Parallel Parking and Dial Tones

The Next Generation

There aren’t many things left I’ve mastered that technology hasn’t. The hours of painstaking failure I had with a pen on notebook paper were happily made needless. Mrs. Buxbaum, my fifth grade teacher, was wrong. Even with my barely legible penmanship, I made a career out of writing. Sure, without a keyboard, I might have had to keep my day job. What that would have been, I can’t tell. There is nothing I’m as good at as words. Except maybe, parking.

Which is what brought me to this topic. My EV asks me all the time if I’d like it’s parking assist. No, I do not! It’s a matter of pride. But thanks for the idea for this story.

When you have a car in Brooklyn, maybe any city, you learn to parallel park. During my early driving years we lived on a five lane boulevard my father referred to as the, Champs-Élysées of Brooklyn. On this side of the pond we called it, Ocean Parkway. Like a bowling alley with two gutters, it was treelined and included opposite service roads with parking on either side.

Concrete benches were set up in a dotted line from Coney Island to the Prospect Expressway. Old folks, chess players, kids, young lovers and drug dealers, were happy to offer a running commentary while you attempted to squeeze your car into a an empty space. I made it work or I’d be driving around the block again. It wasn’t until I left the state that I understood not everyone tacked on 20 minutes for traffic and another 20 for parking. 

I did this!

Good spots were at a premium. On my slice of Ocean Parkway there were several apartment buildings, one catering hall and a giant cemetery that no one wanted to park beside. It wasn’t the dead people they were worried about, it was the “punk kids,” many of whom I knew, removing a radio, smashing a window and making the ten minute run through graves until they hopped onto the elevated F train at Bay Parkway. 

Not everyone had a car, of course, but those of us who did learned early how to maneuver into tight spaces. Sometimes someone would steal it or ride so close you didn’t have a shot. Assholes are everywhere, but driving ones are especially infuriating and parking ones open up a dark pit inside my soul. Deep breath. I’m almost over it after these long thirty or so years. Unless I’m driving in the city again. 

In my mother’s passenger seat, not strapped in, I learned to size a parking spot. When it was my time, I all but intuited the moment my front end crossed the other guy’s rearview, and I cut the wheel as hard as I could, and eased it in. I never gave up and I have a preternatural patience with it, because I know that surrender means starting the search again. That. Was. Not. Going. To. Happen.

Which is only true inside the five boroughs of any large city.  If you’ve honked your way through traffic, you know. This is your every day unless you want to pay what amounts to rent on another apartment to park in a lot. You do what you gotta do. Am I right?

But in the suburban existence I’ve enjoyed most of my adult life, it’s one of my magic talents. When a concert or a show came up, I’d take the lead and agree to find the spot. No daughter of my mother was going to pay for parking. 

Every lane change was cringeworthy for them, but there’s nothing like a little acceleration in traffic to get the blood going! And don’t get me started on the art of the last minute merge or trying to find a place to rest—that last, tiny spot. If my husband was with me, he’d close his eyes. Because that would save him, you know? And it might take me a couple soft taps on a few bumpers. That’s why they’re there, right? They are not called, “never bumpers.” 

“The spot is smaller than the car! I don’t know how you do it.”

And I beam with pride.

Which is why it pisses me off when the car asks me if I want assistance. Puh-lease. In this giant parking lot with a thousand white lines? Save it for someone who needs it. Like my husband, who seems to think the lines are the target, not the boundary.

No thank you, car. I got this.

Which got me thinking about phone numbers. I had a knack for that, too. I still know my own childhood one. 377-1761. I knew my best friend’s, several relatives’ and my first real boyfriend’s 444-6979. Aunt Augusta’s was 228-5832. She’s been gone since the early 1990s.

I knew those numbers through area code changes and the switch to touchtone. Maybe I know my childrens’ phone numbers, but I’m not sure? I hope no one asks me at gunpoint. I only have to remember a person’s name to call them. Or how I misspelled it when I put it into my cell phone, though by now my devices intuit what I mean. This progress I can get behind. Until the grid goes down.

My career in editing began writing indexes in the back of textbooks. I don’t think that’s a thing anymore and if it is, it’s been automated. There was something in that line-by-line, close reading that I loved. But it took weeks sometimes. And the scroll has deadened my attention span to the size of a pea. I’m not sure I’d be good at it anymore.

I imagine my grandmother knew how to darn socks and maybe had a corner of her mind where she remembered people parking horses, and she certainly used an operator to make a phone call. My parents were parking on a stick shift, always carried cash and found their routes inside a box of paper maps they stored in the glove compartment—all things I’m grateful to have bypassed.

The mastery we work for often becomes useless in the course of a lifetime. As it must. And yet progress and artificial intelligence being what they are, what has all this extra brain space gotten us? A lot. Also, a lot more than we can handle?

In this technological age, I have come to see how much time gets wasted learning things you won’t need to know in a few years, like how to type on an alpha numeric keypad, though I think it’s a self defeating mistake to regret it. Each generation makes something that renders the previous one, obsolete. It’s a natural, if unpleasant evolution.

I’ve had fun all week collecting and thinking on these few things. What are yours? Drop a note in the comments.