whatever reason, no one took the time to clean it out.  So there we were, with Sarah’s Kleenex, Sarah’s lipstick,  and something else of Sarah’s, but more about that in a minute. 

  As soon as we got in the car, my dog Oreo started whining and wouldn’t stop.  As soon as we drove out of the parking lot, we heard a screeching noise coming from the right front wheel well.  We turned a corner and heard it again.  We had no idea what it was, but figured it was something wrong with the alignment and didn’t worry too much (what did we know?).  We were late for a movie or something, so we dropped Oreo off, drove to the theater, parked the car, and went in.  Two hours later we came out to a note on our windshield.  It read simply, “What kind of SICKO are you?  There’s a cat under your hood!!!”  (I think I still have that note somewhere too, LOL!)

  Sure enough, there was a cat, not under the hood, but in the wheel well between the tire and the hood.  We couldn’t see it, but we sure heard it every time we turned the wheel.  We took the car to the police, and they told us it was the damnedest thing they’d ever seen, but they couldn’t help us.  We took it to a mechanic, and they said it would cost us $200 to try to get it out (alive).  Finally we drove the car (with as few turns as possible) to Daniel’s brother in law, an amateur mechanic.  He spent 2 hours taking the front end of the car apart, and finally pulled out a full sized adult cat.  The first thing the cat did was go up to my dog Oreo and start playing with him.  Oreo loved cats, though they usually didn’t love him.  This cat was different though, and they got along splendidly.

  I wasn’t as allergic to cats then as I am now, so we decided to keep her.  We named the cat “Sarah” in honor of the car’s former owner.  Daniel’s last name was Herrera, so the cat was Sarah Herrera.   Where Sarah came from and how she got into such a “spot” we never knew.  We suspected she was a stray and found the car in the parking garage the morning we got it, after taking it out for a test drive.  It was a cold Chicago winter morning, and we think maybe Sarah climbed up into the wheel well to stay warm, and then somehow got stuck and couldn’t get out of the small opening.

  Of course the other theory was that the cat was really a reincarnation of the car’s owner, Sarah, and perhaps the human Sarah was a dog lover, and that’s why the feline Sarah and the canine Oreo got along so well.  Regardless, Sarah and Oreo had a great relationship.  Sarah died a year later of a kidney ailment.  She was the first and last cat I will ever have, but I have fond memories of her

  

  Tori, a Sarah lookalike & Oreo circa 1996

  What made me think of this story you ask??

  Stowaway cat beats security

  From correspondents in Ottawa

  May 03, 2007 09:57am

  Send this article: Print Email

  An adventurous tabby took an unexpected trip this week, after slyly crawling into her keeper’s luggage and clearing lax Canadian airport security.

  Mary Martell unwittingly travelled 1400km from Saint John Airport on Canada’s Atlantic coast all the way to Toronto, then to Niagara-on-the-Lake by car with the live cat in her suitcase.

  She told public broadcaster CBC today the bag was scanned at the airport, but she was not stopped and it was eventually loaded into the airplane’s cargo bay.

  “They had asked me, when they put … the luggage through the X-ray, whether I had a turkey,” she said.

  “(Airport security) kept going back and forth with (the suitcase).

  “I was adamant: ‘Look, I have no turkey’.”

  Ms Martell said she only discovered Ginger, the family pet, when she opened her luggage in a hotel room, after the three-hour journey.

  The cat had apparently snuck into a bag while Ms Martell was packing.

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  ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
  “Scientists in Japan say they have developed a patch you put on your cat’s paw that will tell you if your cat is suffering from stress. My cat sleeps 23 ½ hours a day. The only stress he is going to have is when you put the patch on his paw.” — Jay Leno
  

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  I can’t blog anymore tonight as I have to clean my house and get ready for the next set of visitors to the “Hotel Careyfornia”   I’m picking Marc & Mike up in Long Beach tomorrow.  I haven’t seen them since their wedding in Montreal last September.  Marc is one of my dearest friends in the world, and I’m really looking forward to seeing him.  We’re the type of friends who stay up until dawn talking, so I don’t know how much blogging I’ll get done this weekend, but I’ll try to post pictures at least.

   

  In the meantime, here are some topics for you to think about until next week.

  • What is your Mom worth??
  • Man sues dry cleaner for 67 million. Only in America
  • “Success is not no violence” George W. Bushism
  • Sanjaya’s “seedy” past
  • And one last thing…I’ve started sleep walking. Honest.  I’ll explain next week. UGH!

  Have a nice weekend everyone! –Carey

  • 3:41 pm
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