The Alternate Side Parking Reader

In Den Haag

2011-12-29T18:22:00.000-08:00

The venue for Baby Dee’s show on December 17th in den Haag (which in English we call The Hague, and is much easier to pronounce than the Dutch) was Paard van Troje (Trojan Horse), site of the State X–New Forms Festival. I have been trying all this time to figure out why it is called Paard van Troje . . . The entrance is deceptive: you go up a flight of stairs to what looks like a grand old town house on Prinsengracht, a wide street with a trolley running along it, knock on the door, and nobody answers. (I was early.) I entered through the stage door, around the corner, and was led down a hall and through a door and along a ramp behind a screen, on the other side of which was … Baby Dee!

Dee and the band were in the midst of their sound check. For this gig, Dee had reassembled some of the musicians who played with her at the Holland Festival, two years ago: the drummer Alex Neilsen, from Glasgow, and the bassist Joe Carvell, from Coventry, as well as the cellist Matthew Robinson, who had come from Brooklyn earlier that week and rehearsed with Dee in Rotterdam. (Dee will do a show in Rotterdam on January 24th, which will include an exhibit of work by Christina de Vos, who did the wonderful snail paintings for “Regifted Light.”) The performance space at the Trojan Horse was decorated with white tuffets that looked like big marshmallows and smaller black tuffets that looked like licorice Dots. There were also black and white dots on the floor. Dee lamented that she had not worn her Dalmatian pants. There was a piano at stage right and the harp at stage left. Dee’s inestimably valuable friend and producer Richard Guy, of Tin Angel, had driven all the way from Coventry with the harp and the bass.

Dee was not playing till 11 P.M. I had thought we would explore den Haag and have dinner somewhere before the show (den Haag was cute; I especially liked the garden houses that I saw from the train on the way there, and the outdoor cafés featuring tiny braziers in glass cases), but the festival organizers had other ideas, and the musicians and their friends were escorted across the street to an upper room, where caterers had set up a buffet. Afterward, we kept Dee company in her dressing room upstairs at the Paard van Troje: Christina, her friends Hans and Marleen (who maintains Dee’s Web site), Matthew, Rich, and me. Dee was sharing the dressing room with Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose group the Apparat Organ Quartet, from Iceland, plays all sorts of organs, really LOUD. Dee did her makeup at a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. She drew on eyebrows. She put on blush from a kit with a tiny brush. She sprayed stuff in her hair, brushed it upside down, teased it a little, and, still upside down, drew it up with a comb on either side: when she stood, her hair looked like the fabulous red plumage of some mythological bird.

“I’m going to struggle into my outfit,” Dee said. Baby Dee has lately been taken up by the fashion world—before leaving Europe, she would be playing at a party for Fiorucci, in Milan—and her outfit consisted of layers and layers of dyed tutus and a pair of velvety black high heels. “Rotterdam,” she said, showing them off. She also had a new hot-pink fake-fur hooded jacket, made for her by Christina’s mom, Anneliese de Vos, a.k.a. Mrs. Foxy. It literally stops traffic—at least bicycle traffic (remember, we were in Holland).

“Do you have a set list?” I asked.

“A set list!” Dee said. I tore a few sheets out of a notebook and gave her a pencil, and she consulted with Rich about what to play. She would start with the accordion, then go to the piano and do “Brother Slug and Sister Snail,” finishing with "The Pie Song," before moving to the harp to do a set-within-the-set with Matthew on the cello, and then go back to the piano. She included several songs from “Safe Inside the Day,” because “people like them,” she said. She decided against some longer ones from “A Book of Songs for Anne Marie,” because the set could last only an hour. She was going to end with “The Earlie King,” and I had to bite my tongue, because that’s a scary song, and I have a weakness for the silly, stupid songs, but nobody asked me, and "The Earlie King" is a great song, certainly one of the best on the new live CD, “Baby Dee Goes Down to Amsterdam,” which was for sale in the lobby. (It sold out.)

Showtime! More friends of Christina’s had arrived, and my friend Ella, from Amsterdam, came with her niece, and we all perched on tuffets. Dee entered in her tutu and heels, and played a beautiful show. The set list had evolved until the last minute. I realized that Dee’s choice of instruments (bass, cello, drums) brings out the darkness in her music, though the drummer, Alex, has a wonderful feathery touch. The audience grew as she played; we had to move our tuffets to make room behind us. The sound system was great—very sensitive—and so was the lighting, from big aluminum cones, like outsized reading lamps. Dee played an encore, ending with “Teeth Are the Only Bones That Show,” and made her exit in her stocking feet, then came back to reclaim her shoes. (She had to take them off to work the pedals on the harp.) By the finish, her hair had shaken loose and she looked gorgeous.

When it was over, we partied until the wee hours, first in the Trojan Horse and then in the hotel, and the next day we all went down to Amsterdam.

Thanks to Marcel Musters (above, with Dee and me) for letting us stay in his place, and for the video shown here (shot in New York on Christmas Day). Here are some pictures taken by the official photographer for the festival (note Nos. 20-25).

Happy New Year! And Happy Birthday to Dee!

In Dutch

2011-12-17T01:32:00.000-08:00

Somehow it had escaped my notice that the festivities surrounding the celebration of the hundredth birthday of the artist known as Ele D’Artagnan at Post I Perdu, a theatre belonging to a poetry foundation (adjoining a bookshop dedicated to poetry in many languages) in the university neighborhood of Amsterdam, would be in Dutch. Three large works by D’Artagnan floated against black velvet drapes while Ella Arps, owner of the gallery Arps & Co., which handles his work in the Netherlands, led the audience through his incredibly colorful life “on the margins of La Dolce Vita.” Ella has absorbed the biographical details as well as anyone: how the child born an orphan in Venice and given the name Michele Stinelli rented a room in the home of Pietro Gallina, in the ancient Forum of Rome; acted in films by Fellini; painted; pursued the question of his parentage (mother, of the Lombardi family, a harpist with La Scala; father unknown but believed by D’Artagnan to be Toscanini); died homeless in Rome; and, through the efforts of Pietro, his lifelong friend, came to be represented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and to underwrite a school in Savador de Bahia. Although the artist has yet to be recognized in Italy, celebrations of his centenary went forward on three continents: in Amsterdam and Limburg, Germany; in New York and Chicago; and in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.

In Amsterdam, two poets read, in Dutch, which sounded easier to understand in verse than in conversation. One of them was a young man with a bottle of beer who accepted as a stipend a photograph of D’Artagnan reproduced on metal. It was lovely to see people crowding to get up close to the paintings, which are full of charming, minuscule details. Ella introduced me as a collector. Just for the record, I am not a collector, though I am the proud of owner of a drawing that D’Artagnan did on a matchpack.

My stay in the Netherlands began at dawn yesterday (I am not sure of the exact time of sunrise in Amsterdam so near the winter solstice, but it was raining when I arrived and stayed dark until about ten in the morning) and continues tonight in The Hague at a concert by Baby Dee to celebrate her CD, “Baby Goes Down to Amsterdam,” a live recording of a concert that took place during the Holland Festival in June, 2009. I think you could say that D’Artagnan and Baby Dee are both outsider artists, in that they are more celebrated outside their own lands.

Parallel Park

2011-11-15T15:25:00.000-08:00

It took me a full half hour this morning to get into position to park: a twenty-minute walk to the car (in a distant 11:30-1 spot) and an agonizing ten-minute drive to a nearby 8:30-10 block. By 8:50 A.M., I was double-parked and waiting for the broom. It came at about nine, later than usual, and by 9:02 I was happily situated in front of a building whose doorman kept popping out to sweep up ginkgo leaves. A generous spot in front of me was claimed by a silver Lexus at 9:09.

For a while last week, I was a two-car family. A friend came down from New Hampshire late on Thursday, and we were up at eight on Friday to find her a spot. I didn’t want to worry her, but I was not that optimistic. Friday was Veterans Day, and alternate-side parking was suspended: it is never easy to find a spot under those circumstances, because no one moves. Then again it was a Friday, when people sometimes leave town early for the weekend. Still, Veterans Day meant a Veterans Day Parade, and veterans driving into the city to march in it.

My friend was at the wheel, crawling along, looking for a spot on blocks where I know there is no legal parking, and I kept waggling my fingers at the road ahead and saying, “Zip along.” We drove east, we drove north, we drove west. “Stop!” I said. “I thought I saw a spot. Back up.”

“I don’t like backing up,” she said, and she inched backward reluctantly to the spot I had seen, in front of a fire hydrant I had not seen. Oops. Zip along.

We drove west, we drove south, we drove east again, and I saw a possible spot near a fire hydrant and directed her into it. I swung open the passenger door, intending to hop out and see if we were too close (we were), and a car that was squeezing past us had to swerve to avoid getting doored. I apologized left and right, literally: to the driver on my right and to the friend on my left, who had had visions of a delightful weekend spent shopping for a used car door. I never don’t look when I open the car door. There must have been something about driving around with my friend that made the streets feel like my own driveway.

Yesterday, the Times ran an Op-Ed piece about how the alternate-side parking calendar fosters tolerance ( “Alternate Side Parking Brings Peace”): it “is actually a model for managing the challenges of diversity.” It is true that car-owning infidels are fine with Islam if it means we don’t have to move our cars on Idul-Adha. Occidental parkers love Asian New Year, and parkers of all persuasions celebrate the Jewish holidays. Perhaps Jewish car owners feel more kindly toward the Blessed Virgin Mary when alternate side is suspended for the Immaculate Conception (coming up, on December 8th). Many religious holidays—Passover and Easter, for instance—are determined by the sun and the moon. Parking (or, rather, not having to move your car on these precious days) makes you feel you’re part of something bigger than you are—a part of history, a child of the universe.

But as a religion in itself, Alternate-Side Parking has a major disadvantage: it doesn’t offer much in the way of an afterlife. About the best you could hope for is to be reincarnated as someone who can afford a garage.

We drove south, we drove west, we drove east, executing a U-turn as necessary.

The author of the Op-Ed piece, Alan Draper, is identified as “a political scientist at St. Lawrence University.” His idea is that the European Union, some citizens of which have exhibited xenophobia, could use a little of the spirit that animates alternate-side parking. In fact, on Veterans Day my friend and I were thinking about Europe. Our fathers were both veterans of the Second World War. My father was in the Infantry, and was part of the Normandy Invasion. Besides England and France, he did a tour of duty in Alaska, and after he got home he never wanted to go anyplace again. Her father was in the Air Force, a bomber pilot who got shot down over enemy territory and sent to a German P.O.W. camp. He traded the cigarettes in his care packages for chocolate and sugar to scrape together the ingredients to make fudge. After the war, he was famous for his prisoner-of-war fudge.

Finally, at the far end of the block, between a car and a crosswalk, there was a space for us, in the last spot before the river. I realized later that we two daughters of veterans of foreign wars were parked in the same spot, two blocks apart. Talk about parallel parking.

Bicyculture

2011-11-10T12:11:00.000-08:00

If the weather report featured a beauty index, last Sunday would have set a record. It was dazzlingly clear, sunny but not hot, with no humidity and barely a breath of wind. It was the day of the New York Marathon, in which I was not running, though I always get the urge, during the marathon season, to buy sporting goods. This year it was bike accessories: a copper bell (ding-ding!) and two lights (it’s the law), on rubbery straps, which can be removed to foil thieves.

So on Sunday I was riding my bike on the boardwalk, having given up an excellent parking spot to spend the day at the beach, when I came upon the birth of a new sport, one that I think may be indigenous to Rockaway: duneboarding. Sand deposited by the hurricane had been bulldozed into three big hills on the beach just west of 116th Street, and the neighborhood kids were “sledding” down them on their Boogie boards. Some kids were sitting, some were doing belly-flops, others were lying on their backs, in the luge position. The sand made for a nice soft landing, and then the kids dragged their boards back up the hill to go again. There were dozens of kids, from toddlers to teens, climbing and sliding and shrieking on the artificial dunes. Maybe they’ve been doing this in the Sahara for millennia, but if so why has there never been a bid to make duneboarding an Olympic sport?

I was back in Manhattan by a little after sunset, which occurred at 4:47 P.M. on the first day of standard time, cruising for a spot. I was determined to find a Tuesday-Friday spot, to take advantage of the High Alternate Side Holidays—Idul-Adha and Election Day on Tuesday, and Veterans Day on Friday. I spurned a Monday-Thursday spot, hard as it is not to take the first spot you come to. I have been trying to figure out how to combine bike riding with car parking. On days when I have to sit in the car, should I ride my bike over to where the car is parked, lock it up there, and come back for it in order to ride to work? Or do I dare to put the bike where I hope to park the car, so I won’t have to backtrack? Last Friday, I couldn't decide, so I took the train to work.

The new bike lanes were the subject of an excellent article in the Times this week, in the Arts section, by Michael Kimmelman (“Pleasures of Life in the Slow Lane”), who made some of the same observations that I was just about to make. For instance, now that Janette Sadik-Kahn, Mayor Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner, has built more bike lanes, the same thing is happening with bikes as happened with cars when Robert Moses built more bridges: there are more of them.

The last time I biked to work regularly was during the Koch Administration. He had painted some lines on Sixth Avenue and called it a bike lane, but by the time Rudy Giuliani took over, those lines had been erased. No one took them very seriously anyway. The new bike lanes are more permanent-looking, and some of them are downright dedicated, with medians of potted plants or lanes of parked cars between the bike lane and heavy traffic, and even an extra lens in traffic lights to regulate both bikes and cars in turning lanes. I was curious to see if I would actually feel safe in a bike lane. And the answer is:

No, not particularly. And it’s not because of the trucks double-parked, or the taxis dropping off passengers, or the jaywalkers popping out like Jack-in-the-boxes from between parked cars. It’s because of the other bicyclists. With rare exceptions, they are as cut-throat as speeding taxi-drivers.

