I know that I have many posts to write detailing our holiday extravaganzas, but I must share with you the events of Saturday evening. It all started a couple weeks ago when our neighbors who live two doors down asked us if we could take them to the airport the day after Christmas. As it turned out, we were leaving town the same day and so we agreed to pick them up from the airport instead (since we would be home from Biloxi, MS in time). After getting a set of their house and van keys, I had almost forgotten about the favor until the husband emailed me on Thursday. With the flight details confirmed, everything seemed set to go off without a hitch … or so I thought.
About an hour before the plane was scheduled to arrive Aidan and I walked over to the neighbor’s house and opened the side door to the garage. My nose was instantly struck by a strange and foul odor, but I blew it off as the typical damp basement garage smell (though unfortunate for such a new house, I thought). However, when I opened the garage bay door all of a sudden two pet cats came darting out of nowhere and ran out of the garage — one a Siamese and the other a gray longhair. Immediately, the Siamese cat darted into a storm water drain and the longhair cat ran across the street. “They didn’t tell me they had cats,” I exclaimed! About this same time my cell phone started ringing off of the hook. “Can I call you back later? I’m kind of in the middle of a crisis here!” The seen was quite chaotic.
In a panic, I enlisted the help of the neighbor who lives in between our houses (he was out washing cars) and tried to corral the two cats. At one point I almost coaxed the longhair into the front door of the house, but it kept acting skittish and ran away whenever we approached it. All the while both cats were meowing incessantly. The neighbor remarked that they sounded hungry. “Maybe they missed their owners,” I thought? Finally, we caught the Siamese cat and returned it to the garage and I went off on my way, leaving the side door unlocked in case the neighbor caught the other cat. By this time I was quite frazzled. I was also embarrassed that I was going to have to tell our neighbors that I let one of their cats outside. “Hopefully,” I thought, “they get out all of the time.”
Later, at the airport, while the husband was loading car seats into the minivan and the wife was waiting for luggage, I mentioned that one of their cats had gotten out of the garage … accidentally.
“We don’t have cats,” replied the husband.
“Oh really,” I said with surprise, kicking myself for the aggravation of trying to round up cats that did not even belong to them.
“Then how did…”
“Maybe they got in when Bill returned our van?”
Bill was the guy who had taken them to the airport. However it happened, those cats were in their garage for ten days. No wonder it smelled like cat pee (and more); no wonder they sounded like they were starving (because they were). And some family in the neighborhood has probably been thinking all this time that both of their cats have run away. The moral of the story: 1) do not leave your garage door open for any length of time; 2) do not inflict your cats on your neighbors (i.e., keep them inside); and 3) this would never have happened to a dog. 
Mark Issenberg of 
