The Ballad of Churchy the Tortoise or another cold case solved...

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We had this desert tortoise when I was growing up. We called him Churchy. Nobody remembers for certain, but we believe he was named after Winston Churchill. It was illegal to keep them, but somebody had found him on the side of the road and figured it wasn't safe there, took him and gave him to my mom. He lived in our backyard and we fed him lettuce and carrots and whatever plants were growing back there. We had a hill in the back and Churchy had dug himself a burrow in there and when the weather got cold, he would sometimes disappear for days, maybe even weeks. I don't remember after all these years. But one year, it was 1971, the year of the Sylmar earthquake, Churchy never came out. We thought perhaps his burrow had collapsed on top of him and buried him or that he had burrowed his way into somebody else's yard. Fast forward to 2009 and I was asking my siblings if any of them remembered how the tortoise got his name. Nobody remembered for sure, but my sister told me that she knew the real story of what happened to him. And here it is in my sister's own words: So everyone assumes he was in a burrow at the time of the earthquake and the burrow caved in and we lost him. Truth is, a few weeks earlier I had taken him to school for show and tell and gifted him to the teacher for the classroom. You can tell everyone, I don't care. It's a happier ending that what everyone thinks happened. I assume he had a very nice life : ) And everybody thought I was the only person in the family who did that sneaky stuff! Geez... Case closed.