My model for bicycling is European: I think of the matrons I saw in the French countryside, pedalling serenely into the village for a cabbage or whatever, wearing flower-print housedresses, bedroom slippers, and maybe an apron. In Ravenna in winter, Italian women in fur coats cycle majestically alongside the canals. New York City is not exactly the People’s Republic of China yet, but there are throngs in the new bike lanes. O.K., I exaggerate: at one red light I counted nine bikes waiting to cross the street. But I do not exaggerate when I say that everybody is trying to get ahead of everybody else.

Biking in the city does have its aesthetic pleasures. If not for the (unprotected) bike lane on Sixth Avenue, I would probably not go out of my way to visit the flower district. And from the (protected) bike lane on First Avenue I admired a brick wall with ivy growing nine stories high and changing color. The bike lane on Broadway below Times Square is a joke, clotted with oblivious pedestrians, tourists lugging wheeled suitcases, and panhandlers in Minnie Mouse costumes. But Robert Moses’ Law also works in reverse: if you narrow Broadway down to one lane and have it dead-end at Herald Square, the cars go elsewhere, leaving a few precious blocks of midtown wide open for bicyclists.

The first day I rode to work, I got all the way to Times Square before realizing that although I had remembered my Kryptonite lock, I had forgotten the key. I had been planning on checking out this garage that rents parking spots for bikes, so I went over there: the Hippodrome. “Sure, we can lend you a lock,” the manager said. I gave them my credit card, they lent me a chain and a lock, and I signed up to park my bike in midtown for twenty dollars a month.

Am I crazy? Who would have believed that a car owner who goes to so much trouble to find free parking on the street would pay to garage a bicycle? The fact is that it’s not so easy to find a pole to lock your bike to in midtown. There are no more old-fashioned parking meters—they have all been replaced by bulky MuniMeters. The bike racks that the city has provided are always at capacity, at least in midtown (another example of “Build it and they will come”). Twenty dollars a month for a safe place to park a bike seems like a bargain—it costs ten times that to garage a car in the city. And I enjoy coasting onto the smooth floor of the Hippodrome, past the arm lowered to keep cars from leaving without paying.

Bike parking is vertical: you heft your front tire over a hook high on the wall and line up both tires along the groove of a rod that extends below it. It is not without its surprises. The other day after work, I went to get my bike and found a huge heavy chain on it, like something that belonged to Marley’s Ghost. I went to the office to see what was up. I still had time to get where I was going, so I wasn’t unduly upset. “Someone has put a big heavy chain on my bike,” I told the attendant. He came to take a look and then went back and checked the computer. Apparently, the monthly fee had not yet been charged to my credit card. He took care of that, and put a little blue sticker on my bike, so the inspectors would not incarcerate it again. Now I know what happens if a cyclist tries to park for free in the Hippodrome. It’s the bike equivalent of having a boot put on your car.

Meanwhile, back in the car, cruising for a parking spot last Sunday evening, I set my watch to amuse myself by seeing exactly how long it would take: twenty minutes, including a few minutes spent in a spot that I thought was a bonanza until a study of the signs revealed that it was in a No Standing Monday-Friday zone. Finally, at the far end of my range, in the last spot before the river, I got lucky. While I was getting my stuff out of the trunk, a car pulled up and the driver asked if I was going out. I smiled and shook my head no. He gave me a thumbs-up to acknowledge my triumph in finding a spot that would be good for the next nine days. In the morning, I rode my bike back to the car to get a jar of mayonnaise and some Kalamata olives out of the trunk (I had cleaned out the refrigerator in Rockaway) and passed a tow truck removing a car from the No Standing zone.

King Tide

2011-10-29T14:41:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the car at high tide on Thursday felt like camping in the rain. Hopes ran high that the streetsweeper wouldn’t come, but why would a little rain stop him? The cops were out: they waddled from car to car like members of the Wide Family, their chartreuse foul-weather gear stretched over the multiple items of police equipment padding their hips.

The Broom comes early on this block. On Monday, it rumbled around the corner at 8:40 A.M. Thursday it showed up at 8:44. That means that if you get here at nine looking for an 8:30-10 spot, you may be too late. But if you happen to be sitting here already, in a nice, single-car spot between a No Standing sign and a curb cut, once the Broom has passed, the pressure is off. You can turn off the lights and the windshield wipers, move the seat back, and enjoy the view: gingkos (still green), an ornate tower top, a line of pigeons silhouetted on a roof.

Last week, after getting the water shut off at the bungalow (let it snow!), I went down to the boatyard to turn in the lanyard—the red coil with the black plastic ring that fits over the ignition on my outboard—so that the motor can be put away properly for the winter. The boat has been out of the water since the hurricane.

I went out on the bay three or four times this summer: visited the BOATEL, the art project/hotel made of boats at the 59th Street Marina, and ran aground at low tide off Broad Channel (I had to use the oars as poles to get out of the muck and then row). But I had no engine trouble, and that, combined with being away a lot, made me decide not to put the boat back in the water. I like having a season where I can say I had no engine trouble.

Ahead of me, a car left its spot and zipped across the street to take a spot that that had just opened on the Tuesday-Friday side. No sooner had he pulled out than another car swam in. It was strangely silent in the car: I had to keep the windows rolled up against the rain. The only sound was the swish of tires on wet asphalt.

The marina boss had left for the weekend, so I put the lanyard in the office with a note and called to make sure he'd found it. I also wanted to ask if he'd heard about the king tide. It was in the Times on October 26th: “A king tide will be running Wednesday and Thursday because gravitational forces of the sun, the moon and the earth will be lined up in a cue shot of fleeting geometry and rare power.” (The article, by Jim Dwyer, was about how this extra-high tide was a harbinger of things to come: the ocean level has been rising and could be this high all the time by 2080.)

The Boss had not seen the Times. “That’s all I need,” he said. “Another high tide.” During Hurricane Irene, he had had a foot and a half of water in his house. “Did they say how high it would be?”

"One to two feet above normal."

“Didja hear I got robbed?” I had heard, but I wanted him to tell it. “The restaurant barge. Twice.“ The barge, formerly a restaurant, is moored behind the dock. I've been dying to get in there; I see that they've been working on it, but it doesn't look much like a restaurant yet.

"What did they get?" I asked

"Tools and liquor. There were five of them. They saw the liquor, so they came back for more. My good tools. We’re trying to catch them. We got cameras. We took fingerprints.” There are cops living on the dock, so they may very well catch them. He didn't sound as mad as he must have been when it happened. I heard he was in a really bad mood.

The garbage recycling truck pulled up alongside me and started crunching glass and plastic. When it moved on, the garbagemen followed it, on the sidewalk. One of them was wearing big orange gloves, rubber boots, and gold earrings—she was a garbage girl.

Across the street, in a pile of bulky recyclable items, was a memento mori: the grille off a small truck or an S.U.V., silver gray. “Don’t look at that,” I wanted to say to the Éclair. The rain had tapered off by the time I got out of the car, at ten. I'd been sitting there so long that in Jamaica Bay the king tide would have begun to ebb already.

Milestone

2011-10-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

It happened in Mifflinburg. Or was it Mifflinville? No, it was definitely Mifflinburg. I had taken my usual detour off I-80 on the way back from Ohio, cutting south in the middle of Pennsylvania to state route 45. I was poking along, sharing the road with the occasional horse-and-buggy, watching on the right for Wenger's Discount Grocery Outlet, where I like to stock up on dented cans of soup (I don't know why I get so excited about half-price dented cans of soup; it must be genetic). And then it happened: the odometer flipped over to 77,777.7.

Soon after that, my detour sprung a detour, because of flood damage along the Susquehanna River. I drove north along the river to Milton, a small but industrious town (home of Ettore Boiardi, a.k.a. Chef Boyardee), and when I got back to I-80 I found out that I had been on something signposted as the "Blue Detour." After another hundred miles or so, there was a massive traffic jam near the Delaware Water Gap, so I got off 80 again, and found myself on the "Green Detour." I have been seeing signs for these detours for years, and can report that they are indeed quite colorful.

I have been taking full advantage of the traditional fall parking holidays—between Columbus Day and Succoth, I didn't have to move the car for a week. But on the way home from New England last weekend, I was kicking myself for not having a copy of the alternate-side-parking calendar on me. I knew there were more holidays coming up, but I didn't know which side of the street to park on. I found a Tuesday-Friday spot, behind a huge Army truck, like something that had gotten separated from a convoy. It turned out that either side of the street would have worked, since both Thursday and Friday are religious holidays.

I was hoping the Army truck would be gone when I returned to do my civic duty on Tuesday morning. But no. It made for a dismal prospect: the back of a huge convoy-style armored truck, with tires as big as office cubicles and a dipstick the size of a pool cue. Needless to say, the US Army does not observe street-cleaning rules, so when the Broom came, I expected to have trouble squeezing back in between the tank and the lineup of S.U.V.s behind me.

The Broom came at 7:40, and I was able to zip back across the street and get in position (albeit about two feet from the curb) while the S.U.V.s were still lumbering around, holding up traffic. I had to pull up practically under the Army truck so that they could parallel park, and then ask them to back up so I could get closer to the curb.

Actually, I will be moving the car on Friday anyway, because I have to go out to Rockaway. It's time to turn the water off for the winter. My wonderful neighbors, who for the past two winters have been parking my car in exchange for getting to use it, recently told me that they're getting their own car, a GMC Jimmy. "We'll still take care of your car!" my friend T. said. I know they love my car. Who could resist her? Here she is enjoying a ferry ride, surrounded, as usual, by S.U.V.s

I am going to have to come up with a new plan for the winter.

Wundervoll!

2011-09-28T23:00:00.000-07:00

I got a dose of German this week, because Baby Dee played Berlin the same night as the Pope. (Here is an interview from the Berliner Zeitung: http://www.babydee.org/press/the-pope-is-on-the-guest-list.php). Luckily, she has lots of alternative hymns. She went from Berlin to Leipzig to Vienna, and tonight she is playing Hamburg. A few days ago, another piece ran in the Berliner Zeitung, a column (Die Warheit) by Michael Ringel, in which Baby Dee meets the Pope. Here's the the English translation, on Dee's Web site: http://www.babydee.org/press/rupture-in-being.php

Parking this morning was a breeze. There were two spots available upstream. Two cops came by (black chicks in white hats, with about twelve pounds of equipment hanging from their belts). The Broom turned the corner at 7:42 A.M., and the exercise went off like clockwork.

Chaos and Recognition

2011-09-23T13:26:00.000-07:00

It started off slowly: a guy in camouflage pants lovingly washing his hubcaps; a black fellow pulling a boom box on wheels; a young father pushing his little girl in a stroller (I recognized them from alternate-side parking last spring). Then an orange Tasty Hot Dog truck pulled in behind me, blocking a previously unobstructed view. A Move It … Yourself rent-a-truck parked across the street from the hot-dog truck, and a garbage truck double-parked behind it. Then there were sirens and flashing lights and a fire engine turned the corner. The garbage truck pulled up next to me and started grinding away.

I got out of the car. I had just found myself thinking that the day is coming when I'm not going to want to sit in the car anymore, even for a half hour. I joined two men, fellow-parkers, who were standing on the sidewalk observing the chaos.

We had not been standing there long before one of the men asked me, "Do you have a blog?" I was thrilled—he had recognized my car! "I work around here," he said. “I’ve noticed your car before.” He lives in Long Island and gets into the city at five-thirty in the morning. His car, a late-model Honda Civic with those cool retro license plates, was parked three cars up ahead of mine. As we talked, I was dismayed to see first the fire engine leave and then the garbage truck. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to move,” I said.

“Here it comes,” my beloved reader said. The street sweeper had turned the corner. “We’re not moving,” my friend said. “It’s eight o'clock. They can’t make you move.” Actually, it was seven-fifty-five, and they could make me move. Maybe we girls are more easily intimidated, but I got in my car and started it up. I tried explaining to the driver of the street sweeper that there was no one in the car ahead of me and it was pointless to make me move, because the curb was parked up all the way to the end of the block. But he stayed behind me, all but pawing the ground like a pent-up bull.

Because I had not backed up preemptively, to give myself room to get in again, I was in a bad way. There was an interloper, a Subaru Outback, double-parked just ahead of me on the opposite side of the street, hoping to squeeze in. The hot-dog truck had moved up behind him. Damned if I was going to go around the block and let the Subaru usurp my place. But I couldn’t just sit here and refuse to move. Then the hot-dog truck backed up, which gave me room to pull out diagonally. I was still blocking the Broom from getting around the unoccupied car in front of me, so I honked at the Subaru. Miraculously, he moved up. The Broom swept through, followed by an endless stream of traffic.

That was when my beloved reader, who was still standing on the sidewalk with the other alternate-side parker, stepped into the street in front of a taxi and held up traffic while I reversed into my spot. Sometimes a knight in shining armor looks a lot like a businessman in a Honda Civic. Chivalry is not dead. Thanks!

