Pitfalls of parallel parking
Nevada is the latest state to drop parallel parking from the driver’s license test, joining the 17 other states that have abandoned it. Pennsylvania still requires the tricky move – just as it did back in the late 1970s when I took my test.
I passed the first time, so I must have wedged the Volvo into the space along the curb, although I have no such memory. Most likely, it was a skin-of-my-teeth thing, because based on the current situation, my passing the test was not necessarily proof that I’d mastered the parallel.
Mostly, those parking spaces are to be avoided, particularly when the spot in question is an open area the length of my car and not an inch wider. These spaces are the great mirages of the urban parking scene; they seem like friendly concrete gifts, beckoning me to back on in. But we soon learn that’s a trick our minds play on us.
Last week I met a couple of former co-workers at a restaurant on a busy street near the Pitt campus. While still in college, I was first an intern at the radio station where they worked and then a news writer. They were smart and funny professionals then, and are smart and funny retired men now. An afternoon with them would be a treat.
But first to find a space. Noontime in Oakland can be a traffic circus; I watched the clock as I drove in rings around the block looking for a spot. And there was an open one, directly across from the restaurant.
Now, to fill it with my car.
Pull forward, put in reverse, look over right shoulder, cut the wheel, back up, swerve in. The backup camera showed I’d gotten close, but my nose was poking out into the street.
I tried again, and ran my right rear tire up onto the sidewalk.
By now I was holding up traffic. Drivers waiting behind me were hungry and grumpy. It was bad enough that some were glaring at me. I now could begin to worry that my friends might be at a table in the front window of the restaurant, watching.
It’s strange how, even in the middle of an intense task, the mind will jump around. As I inched my car forward and back and forward and back, I meandered my mind through the few memories I have of working with those two friends. As an intern, I was an overeager bundle of nerves – the embodiment of “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” with a serious enough lack of skills to cause them and the other professionals to have to correct my work. Just how much of a mess was I back then? And if my friends were watching out the window at my hapless parking attempt, were their own memories launched back to those days when they first met me in the newsroom?
Of course, as the saying goes, we shouldn’t worry about what people are thinking about us because – they usually aren’t. That’s the other trick our minds like to play on us.
After about five swipes at it, I tucked my car into the space. My friends were not in the front window, but were seated at a table in the back of the restaurant, unaware of the fiasco unfolding out on the street.
I breezed over to them, the former intern who was now all grown up. For all they knew, I’d parked out front on the very first try.