New Orleans is a magical place. I have said this before and I'm saying it again. Now just because it is magical it does not follow that that magic is always necessarily a good thing or a pleasurable experience.I have one such magical tale to tell.
When I got home one evening last week, I parked my car and got out. When I looked down there I saw a pair of shoes. They were set out as if their occupant had either vanished or had laid them in the bottom of their closet. They were black slingbacks. They may have caused their owner some pain and thus had been discarded on the walk back home. Their placement on the side of the road, beside the trash can, was definitely a mystery.
These shoes reminded me of the Wizard of Oz. Every time I looked at them I heard the high pitched shrieks of "I'm melting, I'm melting!". I rushed indoors to get my camera to capture them.
Jump forward in time.
2.30 am.
BOOM, CRASH!!
What sounded like a bolt of lightening hitting the ground outside our front door, woke me abruptly from my sleep. Then, as if to ensure that I was in fact awake, a car alarm went off. This is the normal progression of most thunder claps in the middle of the night in New Orleans. Only this time there was no sound of rain and no subsequent claps of thunder were heard.
Dazza and I stumbled to the door to peek out. When we looked our cars had moved. Oh no!!
We grabbed some clothes and stumbled into the night, cautiously, not wanting to get caught up in any nasty incident.
We found that our big station wagon Passat had been shunted about 8 feet into our teeny weeny little Honda Fit. There was debris on the ground from what looked like a red vehicle but there was no vehicle to be found.
We did find our neighbors also wandering around trying to decipher the loud noise that woke them and how many of their cars had also been hit by this mystery vehicle.
Our big fear was that they had gone. Vanished like a tornado leaving us to pick up the pieces of their pandemonium.
But out of the darkness our neighbors at the end of the block started yelling out to us. A woman had seen the whole thing from her porch as she waited for her husband to get home from his late shift. And she told us that the two guys wandering around at the end of the adjacent street were the cause of our tornado and that the pick up truck they had been driving was parked the wrong way on a one way street.
The cops turned up and arrested the drunk (very) driver and his passenger. To our amazement (at their drunken stupidity) we had the name of the driver and he had insurance!! The cops were very professional and nice. And we were all thankful no one was hurt.
But what about the shoes and their melted occupant. We all discussed their presence (I was not the only one to have notice them) and now absence. We all assumed they must be underneath our little Fit, squished by its little tyres. But when the next day we moved the cars, poof .... they were nowhere to be seen ......