Season's Greetings

2011-09-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

Wow. I can't believe my luck on this first day of the new parking season. I left a Monday/Thursday 9:30-11 spot at about 8:45, to be well in time for a spot that would be good at ten. Last week at this time (given the time difference), I was sitting in an outdoor cafe in Rome with Mr. Zimmerman (pronounced TZEE-mare-mahn in Rome), watching Smart Cars zoom around. Also, the Segway seems to be enjoying a vogue in Rome—I saw whole fleets of them. The Eclair was safe in Rockaway, having survived an earthquake and a hurricane while I was on terra firma in Umbria, of all shaky places. Just before leaving in mid-August, I had the car inspected and got her air-conditioning fixed. It cost a month's rent (which, fortunately, in my guise of capitalist landlady, I had collected, not paid), and I had to think about whether to go through with the repairs, but not for long: not to get the air-conditioning fixed would be to admit that the Eclair was on her way out.

So I'm on my way up the avenue, snarling at Mayor Bloomberg for having reconfigured traffic so that I would have to commit myself to the left-hand lane in order to turn in case I saw a spot in the Sanctuary, when, lo and behold, I saw a spot in the Sanctuary! It was well clear of the fire hydrant, one of only six spots available in that sacred space. The spot would be good at nine, and it was 8:53. I didn't even need the takeout coffee and the Times I'd brought along. So, I would like to give something back to the city for bestowing this gift on me. Accept these figs, the first picked from the tree in the garden behind the house in Umbria, where I spent a fruitful couple of weeks.

Bad Moments in Parking

2011-05-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

You know it is time to get off the street when you have had three bad parking experiences in a row. Yesterday morning at nine, I had to move my car from a swiftly expiring Tuesday-Friday 9:30-11 spot to an 8:30-10 spot before work. I went up one block and down another before finding a spot between a Dodge Caravan and a Toyota Camry. It was tight—those Caravans are so massive that it is hard to parallel park behind them—and my first try did not go well, so I pulled out and tried again. There was no one in the Caravan, and it looked like the Camry was unoccupied, too—that is, until I gave its front end a little kiss with my back bumper. Oops.

“So sorry I nudged you,” I said, jumping out of the car to apologize. The woman behind the wheel scowled and got out of her car to see the damages. Her car was a later model than mine, but its front license plate was every bit as mangled from parking on the street as the Éclair’s, and any smudge I left could easily have been attributed to a preexisting condition. She had to have seen me struggling, and there was a good two feet of clearance behind her, so I said, “You could have backed up a little.” Mistake.

“Well, I was reading the paper and you didn’t have the courtesy to ask me to back up,” she said. She was mean: heavy, with messy gray hair, a rumpled shirt the shade Crayola calls Orchid, and blue polyester pants. A big bunch of keys dangled around her neck, giving her the air of a prison warden.

I shut up and got back in my car, and read my own newspaper. The Times had a story about Dennis Kucinich, saying that in anticipation of his district's being eliminated in Ohio he was investigating the possibility of a run for Congress in the state of Washington. Poor Cousin Dennis. He had to give up his run for the Presidency in 2008 to protect his seat in Congress, and now he might have to leave Cleveland, our ancestral stronghold, to stay in the game at all. I bet he could win in Washington, even as a carpetbagger. Though the Times ignored him when he was running for President, now they are admitting that he has name recognition.

At 9:40, the Warden got out of her car and zipped up a fleece jacket with a Navajo print. She was way overdressed for alternate-side parking—it was a steamy morning. Maybe that's why she was so crabby. Her newspaper was a freebie tabloid that she wadded up in a big ball and threw away. I kept hoping she’d leave, and a cop would come and give her car a ticket. But she patrolled the street as if it were a cellblock and her shift was up at two minutes to ten.

This was the third of three unpleasant experiences, one of which was vicarious. Last Friday, Baby Dee was in town, and we both had to move our cars at seven-thirty in the morning. Dee gave me a ride to my parking space and then went off to find her own. I got home at a little after eight, and Dee didn’t make it back until almost eleven. “What happened?” I asked. “Just a little bad luck,” she said. “There were a million people driving around in that hour or so before the alternate side thing kicked in. I should have done that thing of putting it at the meter until the change came. We did that once before.” I somehow hadn’t had the energy that morning to suggest the three-step parking routine and offer her four pounds of quarters. Usually there are free spaces on Fridays, because people are leaving for the weekend. Dee had driven around for almost two hours, she said. Then, “I found myself behind the street sweeper and all the cars were lining up for a spot to wait until 10:30 and I realized that was as good as it was going to get.” She parked a mile away and had to walk home. Later, she said she had seen a lot of young people in caps and gowns, and figured that their parents had come to town in for graduation and were taking up all the parking places.

As if to punish me for not giving my spot to Dee and trying my own luck, when I wanted to leave for the beach on Saturday, my car wouldn't start. That was the day the world was supposed to end. Was the first symptom a dead car battery? The steering wheel was jammed and the key wouldn’t turn in the ignition. I couldn’t even roll down the stupid automatic windows to get some air while I agonized. I was about to call AAA when a guy drove up beside me who wanted my space bad enough to help. He knew how to unjam the steering wheel (stomp on the brake and give the wheel a good jerk). But still, when I turned the key, nothing happened. I tried jiggling the cutoff switch, an anti-theft device that I have never mastered. Eventually, with some combination of jumper cables, the right key, and a flick of the cutoff switch, the car started and I drove off, bequeathing my spot to the Good Samaritan.

Deetroit

2011-05-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

This review on the online calendar of Cliff Bell's (http://www.cliffbells.com/events.php), where Dee appeared on Friday night, is worth reposting. The author is Kurt B. Reighley.

"It takes nerve for a grown woman to bill herself as “Baby” and expect to be taken seriously—unless you’re Baby Dee. If anyone’s earned a moniker like this, it is she. In her storied career, the Cleveland, OH, songwriter has worked circuses and sideshows. Yes, her cackling laugh and wild eyes can unnerve, but she doesn’t seem the sort to lock her older sister in an upstairs room and serve rats for supper. She’s too good-natured for that.

As curious as she is—there aren’t many transgendered harpists who love a good cigar—Baby Dee doesn’t peddle “outsider” music. And even though she’s releasing records on Drag City these days, she still runs in the same circles as Current 93, Little Annie, and Marc Almond. Her Art-with-a-capitol-A speaks of a commitment to discipline and stylistic choices far removed from traditional indie rock.

With its references to German lieder (particularly Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig”), Baby Dee’s 2008 breakthrough Safe Inside the Day flirted with classical music. Regifted Light embraces it further. Eight of the 12 selections are instrumentals, arranged for small ensemble: piano, cello, a few winds and brass, glockenspiel and other percussion. Producer Andrew WK contributes pump organ. The instrumentation may evoke programmatic favorites like “Peter and the Wolf,” but the execution—particularly in the lively mid-section of standout “Yapapipi”—rings closer to Stravinsky’s theater piece “L’Histoire du Soldat.” As for the vocal works, it isn’t difficult to imagine some earnest young mezzo-soprano warbling “On The Day I Died” or the title song in a recital hall. But even a singer with superior technique couldn’t top Dee’s performance of “The Pie Song,” which brings surprising depth and range of feeling to a seemingly frivolous little ditty. And that is the magic of Baby Dee: she illuminates her music—however you define it—with a mix of childlike exuberance and hard-won experience few others, in any discipline, can match." -Kurt B. Reighley

The Morning After

2011-05-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

“It was like a ferris wheel ride where the operator keeps letting you go around once more.” That’s how J. Kathleen White described Baby Dee’s show on Tuesday at Joe’s Pub. Dee is touring with a cellist (Matthew Robinson) and two guys from Mucca Pazza, the Chicago marching band: a percussionist (Jon Steinmeir) and a bassoonist (Mark Messing), who had also brought his Sousaphone. An ear-splitting fire alarm went off just as Dee was starting her first lovely slug song, “Regifted Light”; we didn’t have to evacuate, and when it stopped, she simply started over. The false alarm would not have bothered a slug. Dee has played Joe’s Pub so many times, she said, that she has gotten used to feeling the subway rumble underneath, and wonders if the people on the train below ever think, hearing music from above, “I could get used to that.”

The instrumentation was more conducive to funny songs than to dirges. Little Annie made an appearance; she and Dee are working on an album together. And, after playing most of the songs on the new CD (“Lullaby Parade” was especially beguiling), as well as "The Early King" and "Teeth Are the Only Bones that Show," Dee got out the Baby Dee Hymnal: she did the Mormon Underwear song, led the congregation in “Pisspot” (to raise our self-esteem), and sang “Jesus Got a Plan for You” (“He’s gonna fry your fat ass in Hell”). She finished with “Tranny Girl,” a song that, when I first heard it, back in the nineties, made me want to dive under the table. When I realized what she was playing, I thought, Oh, no! I’ve invited all these people from the office! But they enjoyed it! Even I enjoyed it—which says at least as much about my evolution as it does about Dee's delivery.

A few days later, Dee and company were on their way to Cleveland to play a house concert, and I was back at my post on Little Kiss Street (formerly K Street), behind yet another black S.U.V., this one presided over by a woman of a certain age who wore a black sweatsuit and a green hairband. She was very bossy, but she lives on the block and she had my interests at heart, so I can’t complain. In front of her was a small white car whose owner had incurred her wrath by not showing up on Monday, thereby complicating our parking maneuvers, the son of a bitch. She showed up on Thursday, though, and we all joined forces against a guy who tried to insinuate himself into our lineup. He had been too close to the fire hydrant, and when the Broom came, he backed all the way up the street and stood in the spot that I had been planning on occupying while the Broom went by (followed closely by a Lay's potato-chip truck in a big fat greasy hurry). The bossy S.U.V. owner and I had no choice but to go into wedge formation and block the guy from taking one of our spots.

“That guy has never parked on this block before,” a man said when eight o'clock came and we all trudged off, having earned our spots until next Monday. "He doesn't know the drill."

Little Kiss Street

2011-05-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

Last week, when alternate-side was suspended for Passover, I found a highly vulnerable spot on K Street, just around the corner from the avenue, the Éclair’s back end protruding slightly into the crosswalk. The cop who came last Friday morning was super friendly. (I had found room to move the car up out of the crosswalk by then.) “Do you know this guy?” she asked, indicating the black Nissan Murano in front of me. I said I didn’t know him. (Nor do I know why an S.U.V. should be named after an island of glassblowers.) “Why can’t people wake up on time?” she wailed. She was an attractive cop, with loops of long brown hair tucked under her white metermaid cap. “I like to give them a few minutes, you know?” She wrote the ticket slowly, and had placed it reluctantly on the windshield when a harried-looking guy approached carrying a baby girl. Everyone felt bad about the ticket, with the possible exception of the little girl, who thought it was fun to sit in the car with her father first thing in the morning.

I was back out there at 7:30 A.M. on Tuesday, having been lucky enough to score a spot after I returned from Rockaway, this time on the other side of the black Murano, better protected from turning buses. There was a beige Toyota Corolla in front of me, and a potbellied guy with a Mini-Cooper in the spot up at the corner. The street sweeper came, and we pulled diagonally across the street in the time-honored fashion. Getting back into my spot was a bit tricky, and I did something I've never done before: I accidentally grazed the bumper of the Toyota. Oops. I got out of the car to apologize and inspect the damages. There was a gray smudge on the bumper about the size of an eraser. The guy wasn’t happy about it, but he wasn’t insane, so he accepted my apology.

The Murano was still there today, but the car in front of me was a black GMC pickup called a Canyon. So I was between Murano and the Canyon. When the street sweeper came, it idled in my spot, because a car farther down the street had not moved, and the Canyon owner, a big guy who looked like a K.G.B. agent, refused to pull up a little and let the street sweeper squeeze behind him. Meanwhile, the Murano had returned to its spot, and somehow the Canyon also got back in before I did. It sometimes happens that somebody’s spot shrinks after the street sweeper goes by, and today that happened to me. "I don't know why it got so tight," the Murano owner said, as I parallel-parked with his guidance. I tapped the bumper of the Canyon in front of me. Oops. (This is getting altogether too much like the Bump'em Cars concession at Coney Island.) I got out and went up to his car window to apologize. “Sorry for tapping you,” I said. And the K.G.B. guy's face split open in a big gaptoothed grin, and he said, “Little kiss!”

Before & After

2011-04-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

The foot surgery has been over for two and a half months now, and until I can walk without pain or lurching, I am going to take comfort from the things that made it almost worthwhile. Chief among those was:

Taxis. Taking taxis is an expensive habit and, once acquired, hard to break. The commute to Times Square cost anywhere from eight to twelve dollars (including tip). The best, most efficient drivers got screwed, because I calculated the tip from the meter. Only one driver asked me what route I wanted to take. Coincidentally, he was also the only driver who was a native-born American, and the only one who asked me what happened to my foot. Others were Greek and Egyptian and Indian and Algerian and Tibetan and Pakistani and Bangladeshi. One driver took me straight up Park to 42nd and then couldn’t make a left turn, so I had to take a crosstown bus the rest of the way. Another took me to Herald Square instead of Times Square, and then had to go over to Eighth Avenue to get uptown and couldn’t make a right turn onto 42nd, so I had to limp from there. For some reason, I thought he was Samoan.

The scooter was a big hit around the office. I tried taking it out on the street, but it had no shock absorbers, and rattling over the city sidewalks was pretty bone-jarring. I soon learned to use it only for essential errands, like exchanging cat food when Petco delivered a case of the wrong stuff.

Home delivery is one of the things I had been saving for extreme old age, but no longer. I don’t know if I can be bothered to carry home my own groceries ever again. It’s so easy: I call, give my order to a surprisingly smart girl, she picks out the biggest bunch of bananas in the store, the guy shows up with a twenty-pound bag of cat litter, I tip him, and I end up saving money because if I went to the store myself, even if I picked out a smaller bunch of bananas and bought only a ten-pound bag of litter, I’d end up spending more because I'd buy all kinds of things that weren’t on my list. Home delivery from Petco did not work out that well (see above, under Scooter). You know how the cashiers are always on the phone when you’re trying to check out? Well, it wasn't with me. I was on hold in the hamster department.

Sneakers: Before this winter, I had never worn sneakers to the office. I have never been one to overdress for work, but under doctor's orders to wear sneakers, I found myself sinking to new sartorial lows to make the sneakers blend in. I observed not only Casual Friday but also Casual February, March, and April.

It is almost impossible to get a taxi in Times Square, so to get home from work I have had to resort to buses—another thing that, like home delivery and matinees, I was saving for old age. Now that I can take the subway again, guess what: I prefer not to. I like the bus. I like to sit up front in one of the seats reserved for the handicapped and look out the window. I used to think buses were too slow, but if you're not going far, it doesn't take that long, and a bus ride is blissfully quiet compared with the subway. Once, my bus got rerouted from Fifth to Seventh, and instead of getting irritable I realized I could transfer to a crosstown bus that would let me off even closer to home. A woman with her leg in a cast got on at Fifth Avenue and sat down next to me, and I recognized her: she was a friend of a friend—I'd been to her place for dinner, and I'd heard that she had killer shin splints or something. We thought it was hilarious that our various ailments had landed us both on the same bus. She'd been on a Fifth Avenue bus, and knew that my bus had been rerouted because of a fire—flames were shooting out of the top of a building. You would never find this kind of camaraderie in the subway.

Baby Dee's Spring Tour

2011-04-22T12:06:00.000-07:00

Baby Dee's new CD "Regifted LIght" was recorded at her home in Cleveland, Ohio, on the Steinway grand on loan from Andrew W.K., who produced the album. Also with Matthew Robinson on cello and members of Mucca Pazza, the fabulous Chicago-based marching band, on bassoon, glockenspiel, melodica, sousaphone, and more. The lovely cover art, by Christina de Vos (above), was inspired by Dee's slug songs. For interviews and photos, visit Baby Dee's Official Web Site (link at left).

I am looking forward to the show at Joe's Pub, on May 10th. The house concert in Cleveland, on May 12th, is going to be the event of the season. I don't know where Nelsonville, Ohio, is, but all ye in the Columbus area, put it on your calendars: "Baby Dee—May 14th!" Dee is talking about playing the whole album, straight through. Members of Mucca Pazza will be along on the tour.

Hooray for Baby Dee!

May 04 The Strutt Kalamazoo MI
May 05 The Hideout Chicago IL
May 06 Andy Warhol Museum Pittsburgh PA
May 07 The Music Gallery Toronto Ontario Canada
May 08 Casa Del Popolo Montreal Canada
May 09 Cafe 939 Boston MA
May 10 Joe's Pub New York NY
May 11 First Unitarian Side Chapel Philadelphia, PA
May 12 House Concert Cleveland, Ohio
May 13 Cliff Bell's Detroit MI w/ Raw Truth Ensemble
May 14 Nelsonville Music Festival Nelsonville OH

Corrections

2011-04-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of Tax Day, my New Hampshire friend points out that I miscalculated the amount she spent on parking back in February, when she devised her own parking strategies, independent of my hectoring. Metered parking on my street costs 50 cents for 12 minutes. That’s $2.50 an hour (or ten quarters)—not, as I wrote, $5 an hour. So for four hours of metered parking—one hour the first morning and three hours on the morning she left, running down to feed the meter hourly between episodes of “Top Chef”—the grand total came to ten dollars (or forty quarters), half the amount I reported. I stand corrected.

She would also like me to point out that it was well worth that amount—and the trouble of collecting quarters and watching the clock—not to have to schlep her luggage to a free parking spot several blocks away. (She does not travel light.) I could have countered that it would have been possible, if she had parked at some distance, to drive back to my street and pack the car before getting on the road. I saved my breath, however, because I knew she might not be able to find a spot on her return, and then I’d never hear the end of it.

Alternate side parking is suspended for the rest of the week and on into next week, for Passover and Easter. Spring is in the air, the price of gas has shot way up, and it’s time to bring the Éclair back to the city.

Back-Seat Parker

2011-02-25T13:12:00.000-08:00

Most of the time when people with cars visit me they defer to my parking wisdom. Baby Dee always asks my advice, and I’ve given very specific directions to a friend from Massachusetts, which she has followed with great success. (No parking tickets.) So it was a surprise last weekend when a friend from New Hampshire proved resistant. As she prepared to go out to find a spot on Sunday at around noon (good instinct), she announced—after I had expended considerable breath recommending that she take advantage of Presidents’ Day, when alternate-side parking would be suspended, by driving several blocks to the Sanctuary (though it would probably be full already)—“I’m parking across the street.”

“But then you’ll have to feed the meter,” I said. She seemed not to mind. I had told her how to find a spot the Thursday before, and apparently she did not enjoy my machinations. I laid out for her a three-part parking scheme: (1) At 7:30 A.M., she had to move her car to the other side of the street, where it was good till eight. (2) At 8 A.M. she had to move the car back to my side of the street and feed the meter (1 hour = $5, in quarters). (3) Nine was the best time to look for a spot on an 8:30-10 block, after the street sweeper had gone by, and when she found one [exhaustive directions suppressed; she ignored them anyway] she had to sit in the car till ten. She particularly resented this last part, telling me that lots of people left their cars. And there she was, a prisoner, in a car with New Hampshire license plates, which say “Live Free or Die.”

I just couldn’t impress on her the advantages of being parked a half mile away. She probably suspected (rightly) that I was trying to get her to stay longer. They were forecasting snow for Monday, and if it turned into a blizzard it would definitely be better for her to be in an unmetered spot. Anyway, she found a spot across the street that was good till eight on Monday morning, when she moved to my side of the street and started pumping quarters into the Muni Meter. Fortunately, I had plenty of quarters, because I am one of those people who empties the change out of her pockets every day and takes it to the Penny Arcade to be counted once a year. And being parked right in front of the building did make it easier for her to pack the car. She spent another fifteen dollars—or sixty quarters—on parking, which is at least a hundred dollars less than she would have spent if she had put the car in a garage for four days. And we got to watch three episodes of “Top Chef” together before she left, at noon, when it had stopped snowing.

The highlight of my friend’s stay came last Friday, when the temperature reached sixty-seven degrees, and we cruised up Park Avenue in a Mustang convertible with the top down and the radio blaring. The Mustang belongs to my Rockaway friend the Catwoman, who visited me in Manhattan for the first time. Sorry I didn’t get a picture of the car.

Rolling Rolling Rolling

2011-02-15T10:27:00.000-08:00

When I went to move my car last week from in front of the Taj Mahal, it was not there—the Taj Mahal, I mean. The car was fine, and made it up over the hump of snow and out to Rockaway, where I left it on the Street of No Parking Restrictions. But the Taj Mahal hologram in the window of the gallery I had parked in front of had dematerialized, and I am not sure if that is just in the nature of holograms or if the gallery has closed.

Not that I will be in any condition to follow up on it soon. Yes, dear readers, the Alternate Side Parker has been sidelined with a pedestrian injury. I had surgery last week on my accelerator foot, and am currently using a Roll-a-Bout to navigate the three rooms of my apartment.

The Roll-a-Bout is an evolutionary leap over crutches, and I applaud it heartily and rely on it heavily, except when crutches are necessary to play on the heartstrings of plumbers. (My recovery coincided with a plumbing crisis: something behind the wall or under my bathroom floor was leaking onto the newly renovated bathroom in the apartment below. Thanks to my pathetic invalid condition, the plumbers were able to find and fix the leak with a minimum of damage or inconvenience.)

I was hoping that yesterday’s mail would contain a valentine from the New York Department of Finance’s Adjudication Division. Earlier this month, I received the decision on my appeal in the matter of the curb cut. The form for this is evenhanded to a fault. It is headed “In the Matter of the Appeal of,” under which find my name and address, license plate number, and summons number(s). Then there is a choice of verdicts: “Upon review of the entire record before us, we find no error of fact or law. The Judge’s decision is upheld” and “Upon review of the entire record before us, we find error. The decision is reversed and the prior payment will be returned.” Below that, it says, in parentheses, “A mark has been placed next to the applicable decision.”

The letter was artfully folded so that the faintly crossed-out verdict fell on the fold, and it took a while to decipher the fact that the judges unanimously (O.K., so there were only two of them) found my appeal persuasive: “we find error.” Yes! It is signed (indecipherably) by two Administrative Law Judges, above a section headed “Codes,” in which the letters “O / M / O / N” are printed, just like that, between slashes, twice, in a space that would accommodate six codes. I don’t know how to decode it, but I figure it means “That first judge was an idiot.”

The point is that I won. But I don't expect to feel the full triumph of judicial victory until I receive that check for $195.

Big Dig

2011-02-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

“You need a hand?” I’d call these the four most beautiful words in the English language, especially when spoken by a man holding a shovel and crossing the street to where I was digging out the Éclair. I had left work early to go to the hardware store and buy a shovel—a yellow plastic model with a steel-rimmed blade. It was not ideal—what I needed was a pickaxe—but it was all they had. The Éclair has been out on the street through two storms. She is parked on the right-hand side, meaning that the plow was angled against her. Not only was she buried in snow but tree limbs had fallen on her, and two of them were sticking up on the roof like antlers.

My new friend, Jose, knew exactly what he was doing. He told me to dig out the door first, so that I could get in the car and warm it up. Great chunks of crusty black plow leavings were barnacled to her side. We chipped away at them, tossing clunkers into the street behind us when there were no cars passing. He worked at the front end, and I worked at the back end. On either side of the car was a ten-foot mound. On the sidewalk, garbage bags were piled against the snowbank. I was parked in front of a gallery, and the two men inside, closing up shop, watched to make sure we didn’t throw snow on the sidewalk they had painstakingly cleared. A taxi-driver stopped opposite us, rolled down his passenger-side window, and laughed: "Hah-hah."

We cleared the exhaust pipe and the wheel wells on the street side. After a while, Jose told me to turn on the defroster. He dug a path through to the sidewalk, while I pushed the snow off the roof and the hood and the trunk and the windows. (I was relieved to find no parking tickets under the snow.) He had an excellent shovel, a garden shovel, squared off, the better to chop ice. He called it “my baby.” He kept showing me his technique, and mentioned that he was with the Department of Sanitation. When it came time to move the garbage bags, he said, “I do garbage, too.”

I wasn’t actually going anyplace—word arrived today that "Alternate Side Parking regulations remain suspended Citywide until further notice"—but the weather report was so dire that I felt I ought to do something. We are in for fifty hours of wintry mix: freezing rain, snow, regular rain, and then ice. Imagine that on top of ten inches of old snow. Jose recommended that I come out in the morning and start her up again, and I knew that would be a good idea. I paid him handsomely, and we parted, but not before I took time to admire what a handsome parking place we had carved out. Only then did I notice that the gallery I was parked in front of had in its window a hologram of the Taj Mahal.

I [Heart] Snow

2011-01-26T07:27:00.000-08:00

This just in: Alternate Side Parking suspended UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE! Hurray!

Design Flaw

2011-01-21T17:08:00.000-08:00

Much as I love the Éclair, there have always been a few things about her that I could do without. One is the automatic windows. I like the kind of windows you have to crank up and down, and that you don’t have to turn on the ignition to roll up if you forget. Also, I would have preferred a stick shift, and I’d have loved to have a moon roof. But the most irritating feature of the vintage 1990 Honda Civic four-door sedan is its newfangled (at the time) seat belts, with their two-pronged approach to pinning you in your seat: a lap belt and a separate shoulder belt that automatically slides back and strangles you when you turn the key in the ignition. (This design was short-lived: in later models, the two belts were combined into one.)

There is also an annoying beeper that tells you when the seat belt isn’t fastened. My Rockaway car-sitters, T & T, called last week to say that it was beeping nonstop, even when the seat belts were all securely fastened, and asked if there was some trick to turning the damn thing off. Apparently the Eclair had been beeping since New Year’s, when I left it parked with one rear wheel up on the curb (I was sober; it was the snow banks that were at fault). Mr. T. solved the problem by turning the radio up. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand it on the five-hundred-mile trek across Pennsylvania, so last Friday, when I went out to Rockaway to pick up the car before leaving for my literary debut in Cleveland, I drove straight to my mechanic, Sir James Bulloch.

“All we’ll do is disconnect it,” Big Bulloch said when I described the problem. And that was all I asked. He put a mechanic to work on it, and right away it was clear that it wasn’t going to be easy. They had to bring the car inside and put it on the lift. It was about noon, and I was hoping to get back to Manhattan and on the road before rush hour. I went for coffee, and when I got back, maybe a half hour later, Baby Bulloch was in the office. “That must drive you crazy,” he said. Then I heard it: she was still beeping. I suddenly remembered something I had to do and went across the street to the liquor store. When I got back, the garage was blessedly silent. “They had to take the whole panel off,” Big Bulloch said. “They’re just putting it together now.” He said I would have to buckle the seat belt manually. As the automatic seat belt had never been my favorite feature, I didn’t mind. He charged me forty dollars and threw in a gallon of windshield-wiper fluid.

Anyone who has ever ridden shotgun in the Éclair will probably be pleased to hear that not only has the beeper been disabled but the entire shoulder-belt assembly has lost its will to throttle. You can buckle it, but the belt doesn’t ride back against your throat. The bad news, of course, is that it’s illegal to drive without the shoulder belt (I have been stopped for not wearing it), so it is extra important not to do anything that might attract a cop’s attention, like run a red light, for instance (which I would never do), or make a U-turn (which I would do only if it was strictly convenient) or speed (which this would be a good incentive to give up).

I was on the road by about three-thirty, and everything was going according to plan until dusk fell. For some reason, the dashboard lights weren’t working. When I’d asked, back in Rockaway, what might have caused the car to beep without ceasing, Bulloch had shrugged and said, “Could be a bad module.” I pulled into a rest area and made sure that the headlights were on, wondering what else might have gotten disconnected. While not mechanically essential, the dashboard at night is a sign of intelligent life, and I missed it. Without the dashboard lights, I couldn’t see how fast I was going or how many miles I’d gone or how much gas I had left. It was as if the car had had a stroke.

I got 177 miles into the trip before stopping at a Days Inn in Danville Pennsylvania. The gas tank was nearly empty. The next day, in addition to the stroke symptoms, the car developed Parkinson’s disease. It shook violently, especially at low speeds (my solution, of course, was to speed up). In Cleveland, I drove straight to the neighborhood mechanic, Wally, who told me I needed two tires. I asked him to take a look at the dashboard lights, and he was able to fix that problem, too. "I plugged in a module," he said. I snuck back into New York, on my new tires, between two storm systems, and found a parking spot that is good until next Tuesday or maybe longer, depending on whether the Mayor keeps having to suspend alternate side parking on account of snow.

Unkindest Curb Cut

2011-01-12T12:24:00.001-08:00

I have been in a bad mood since New Year’s Eve, when my mailbox contained two thin, identical envelopes from the Adjudication Division of the NYC Department of Finance. At first I took the thinness for a sign of innocence: no return envelope, ergo no fine. But I was wrong. The judge in the case of the curb cut (see post of Oct. 20th) found me GUILTY and said that my evidence—a photo of the Ninth Church of Christ, Scientist, the only church so designated in the metropolitan area—was “not probative.” As if I would send in a picture of just any old curb cut and not the one I was parked at when accused of obstructing a driveway.

I had purposely kept my defense succinct in order not to waste anyone’s time, but since that didn’t work I sent an appeal that runs to 736 words, written at white heat, as well as seven pieces of evidence, including a series of digital photographs designed to locate indisputably the Ninth Church of Christ, Scientist. In the course of my research, I discovered that there used to be a fire house at that address, which accounts for the curb cut. Unfortunately, I had to enclose payment ($190) with my appeal (grrrrr).

As if that were not enough, in mid-December I received another communication from the Department of Finance, saying I hadn’t paid yet another ticket, one that I’d never received. I went online and found a copy: it was for allegedly violating a “No Standing—Commercial Vehicles Only” sign on November 15th, at exactly the time that I was bragging about the spot I found on K Street where, if I wished, I could stay until Martin Luther King Day (which is upon as at last). The ticket was written completely in error by a blockhead who conflated the street number with an avenue address, and didn’t see which way the arrow points on the “No Standing” sign. I confined my defense to a single scathing typewritten page, and included four photographs to document the exact location of the sign with reference to local landmarks (I couldn’t take a picture of the address on the ticket, because it doesn’t exist) and printouts of relevant passages from two blog posts. All this took hours, and it still makes me mad just to think about it.

The only good thing to come out of it is the above photo of the Birdman of K Street, taken, totally by accident, I have to admit, while trying to document the legality of my beloved parking spot.

Meanwhile, alternate-side parking has been suspended for weeks, to facilitate snow removal and garbage pickup, and there has been delicious coverage in the Times, including this great story on how car-owners in the neighborhood of Boston known as Southie reserve dug-out parking spaces by placing things like lawn chairs in them, and then doing violence to any car that dares to park there. (I hope it doesn’t come to that in New York. They play mean in Southie.) There was also this piece, about the longest-ever period that alternate-side has been suspended in New York: 56 days in the winter of 1978, the year after I moved here and junked my ’65 Plymouth Fury II.

To Pay or to Pay More?

2010-12-28T15:07:00.000-08:00

Uh-oh. I got back into the city two days after the blizzard and, following a brief, half-hearted tour of my usual parking haunts (featuring mounds of snow with cars beneath them and people standing on the roofs of cars, shoving the snow off), I went to my old garage, where I hoped they would take me in. And they did, for a price: $36 a day. I called the management office, to see what kind of monthly rate I can get, and the best they can do is $303.04. That's almost twice as much as I paid in this garage two years ago. And yet when I hung up the phone both the man at Icon (Jose) and I were convinced that I was going to go to the garage tonight and fill out the paperwork and leave a check. What to do? If I leave the car in the garage till Saturday, I'm up to $180. And out on the street again.

I may wait a few days and see if my friends in Rockaway want the car for the winter or not. It came in handy for them, but then, misfortune: they had to go to a funeral in Brooklyn and got a ticket for parking at a bus stop. Parking is probably worse right now in Rockaway than it is in Manhattan.

Or I could try one more option: the new Automotion lot near me. "Park Swipe Leave" is their motto. At least it would be novel.

Clockwork

2010-12-09T14:24:00.000-08:00

Picture a Swiss clock with an alternate-side-parking theme: At 7:30, a little door opens and St. Francis of Assisi toddles out, sprinkling birdseed; sparrows surround him. At 7:50, the street sweeper drives through a big door, flashing and beeping, and cars scramble before it; the Broom completes its rotation, the cars return to their slots, and a cop pops out to write a ticket. If you are a Swiss clockmaker, I urge you to run with this. Each clock could have its mechanism set for the alternate-side-parking regulations in a specific neighborhood.

This morning, alternate-side parking was not as precise as a Swiss clock. For one thing, I kept popping out of my car. First I said hello to the birdman, who showed me what he feeds the birds (ordinary birdseed, orange and green) and pointed out the patch of evergreen where the sparrows live (the pigeons roost across the street). Then a woman in a black BMW drew my attention to a proliferation of orange traffic cones farther down the block. It seemed there had been an addendum to the No Parking Saturday sign. I trotted down the street to check it out, and sure enough: a No Parking Thursday sign had appeared, and was already in effect (5 A.M. to 6 P.M.). “The cones are all over the place,” the woman complained. “They’re filming ‘Nurse Jackie.’” There were no cones where we were, but how could we be sure Nurse Jackie would stay at the far end of the block?

A cop strolled by, and the BMW woman got out to ask her advice. I joined them; something about parking makes me unusually sociable. The cop knew nothing—she said we should park at our own discretion. I charged down the street again to ask some guys who were maneuvering a dumpster into position if they knew anything. One of them referred me to a car wrangler, sitting in a truck, who confirmed that Nurse Jackie needed only one side of the street, which I interpreted as only the far half of the block. I reported to the BMW owner that I thought we were safe—at least, until Saturday at 5 A.M.

Just then, a spot opened up on the Tuesday-Friday side of the street. Should I take it? It meant I wouldn’t have to sit here till eight o’clock and could get to the pool early and would be on time for a doctor's appointment at 9:45. Unfortunately, it also meant I would be out here again at seven-thirty tomorrow morning. But today had dawned so beautiful and clear that it was a pleasure to be out and about, enjoying the sight of the early light hitting the tops of the buildings. Plus it looked like the No Parking Saturday sign might not apply to this little strip of the street, maybe five car-lengths, on the Tuesday-Friday side. And I would rather get up at seven-thirty on Friday than bestir myself at 5 A.M. on the Sabbath.

So I moved. But once the car was in place, it was as if my body had been set for parking. There I sat with a cup of takeout coffee and a banana. I thought of crossing the street to explain my action to my new friend in the BMW, but why would she care? I peeled and ate the banana. The coffee was already getting cold. At 7:45, before the Broom could make its (irrelevant) appearance, I snapped out of it: I broke free of the spell of the Swiss clock and altered my parking routine.

Flurries

2010-12-06T15:06:00.000-08:00

I was going to take the car out to Rockaway last weekend, but it wasn’t exactly beach weather, and besides, I didn’t want to give up my parking spot. I had begun to wonder how long I could stay in this fine spot on K Street—perhaps till March? It has been extremely convenient, even with no alternate-side-parking holidays falling on Monday or Thursday until Martin Luther King Day, on January 17, 2011. After sitting in the car for a half hour, I have time to walk over to my health club by the river and get in a swim before work twice a week. Who knew that having a car in the city could be such good cardiopulmonary exercise?

Last night, a Sunday, I happened to pass K Street on foot, and noticed, at the far end, an ominous salmon-pink sign that said “No Parking Saturday.” It wasn’t clear whether it meant the Saturday just past (December 4th) or the Saturday to come (December 11th). If the former, I might arrive at my spot on Monday morning, with my swimming gear, only to find that my car had been towed. I did not sleep well for the suspense, awaking at about four in the morning with the sensation that my inner lining had become hypersensitive to Turkish cuisine.

But this morning the car was there, innocent of parking violations. What’s more, the pigeon fancier showed himself. He is an old man, bald and shambling, who emerged from my friend K’s building at 7:30 with a plastic container (as for hummus) full of bread crumbs. The pigeons were waiting for him. Behind me was a motorcycle. I watched in the rearview mirror as its owner arrived and suited up. He laid his gloves on my trunk, got his helmet out of the space under the seat (that helmet must have been freezing), and tucked himself into a sort of lap robe—a combination windbreaker and potato sack—before starting up and riding off.

There was a long piece in Saturday’s Times about the city’s plan to crack down on parking scofflaws. The person with the most unpaid tickets is a guy in the Bronx who owes $57,526. He said a friend of his racked up those tickets while using his van to make deliveries. The van has since been repossessed, and the friend has fled to the Dominican Republic. “I learned my lesson,” the scofflaw said. “Don’t trust your friends.”

The Broom appeared at 7:50. I left the car running awhile after moving, and even turned the heat on briefly (today’s weather featured the season's first snow flurries). On my way down the street to the pool when my time was up, I took a closer look at the "No Parking Saturday" sign. In fine print, someone had added the hours that No Parking would be in effect: 5:30 A.M. to 6 P.M. I have to get up on Saturday at five to move the car? This is sterner discipline than I have come to expect of my alternate-side-parking exercise routine.

Guerrilla Book Marketing

2010-11-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

Of all the subtle beauties of my current parking spot, chief among them is its position: first in line after the sign dividing commercial parking from alternate-side. When the street sweeper comes, the car in this position has the best chance of getting its spot back, with the minimum of anxiety. It helps that there is no parking directly across the street: only a curb cut leading to a door that opens like a portcullis, admitting cars one at a time into a big elevator cage. So when the Broom comes, as it did this morning at 7:45, I have only to start up my engine, back up a bit, pull out as if into a diagonal spot across the street, leaving room for the Broom to pass, and then reverse back into position before through traffic can get tangled up with the parkers and foil our enterprise.

This is such a fine spot that I could sit here for a half hour twice a week and watch the seasons change. The pigeons were absent this morning, and the yellow leaves of the ginkgo had mostly fallen. In front of me was a silver-gray Dodge Charisma with New Jersey plates. I had not heard of the Charisma before, for a very good reason: when I looked again, I saw that the word formed by the chrome letters was not Charisma but Charger. I like Charisma better. (Detroit, take note.)

Over the long holiday weekend, I practiced the art of guerrilla book marketing. Curious about where the various bookstores have been shelving “Freud’s Blind Spot,” the anthology of sibling experiences that I contributed to (Simon and Schuster, $15; here’s the Amazon link), I went first to Barnes & Noble and asked for it at the information desk. It was in Relationships, on the third floor. I found three copies, shelved alphabetically under the name of the editor, Elisa Albert (how great that her name begins with "A"); I took all three downstairs with me and bought two (after placing the third strategically on one of the counters featuring new nonfiction paperbacks). I got some slight discount, because I am a member of Barnes & Noble, but I had a coupon for an extra fifteen percent off that I forgot to use.

Next on my list was Borders. There is no Relationships section at Borders, so I wandered around in Psychology and discovered a section labelled Anthologies, but no luck. I used one of the computers Borders has instead of employees, and determined that there were indeed copies of "Freud's Blind Spot" in the store. Finally I tracked them down in Literary Fiction, under Elisa Albert’s name. There were two copies, and I bought one (after finding a nice spot up front on a shelf that featured new nonfiction). I had gone to the trouble of printing out a coupon I received via e-mail, so I got forty percent off.

Third was the Strand. Here I did not know what to hope for: that there would be dozens of reviewers’ copies available (at half price) or none, because all the critics were busy consulting the book as they wrote rave reviews. Anyway, there it was downstairs, not among the reviewers’ copies but in the Literary Nonfiction section, which has recently been moved downstairs: three copies, under Elisa Albert’s name, at half price. I bought all three, feeling relieved that it had been shelved properly.

I suppose I could make a color Xerox of the cover and tape it to the window of my car, parked there behind the Charisma, where it might have a subliminal effect on passersby.

Bus Lane Alert

2010-11-22T12:11:00.000-08:00

From my parking spot today, I saw a fleet of four pedicabs pulling mini-billboards that said “Bus Lanes Are for Buses—$115 Fine.” They were headed east, toward First and Second Avenues, where new cameras have been installed to catch cars violating the bus-only lanes. Like the red-light cameras, the bus-lane cameras, which go in effect today (Monday), will be another huge ka-ching for the city. This is from the online Wall Street Journal: “The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says ‘the city's 2.8 million bus riders have been held hostage for far too long by motorists who routinely block bus lanes.’… Vehicles will be allowed to enter a bus lane only to make the next available right turn or to quickly discharge or pick up passengers.”

Everything happens at once. The pedicab ads went by just as the Broom was passing. Though I backed up as far as possible last Monday after the S.U.V. in front of me pulled out, there still was not quite enough room for two cars, so a motorcycle had filled in the blank. Its scofflaw owner failed to show up. The street sweeper—the man, not the machine—seeing the motorcycle in front of me and a van in the commercial space behind me, knew that he wouldn’t be able to get in and out of my spot, so although I started my engine, in a show of good faith, he didn't make me move.

But as my head was turned, some urban Hansel and Gretel must have walked up the street, because suddenly the pigeons reappeared on the sidewalk outside my car door, pecking at microscopic breadcrumbs. Among the birds were some sparrows, and among the sparrows a blond. I seem to be parked in a bird-watching zone. Ahead was a ginkgo tree in full yellow.

Meanwhile, at Broadway and Twenty-third, there was a truck with the word Arctic on it. I thought it was a promotion for some freezing-cold beverage, and headed for the tent to get my free sample. Despite the fact that it is unseasonably mild today, there was snow on the ground and people were bundled up in mittens and mufflers and earmuffs. When I got to the kiosk, a man was turning people away. They were not giving away free samples. They were making a movie.

Sneak Preview

2010-11-16T08:29:00.000-08:00

Chances are pretty good you'll be getting this for Christmas: "Freud's Blind Spot," edited by Elisa Albert, with an essay about Dee and me, out today from Free Press.

Arrr ...

2010-11-15T13:36:00.000-08:00

Pigeons swarmed the sidewalk outside my car door this morning. I could not tell what they were pecking at, it was so tiny (cornmeal?). Apart from the pigeons, I was in a beautiful spot: Monday/Thursday, 7:30-8, with alternate-side suspended Tuesday through Thursday for Idul-Adha. I am good till next Monday and then again for Thanksgiving, if I don’t go anywhere this weekend.

At 7:50 A.M., the Broom sped down the middle of the street with no intention of sweeping. The car in front of me, a big white Lexus with Massachusetts plates, was unoccupied. At eight o’clock, a young blonde showed up with a cup of coffee, got in the car, and drove away. What did she know that I didn’t know?

Sunday evening I came home to yet another envelope from the Department of Finance. It felt ominously thick, as if it contained a return envelope, yet it seemed too soon for a response to my defense in the matter of the defunct curb cut. I make it a policy not to open financial mail in the evening, but in this case I couldn’t stand the suspense. I tore open the envelope and inside, along with a pre-addressed return envelope, was a form showing three pictures of the Eclair, unmistakable with its fishermen’s-parking-lot permits lined up on the right rear fender and, as if that were not enough, a closeup of the license plate. It was running a red light.

My first sensation was of hilarity: I had caught my mechanic joy-riding. The red-light camera was in Rockaway, where I had left the car for a muffler job: it wouldn’t be the first time that I had gotten a ticket while my car was at the mechanic’s. He had probably taken it for a test drive after fixing the muffler, or used it to run an errand, or both. Hah! I would present him with this undeniable proof and demand that he give me a free oil change and throw in a pair of complimentary windshield-wiper blades.

But when I examined the details, the date of the violation did not match up with my appointment to get the muffler fixed. Where was I on 09/11/2010 at 5:59 PM? That was the Saturday after Labor Day, and friends from New England were visiting me in Rockaway. I had gone to the marina in the afternoon to check on my boat, and then returned to the bungalow, where one friend had already arrived on foot and the other soon arrived by car. We sat on the porch for a while, trying to decide what to do for dinner; I didn’t feel like cooking. Then I had a brainstorm: a picnic at Fort Tilden. We had fresh mozzarella and garden tomatoes and leftover pesto and sliced turkey and a bottle of Prosecco. We bought some rolls, threw in salt and pepper and knives and forks. I even packed champagne glasses.

I don’t remember running the light on the way to the beach. I must have sailed through it in an excess of high spirits. The amount due is $50. When I showed the Notice of Liability to a friend who let me use the color copier at work, he said, “You should get rid of that car.”

I went out in the boat one more time on Sunday, heading over to the capped-off landfill on the Brooklyn side at high tide. Thankfully, it was an uneventful trip, and though I haven’t gotten out much this season, on my return I executed a beautiful landing: yanking the gas plug as I entered the marina, feeling the motor begin to sputter out as I turned into my slip, having the boat glide to a stop just as it reached the dock. I grabbed the line I tie up with and wrapped it around the cleat. Too bad no one was watching except the cormorants.

November

2010-11-06T04:36:00.000-07:00

That time of year thou mayst in me behold when I resubscribe to home delivery of the Times. The home-delivery week seems to start on Wednesday, so for several years now my first home-delivered copy has carried the results of Election Day. How sad to see on the front page the first unflattering picture of Barack Obama.

It was not election news that I craved so much as the weather page. I know there are other sources for the weather, but I like the graph in the Times that predicts the high and low temperature for the next several days. As soon as that line plunges into the thirties, I start worrying about turning the water off in Rockaway. As usual, I am torn between pulling the plug (literally) and stretching the season. Last year, I let it go too long, and when I called the plumber, he had already decamped for Florida. But he very sweetly sent his son the accountant to turn off my water. This year I called early, and it turns out Jimmy isn't going to Florida till January.

I cancelled my first appointment, for November 1st, All Saints Day (alternate side suspended), hoping to reschedule for Thursday, but the plumber said it was going to rain. At least that meant it wasn’t cold enough for the pipes to freeze. But the forecast (and I did consult other sources at this point) showed the temperature dipping as low as 30 over the weekend. (The Times held at a conservative 34.) We set a tentative date for Friday, November 5th, Diwali (alternate side suspended), agreeing to talk the night before to confirm.

Jimmy was right about Thursday: it poured and was gloomy. I began to focus more on precipitation than temperature: on Friday there was a chance of rain, but even if it didn’t rain, the ground would still be wet. I hated to think of my plumber, who is like an ancient Chinese ancestor (in jeans, and minus the beard), lying on the wet earth beneath the bungalow. And considering that the forecast was getting milder, I asked, when I called, if he would prefer to postpone again till next Thursday (recycling day in Rockaway; I could get all the newspapers and beer bottles out for the winter). He agreed, and I was feeling quite beneficent: I was giving my plumber Diwali off. Also, I didn't have to leave the Tuesday-Friday spot I found last Sunday, which was good for the whole week.

Later, I realized I’d rescheduled him for Veterans Day (alternate side suspended). I hope he's not a veteran. And that it doesn't rain.

Guilty

2010-10-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

The return address on the envelope was NYC Finance, Adjudication Division.

The document was headed: Decision and Order.

Under “Notice of Violation Decision Summary,” it said, “Disposition: GUILTY.”

It elaborated: “Respondent claims that the summons incorrectly describes the sign posted at the cited location. Pursuant to Traffic Rule 4-08(a)(1)(i), ‘one authorized regulatory sign anywhere on a block, which is the area of sidewalk between one intersection and the next, shall be sufficient notice of the restriction(s) in effect on that block.’ Respondent’s claim is not supported by persuasive evidence about the signs at the place of occurrence. Neither of the photos showed any name(s) of street and building numbers. Respondent did not show, with substantial, detailed persuasive evidence that no part of the vehicle was within the No Standing Zone.”

One should not read things like this before breakfast.

I have to admit that I knew if I had walked down the block I could have figured out which side of the street the “No Standing Anytime” sign referred to (see "Not Guilty," September 2, 2010). But you know what? It’s all too annoying to go on about. They got me. I’ll pay. And I’ll never park in that spot again.

At the bottom of the document is this instruction: “Retain this record of your hearing for 8 years and 3 months.” What? That brings us to January 26, 2019, before the matter is officially closed! That’ll teach me to try to fight City Hall.

Playing with Fire (Hydrants)

2010-10-28T11:46:00.000-07:00

Orange cones have been proliferating in my neighborhood lately, thanks to the film industry. Last Saturday, I drove back from Rockaway (in relative silence—got the muffler fixed, for $275) and found a spot on the Monday-Thursday side of K Street, just far enough (I fervently hoped) from a fire hydrant. Orange cones were all down the other side of the street, along with signs announcing a movie shoot (through November 11th!). Returning to the car for my half-hour sit on Monday and then again today (Thursday), I was worried that the cones might have multiplied and crossed the street . . . but I was lucky. No cones and no hideous orange parking tickets.

Ahead of me, in front of the fire hydrant, on this sultry pre-Halloween morning, was a motorcycle under a shroud. It looked as if someone had just picked it up and moved it there, perhaps because it was in the way of a legal spot. I’ve noticed more motorcycles getting tickets lately, but in this case there was no place to tuck a ticket—a cop would have to use a safety pin. The opposite side of the street was a mess of semis and fork-lifts and trucks delivering hydraulic elevator platforms. At 7:50, a little red Geo pulled up in front of me, no doubt hoping to insinuate itself between me and the fire hydrant. But the Broom hadn’t come yet, and he gave up and left. Two motorcycles zipped down the street and squeezed in between cars farther down the street. It was 7:55, and still the Broom had not come.

A black BMW with a fancy silver license-plate holder double-parked alongside the fire hydrant, and a black guy got out. Tall, suave, and Obama-esque, he worked the line of cars behind me to get everyone to back up and make room for him between me and the hydrant. When he got to me, I said that I didn’t mind moving but that the sweeper hadn’t come yet, and if it did, we were going to create one unholy mess, mixing it up with the trucks and the fork-lifts, leaving room for the Broom and thru traffic. He looked at his watch—it was about three minutes to eight—and shrugged. Well, O.K. Maybe the Broom couldn’t get by all those film-industry trucks and orange cones on the next block. I backed up. Then it turned out that the tall, suave black guy couldn’t parallel park to save his life. A super from a nearby building helped direct him, and I kept backing up to give him more inches.

At eight o’clock, there was still no sign of the Broom. We fortunate few started getting out of our cars and locking up. Then I saw it, up the street: the idling Broom, its lights flashing, trying to intimidate a car into moving. I exchanged looks with the man who had gotten out of the S.U.V. behind me. All the alternate-side parkers were now pretending they had nothing to do with any of these vehicles. “If he’s late, it’s nothing to do with us, right?” I said to the S.U.V. owner as the Broom swept disconsolately down the middle of the street. “Right,” he said. “HE should get a ticket.”

The Defense Rests

2010-10-20T13:48:00.000-07:00

The New York City Department of Finance leaves only four short lines on a parking ticket to describe your defense if it doesn't fit into one of their categories. So I edited down my screed to this: "There is no driveway at [address on ticket]. There is a curb cut in front of a Christian Science Reading Room with no vehicular egress. See enclosed photo." I think the photo came out pretty well. It even shows a car parked where I was when I got the ticket (except that it is farther from the fire hydrant, the long shadow of which can be seen at lower right). I'm also rather fond of "vehicular egress." I don't know where that came from.

Perhaps, to sweeten the package, I should have enclosed a picture I took in Rockaway of my passionflower vine, which finally bloomed.

Gale

2010-10-18T19:07:00.000-07:00

Condolence calls came from as far away as the West Coast about my recent spate of parking tickets. I paid the two for the hydrant offense right away, just to get some of those orange envelopes off my desk. The Department of Finance does make it easy for you: the water-resistant ticket comes with two peel-off labels, one of which says “I want to pay.” I didn’t really want to pay, but I am saving the other peel-off label—“I want a hearing”—for my defense in the matter of the obsolete curb cut fronting the Christian Science Reading Room.

Meanwhile, it seemed like a good time to get the muffler fixed out at the mechanic’s in Rockaway. On the way, I reported to the marina. High winds were predicted for Saturday, but I didn’t believe it until I saw Jamaica Bay: whitecaps fluttered on the surface like a huge flock of birds. Down at the marina, the boats were rocking in their slips. My boat had about four inches of water sloshing around in it, so I got my rubber boots and a bucket out of the trunk. But the slip itself, the narrow dock off the main dock, was rocking almost as much as the boat, and I was afraid I’d lose my balance trying to get in.

I stood and stared for a while, and when a man came up the dock I asked, “Can you give me hand? I want to bail it out, but I’m afraid to get in.” He kindly came out onto the slip with me. “Kind of flimsy, isn’t it?” he said. I took his hand, but I was still scared to get in: I wanted to take his other hand, too. “Get rid of the bucket,” he said. “That way, in case anything happens, at least you’ll have both hands.” That made sense. I put the bucket in the boat. Then he said, “You’d be better off stepping in backwards.” That made sense, too. So I turned around, took both the man’s hands, as if we were dancing, and stepped backward into the boat. “Thanks,” I said.

I started bailing, but soon I had to sit down. The water was as choppy as I’ve ever seen it, and the boat was tossing around. The Boss came running down the gangplank, saying, “We’re gonna have to get you an electric pump.”

“Good idea,” I said, bailing.

“How ya doin'?”

"O.K. How are you?"

“Goin’ to save a boat,” he said, and hustled down the dock in his blue hooded sweatshirt. Soon another man ran down the gangplank after him, and I saw them busy with the lines on one of the boats at the far end of the marina. It struck me for the first time that the Boss looks a little like Popeye. He and the other guy and a lot of the men at the marina have that build: the upper-body strength and the nimble legs.

When it was time to get out of the boat, I played it safe: I sat on the dock and swung my legs up out of the boat. Then I scootched down the flimsy slip to the main dock, where I hauled myself up by the gangplank rail. I wanted to rinse off the outboard, because my weight in the boat had lowered it into the salt water. So I filled the bucket with fresh water and walked back out on the slip, but when it was time to risk losing my balance by lifting the bucket to slosh it onto the motor, I lost my nerve and danced back to the dock, terrified that I was going to fall into the bay. I'm not used to negotiating surfaces that are pitching about underneath me. Every muscle in my legs quivered for the rest of the day. Now I know why sailors are famous for doing jigs.

Disaster Strikes

2010-10-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

Thursday morning when I got to my car I found it festooned with parking tickets: four fat orange envelopes, two stuck under the windshield wiper and two wedged into the sideview mirror. Arg. When I drove in from Rockaway last Saturday for Dee’s show, I was determined to get a Monday-Thursday spot so that I could celebrate Columbus Day (observed on Monday, October 11th), and I settled for the first spot I saw—actually, I went around the block once, hoping for something better, because I knew it looked a little close to the fire hydrant, but I paced off the distance—about ten feet—and decided to take a chance. I respect the need to keep clear of fire hydrants, but sometimes it looks to me like people overdo it, leaving great swathes of space on either side.

There is something printed at the top of parking tickets that I’d never noticed before: “Write only one violation per ticket.” Two of the tickets were issued by an Officer Winn at 2:16 A.M. on 10/11/10. (Note that I had been there for more than twenty-four hours before my alleged infraction drew any notice, so it can’t have been that egregious. Also note the hour that Officer Winn was skulking around my car.) One ticket is for the fire hydrant (he judged that I was only seven feet from it). The other is for a violation of Code 98, Subsection F2: Obstructing Driveway. Now, there is a curb cut at the address recorded on the ticket, and I was parked at the curb cut, but I’ve been down this street before, and that curb cut is a vestige of a former time, when the building it is in front of was a garage, or even a stable. What is there now is a Christian Science Reading Room, and the place where the cars (or horses) passed through is now a plate-glass window that serves as a showcase for religious tomes. There would be no reason for a car to pull in there, or a horse, unless it was a Christian Scientist.

The second set of tickets are the same as the first, except that they were issued approximately twenty-four hours later, by an Officer Santiago, on 10/12/10 at 12:15 A.M. (the hydrant) and 12:17 A.M. (obstructing driveway).

Whenever you contest a ticket, the Department of Finance offers you a discount if you’ll shut up and go away. (Recently, I received the expected offer to reduce the fine for my “No Standing” offense from $115 to $90, but it doesn’t seem like a big enough discount. Besides, I am sincere in my defense, and it’s worth $25 to me to see if it holds up.) I could contest the two tickets for parking too close to a hydrant ($115 x 2), but I just looked up the rule and it turns out that the prescribed distance is fifteen feet, not ten. So I'm screwed.

But blocking an obsolete curb cut? Google maps has a good shot of the Christian Science Reading Room. (Here’s the link; I realize that by publishing it I risk having someone take my spot, but this one doesn’t seem to have been very lucky for me, does it?) The street view on Google even shows a car parked right where I was parked. If the “Obstructing Driveway” offenses ($90 x 2) are dismissed, I can maintain the delusion that I've saved $190.

I found a spot on the same block on Thursday, far from any fire hydrants or curb cuts. When I walked up the block after sitting in the car for an hour and a half, fuming, I noticed that no one had dared to park in front of the Christian Science Reading Room.

Baby Dee with Swans

2010-10-11T11:43:00.000-07:00

Baby Dee’s opening for the Swans on Saturday at the Bowery Ballroom was one of the best sets I’ve ever heard her do. She started on the accordion with an instrumental piece called “Early Spring,” and then sat down at the harp and, with Matthew Robinson on cello and Sarah Alden on violin, sang “The Robin’s Tiny Throat” (which is an excellent song to open with, because it kind of explains why she’s up there singing to begin with), “A Book of Songs for Anne Marie,” “Lilacs,” and “So Bad.” She said she had never told the story behind “So Bad” (“Jesus got my mom in there, and beat her up so bad”), but that someone in the audience had witnessed it, and she dedicated the song to me. (She didn’t tell the story, and I’m not going to either—yet. “So Bad,” oddly, is the song of Dee’s that is easiest for people to lay their own story on.)

Then she did a song that is not on any of her CDs but is on one of David Tibet’s: “Idumea.” She followed with “Set Me as a Seal on Your Heart,” which has a long, beautiful instrumental introduction. Then came a surprise: she introduced “Fresh Out of Candles” as a song about growing up in Cleveland in the fifties and early sixties. I’ve only heard this (to me) tragicomic song (it’s partly about saints who got deposed after Vatican II) with piano accompaniment, and Dee had rearranged it for the harp/cello/violin trio. She played a new song called “The Day I Died” (it will be on her next CD) and finished with one of her two slug songs, “Brother Slug and Sister Snail.” For this, Sarah created a shimmering trail of slime on violin. Matthew had a cello solo on one of the songs. And Dee is playing the harp better than ever.

This was the final concert on the Swans tour with Baby Dee. It was also my first experience in an audience for heavy-metal New York punk. I was advised to bring earplugs, and I did. The Swans are wonderful to look at: three craggy veterans and three younger musicians. One of them is a guy named Thor, who has waist-length blond hair and hammers a set of bells. After he took off his shirt, he looked like nothing so much as a sweating blacksmith. There were three guitars and a pedal steel and another percussionist, all banging away. At one point, two slide trombones joined the act, and I couldn’t even hear them (maybe it was the earplugs). I saw Michael Gira’s lips moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was singing. I am told—and I believe—that the loudness is necessary, that it is part of the point. For a while, I found a place on the balcony, right by the railing, and I could look down at the heads of the people below, standing shoulder to shoulder and vibrating. And it was kind of thrilling in a visceral way. It blows everything else out of your head.

Then I descended to the lounge level and hung out with Baby Dee and Little Annie, who are taking their act to Europe later this month, until it was time to go home. Dee’s next gig is in London, October 16th.

Detour

2010-10-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

Spoiled by the Jewish holidays—five in a row, freeing up the entire month of September—I returned yesterday from a weekend in New England, unloaded the car, and wondered what to do with it. The Eclair now starts reliably, but she needs a new muffler. My friend’s son showed me where the exhaust pipe has come loose. At first it just rattled, but now it roars. It seemed wrong to make so much noise only in order to move the car from one side of the street to the other. I decided to go to Rockaway, check on the boat, and find a parking spot out there.

I had driven up to Massachusetts in the storm last Friday (there is some kind of leak in the well beneath the windshield wipers, and rain dripped on my toes as I drove), so the clear weather when I left for the drive back, at dawn on Sunday, reminded me why people love to drive: it was an intense pleasure just to see the road stretching ahead into the hills. I’d had an excellent weekend, replete with good food and the scratching of several modest consumer itches (a jar of honey, a bag of apples, a new flat-screen TV). I didn’t need the radio or tape-player for company: I was content, for a change, to be peacefully absorbed in the Connecticut scenery.

I planned to take the Sawmill River Parkway all the way down to the West Side Highway—I love the part where, just as you emerge from the tunnel-like toll plaza, the Hudson River opens out on your right—and in my determination I barely registered an LED highway sign that read (in red) “HENRY HUDSON PKWY CLOSED TO 54 ST.” What? Surely if this was true it would be repeated. I passed the exit that offered me a last chance to give up on the Sawmill and take the Cross County Parkway to one of the other approaches to Manhattan, and turned on the radio. Just as the cars ahead of me congealed into a long ribbon of parking lot, I learned that the West Side Highway was indeed closed for a five-borough bike ride.

Cursing all cyclists, I got off in Yonkers. I figured if I went north, I could work my way back to that crossover. Instead, I found Broadway, the old Indian trail, which at least was going in the right direction: south. Where Broadway went under the El, I saw a sign for Route 87, the Major Deegan, and made a left along Van Cortland Park in the Bronx. Soon I was in another traffic jam, but most of the cars on the Major Deegan split off for New Jersey at the junction with 95.

A few hours later, the traffic to Rockaway was light. I went directly to the marina: someone had bailed (or more likely pumped) out my boat. It was too windy to even think of going out in it. I started looking for a parking spot near the bungalow—the next alternate-side holiday isn’t until Columbus Day, next Monday—and had just come to the realization that I was going to have to ask my neighbor to move the car at least once, when suddenly I remembered George’s street: a block of newish two-story attached brick houses, with driveways and parking pads, and no street-cleaning regulations. The people who live there sweep up in front of their own houses. There was one spot left, up against a rosebush planted on the tree lawn. I had time to talk with my neighbors, notice that my passionflower vine has finally put forth a blossom, and take in a major sunset before catching the bus and train home through Brooklyn.

Ship’s Log 9/25/2010

2010-09-28T15:36:00.001-07:00

Baby Dee came out on the boat with me last Saturday, the day before she played Joe’s Pub with Little Annie. There were several inches of water in the boat (there’d been a hurricane and a tornado since I last saw it), so I took off my sandals, climbed in, and bailed. Dee watched. So did some guys who had been sitting outside the office/trailer. For some reason, it amuses people to watch a lady bail out a boat. One of the guys was big, with a beat-up nose; his sidekick was small and dark. “You know, they sell electric pumps,” the big guy said. He told me, in all seriousness, that once I was out on the bay, with the motor going, I could pull out “that plug next to the motor” and the motor would draw out the rest of the water. What? That plug is the main thing standing between me and certain disaster! This is not a method of bailing I'm going to be testing anytime soon.

Before setting off across Jamaica Bay, I went to see the Boss, to find out what I owed him for getting the outboard fixed and also to ask exactly what had needed fixing. He was resting on the dock, with a tall glass of either iced tea or Captain Morgan’s on-the-rocks. "A hundred," he said. “My price.” (I think that means they would have charged me more.) I was ready to pay up, but he said I should wait till the end of the season, “when we’ll need the money to keep us in kibble for the winter.” He said that the pump had melted, and then he teased me about trying to go boating in sand. I’ve actually never run aground—one of the few mistakes I have NOT made in my boating career—but the awful truth is that I forgot to check for the cooling jet of water before setting off on this year's maiden voyage. When I realized it, I knew I should have turned the motor off instantly and rowed back to the marina, but I didn't. It was a relief to know that I had not completely cooked the motor, only lightly sauteed it.

Dee and I needed a destination, and I always like to go someplace I’ve never been before. I was thinking of Howard Beach. The guy with the beat-up nose recommended Vetro, a new place associated with Russo's-on-the-Bay, the big catering hall on Cross Bay Boulevard. "It's on the left as soon as you enter the channel," he said. "They got new docks and a lot of tables outside." We motored across the bay, between Broad Channel and J.F.K., concentrating on spotting the buoys and not getting swamped by the wakes of bigger boats. On the trestle bridge, an A train from Manhattan passed an A train from Far Rockaway: a pas de deux chevaux de fer. There was a good breeze, so it was a little choppy and we both got splashed. The tide was low.

We passed Bergen Basin (which you can't enter anymore, because of Homeland Security) and Hawtree Basin (which, at high tide, takes you all the way to the terminus of the Air Train at Howard Beach, through what looks like "Deliverance" country) and made a wide turn into the channel at Howard Beach. I would have liked to go up to the end of the channel, very slowly, like Cleopatra on the Nile, but the first mate wanted to go to the first place she saw, Vetro, which was exactly where our informant had said it would be. There was hardly anyone there, but whoever was there was certainly watching as I blundered around, shifting from forward to reverse and finally cutting the motor and using the oar to get the back half of the boat closer to the dock while Dee clung to a cleat from the prow. Such seamanship!

Dee had steak and wine, I had grilled octopus and beer, and the waiter admired my boat, which he called a dinghy. Yachts passed as we dined. On the return voyage, the motor started knocking in an alarming way, and I don't know what that was about. But I slowed down until it was under control, and we reached home without incident.

"Now we will return to the Isle of Manhattan," Dee said. So we went back through Howard Beach by car, and there it was again, this time on our right, our new landmark: Vetro. All in all, it was an eccentric itinerary.

(Photo pirated from Vetro's Web site.)

Rest-Area Gypsies

2010-09-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

I calculate that I have crossed I-80 in Pennsylvania, from the Delaware Water Gap to New Castle, about eighty times since I started driving. This past weekend, I saw a few things I’d never seen before.

One was a lineup of three or four police cars on the shoulder, all with their lights flashing, while, a few yards up the road, a couple embraced. (Had they just had a narrow escape?)

I was playing leapfrog with an army convoy: I’d pass them, then stop for coffee or gas, and they would get ahead of me on the road, so I’d pass them again. At one point, the convoy and I all got off at the same truck stop (I tried not to get behind them in line at the cash register), and I overheard one of the soldiers say into his cell phone, “I can crank it up and drive it, but it’s smoking like there’s no tomorrow.”

At the same pit stop (at the sign of the giant percolator, Sapp Bros.), as I pulled off the ramp there was a van stopped at the curve, with a big plastic gas tank sitting next to it and a cardboard sign that said “Need Gas/Cash.” I stopped, thinking that I could at least drive them and their tank to the gas station and back. A man approached, and said someone had already given him gas. “We run outta cash,” he said. He and his family—he motioned to two large young people lolling near the car—were heading home to Virginia, and they had some seven hundred miles to go. I gave him twenty dollars, and said, “That’ll get you to your next pit stop, anyway.”

I filled my own tank, and as I was getting back on the highway I couldn’t help but notice that the man and his kids were still there, flagging down cars. Sap or Good Samaritan? I will never know, but the whole enterprise did have a Faulknerian flavor to it.

Then, on the way home, I was just pulling out of one of the official rest areas when a clean-cut young man, followed by a woman, waved me down. I thought he was going to tell me I’d left my wallet at the vending machines or something. “I’m really embarrassed,” he began, “but if you could spare a few dollars for gas ... We need about fifty or sixty dollars to get home." I already had my hand in my wallet and was giving him a twenty when he added, "Our parents will pay you back double.” His girlfriend, or sister, seemed very grateful.

It seemed odd that two such different kinds of people would have the same problem on opposite sides of I-80. I got to thinking: Who takes off on a trip without enough money for gas? I think I'm going to have to go with sap.

About the Battery

2010-09-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

I wish there were a catchy saying, along the lines of “Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey,” for battery terminals. I think I have the color-coding down, thanks to lots of recent experience whipping around the jumper cables: positive = red (blood, life) and negative = black (death). But then you have to remember to hook up the red/positive before the black/negative, and that's where I get mixed up. Red (rhymes with dead) can be dangerous, and black is basic and comes before red in the dictionary. What's a girl to do?

The good news is that I was able to start the car last Thursday all by myself, using the portable charger. The bad news was that I drove straight to the mechanic and he charged me $500 to replace the battery and the alternator.

This seemed high to me. I know what a new battery costs (about eighty dollars), but I didn’t know the price of an alternator. So I asked the mechanic for a bill.

“A bill?” he said, as if the concept were new to him. “You want a bill?”

“Yes,” I said.

We were in the garage office, and he carried the form over to the car to fill it out without me watching. It said: “Replace alternator/Repair wire—$400. Replace new battery—$100.”

“That's it?" I said. "Can't you break it down? You know, an itemized bill?”

“You want itemized?” he asked.

“Yeah, you know … parts, labor.”

“That costs more,” he said.

“It costs more to have a bill?”

“Yeah. I have to use the computer.”

“Look, I’m … curious”—I was trying to avoid the word “suspicious”—“about the price of an alternator.”

So he divided the $400 into two smaller sums, somewhat arbitrarily, it seemed to me: $220 for the part, and the rest for labor. (A sign on the wall said that labor was $95 per hour.)

“Is there any guarantee?” I asked.

He shrugged and said, "Six months, a year.”

"Would you write that down?" I asked.

He scribbled something on the bill and said, “I’m not going to give you a piece of junk.”

"I know," I said. I gave him his five hundred dollars and shook his hand. At home, I Googled the car part. An alternator for a 1990 Honda Civic can be had for as little as $90. It seems that my mechanic had gone out of his way to fix me up with the finest, most expensive alternator on the East Coast.

“You got ripped off,” a friend (male) told me that night. A few days later, another friend (a female) said, “You got a deal.”

So who knows? I'm out $500, but the car starts. On Sunday, the odometer rolled over to 70,000. It happened on the road to the dump, or "Transfer Station" ("No Fish Guts"), on Kelleys Island, in Lake Erie.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can go to that mechanic again.

Dead Again

2010-09-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

I parked my car in the first available space yesterday when I came back from Rockaway. (All last week it was in a lovely spot, observing the Jewish New Year.) For some reason, when I started it up at eight-thirty this morning to go around the block and double-park across the street, all I got was a low rumble and a few clicks. I hadn’t left the lights on … so I don’t know what is wrong or what to do.

For now, I did nothing. It’s not always easy to do nothing, but in this case it was. I could call AAA. I could shanghai a fellow-motorist and involve him with my jumper cables. I could get the portable charger out of the trunk and see if it worked. But if I succeeded in getting the car started, I would have to drive it some distance to recharge it, and all I wanted to do was get out of the way of the street sweeper and then repark.

There is an office of the Department of Sanitation on this block, and the Sanitation police had left a few cars double-parked across from it. The Broom itself was escorted by the Sanitation police. They favor a white Ford Taurus. I got out as the sanitation cop approached, shrugged theatrically, and said, “Dead battery.” The Sanitation guy said, “No problem,” and added “Sorry” as he went past. The Broom swept around me—or tried to. The Sanitation cop had stopped to ticket an untended vehicle parked ahead of me, so the Broom idled in the middle of the street. Everyone idled while the cop issued the ticket. There was no honking.

At 9:15 a woman cop came by on foot patrol. She was beautiful, black, and busty, and walked in the street with her hands in her pockets. At 9:22 a traffic-enforcement car cruised by. At 9:50 a traffic-enforcement van, full of those orange cones, went by. I had been thinking of trying a little experiment, leaving the car after the Broom went by, to see if the cops had become enlightened as to the lack of necessity for people to be sitting in their cars once the street had been swept. Good thing I thought better of it.

On Thursday, I’ll have to do something about my battery.

Tickets

2010-09-11T06:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Times carried this story about cops being expected to meet quotas for writing tickets: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/nyregion/10quotas.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Are we surprised? We are not.

Not Guilty

2010-09-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

September 2, 2010

New York City Department of Finance
Hearing By Mail Unit
Post Office Box 29021
Brooklyn NY 11202-9021

Dear Sir or Ms.:

Regarding Summons No. *********-*, issued to my car (plate NYC MJN, New York) for parking in a No Standing Anytime zone on Wednesday, 8/17/10:

My car was parked on the west side of a narrow median strip on Beach 102nd St. in Rockaway, Queens. At the north end of this strip are two signs, approximately one car length apart. (See Exhibit A, attached.) The sign farther to the north (the one that appears larger in the photo) indicates Thursday parking rules to the south and No Standing Anytime to the north. The one farther to the south indicates Friday parking rules to the south and No Standing Anytime to the north. (Exhibit B shows the same signs from the opposite side, and offers a slightly better view of the print on the southernmost, or Friday, sign.)

I was parked between the signs, on the west side of the median, in a spot that looks like it is governed by the (larger) sign on the pole to the north, clear of the No Standing Anytime zone. Looking at it, who would not agree that this spot looks perfectly legal? The sign to the south looks like it governs the opposite (east) side of the strip. The strip is too narrow for each pole to be closer to the side of the road that the sign on it applies to. Nor is either sign oriented by a slight tilt to the side of the street it applies to. How was I—how is anyone—to know that the signs mean the opposite of what they appear to say?

I request that the summons be dismissed on the ground that the signs on this median strip are inadequate and ambiguous, if not downright baffling. If the above explanation and the attached photographs are confusing, that only serves as further proof that the signs themselves are confusing (though I do apologize for my photography; this is not a very photogenic block).

Thank you for your patience and consideration.

Yours,
The Alternate Side Parker

"The Bungalows of Rockaway"

2010-08-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

There was a movie premiere in Rockaway last night: the final cut of the documentary “The Bungalows of Rockaway” was shown at Fort Tilden. It rained torrentially, and I was late, so I didn’t stop at the cash machine, and to make the price of admission ($20, to benefit the Rockaway Music and Arts Council) I had to borrow ten dollars from the film’s director, Jennifer Callahan.

I’d seen two earlier cuts of the documentary, and I liked what they did with the final version. It has green-and-yellow illustrations that loosely impose the structure of a storybook, and lighthearted music that celebrates the word “bungalow.” (It means “in the Bengal style”; a bungalow has a pitched roof and a porch.) In addition to archival footage (including Uncle Julius, a.k.a. Groucho Marx, on the beach) and interviews with historians and residents, the movie has a villain (Robert Moses). What brought the audience to the point of hissing, though, was the announcement in mid-film that the management of the Breezy Point cooperative had refused to admit the filmmakers.

Jennifer and the producer, Elizabeth Logan Harris, came to my bungalow a few years ago with a cameraman. As a newcomer to Rockaway, I had no stories of olden days to tell, but I’ve never altered the appearance of the bungalow, so they shot some of its architectural details. Naturally, I watched for my home, which appeared for about three seconds: a shot of the auxiliary kitchen, panning from refrigerator to cathedral ceiling and down to the sink with the mirror over it that is too high for me to see anything in (it’s for tall guests). The narration at that point was about the simplicity of the bungalows.

There was a reception afterward, during which I tore off to the bank in the rain so I could repay the ten dollars I’d borrowed from Jennifer. The filmmakers are hoping that “The Bungalows of Rockaway” will be shown on Channel 13 on September 16th.

Class Reunion

2010-08-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

“I saw the car!” said a fellow-alumna of Lourdes Academy at the anti-reunion in Cleveland. “It has so much character.” She was speaking of the Éclair, which had passed inspection at Bulloch’s ($37.50) and made it yet again all the way across Pennsylvania, and was parked in front of the Saucy Bistro, where a group had gathered in remembrance of Mary Beth, who did not make it to our fortieth-year high-school reunion. I was prepared to deliver a eulogy—a brief eulogy—but no one was in the mood. So we drank to her memory—her sister Cathy, Susan, Jayne, Mary and Dean, Mary and Patti, Meg, Nancy, Paula, Mary Lou, Aura and Tony—and then those of us who were going to the official reunion formed a caravan to a sports bar called Stampers.

What can I say about seeing what people look like forty years after high-school graduation? It was an all-girls Catholic school, and during our tenure there the nuns came out of their habits, and shortly after that most of them left the convent (and some of them left the Church) and the school closed. The people I’ve stayed in touch with look the same to me, and the people I haven’t stayed in touch with I wouldn’t have recognized without their nametags. One of my old friends kept going out to the parking lot to smoke, and I went along with her, out of force of habit. Tareytons, Doublemint gum, and Tab were our poison back then.

After one trip to the parking lot (and one too many pints of beer), I decided that I would not have composed a eulogy in vain. So I put on my cowboy hat and took the stage (such as it was), and I talked about how Mary Beth and Susan and I used to play Michigan rummy, in a version packaged as a board game with the characters from “Bonanza” on the cover. We each adopted the persona of a character from “Bonanza.” Mary Beth was Pa, Susan was Adam, and I was Little Joe (no one wanted to be Hoss), and for years Pa and Little Joe carried on a correspondence … But never mind. No one was listening. Everyone was busy reminiscing about the blue plaid school uniforms and the flamingo-pink (or was it tomato-soup red?) gym “costumes” we were compelled to wear. In the yearbook, our hair styles are as dated as those of our mothers when we laughed at them as kids.

In the end, I had such a good time that I left the Éclair in the sports-bar parking lot and accepted a ride home to a friend’s house, where I slept on a luxurious couch. In the morning, she drove me to my car. The Eclair may have plenty of character, but on this occasion her battery was dim unto death. I jumped back out of the car and stopped my friend from driving away. I don’t know which is worse: having a dead battery from some mysterious mechanical ailment or having a dead battery from the stupidity of leaving your lights on. In that caravan the day before, it had looked like it might rain, and so, as if in a funeral procession, I had turned on my lights, telling myself I’d be sure and remember to turn them off. But the evening brightened, and despite a trip back to the car for my camera and all those trips to keep the smoker company and to get stuff together for a night on my friend’s couch, all I noticed was that the automatic door locks weren’t working.

I have jumper cables (in fact, they were a gift from the late Mary Beth), but I’d never actually used them to jump-start my own car. My friend offered to call her husband; I thought about calling AAA. But it was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, and rude to disturb the peace. We could do this. The hardest part proved to be getting the hood of my friend’s car open. Fortunately, I have a little generator in the trunk, with instructions on it about which color clamp to attach to which battery terminal and in what order. I wish there were a mnemonic device for this. I attached first the red (positive), then the black (negative) onto the good battery, and then the red and the black onto the dead one, and tried starting my car. Nothing happened. “Doesn’t it have to touch the metal?” my friend said. I had been trying to cover as much territory with the clamps as possible, but I reattached them to the nuts—red, black, red, black—and this time my battery gave off a little spark, and when I opened the door, the car beeped to tell me the key was in the ignition: It was alive!

I drove off to see Dee, who helped me celebrate my name day. I’d almost forgotten, in the effort to resist the brunch and Mass that formed the centerpiece of the reunion weekend, that August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, is the day when all people named Mary celebrate (at least in Europe). The superstition is that if you go into a body of water on that day, you will enjoy good health for the rest of the year. So I took a dip in Lake Erie, my natal waters. The slime along the rim and the packed mud on the floor and the wavelets don’t have that health-giving salty tang you expect from water once you’ve gotten used to the ocean. Once, this water tasted not just fresh but sweet to me. Not this time.

Back in New York, on Tuesday morning I moved my car to a spot on a Thursday/Friday street, but when I went back to it on Wednesday, there was a ticket pinned under the windshield wiper. Damn. I had parked along a median strip, and it was hard to tell which sign applied to my side of the strip, an ambiguity that I plan to develop when, inevitably, I contest this ticket for parking in a No Standing zone.

Expiration

2010-08-08T19:53:00.000-07:00

My New York State inspection sticker expires—or, rather, expired—on 08/08/10. It seemed so far away back in June, when I renewed my car registration. And there is no grace period. The police come around in the middle of the night, my neighbor T. says, and shine a flashlight on every car to read the stickers in its windshield. What’s more, 08/08/10 means midnight, Saturday, August 7, 2010, not Sunday, August 8, at 11:59 P.M. I don’t have till Monday. They take this stuff seriously.

I had been planning on driving into the city on Monday and doing various good deeds while my mechanic gave the car its emissions test, etc. But last Friday, when I called, they said Monday was too busy and that I should come in on Saturday. No way I was leaving the beach on Saturday.

So I called Bulloch, my Rockaway mechanic. Baby Bulloch said for a car as old as mine (1990) they couldn't do the test on weekends—something about the equipment being hooked up to the state. It was already too late in the day to get it done on Friday. I could bring the car in on Monday. Meanwhile, park it in a driveway.

(Do they make these things expire on Sunday on purpose?)

My neighbor T., who has been borrowing my car on a regular-enough basis that his two-year-old son can pick out the Éclair in a parking lot (granted, it has on its rear bumper a distinctive lineup of stickers for the fishermen’s parking lot), arranged for me to park behind his truck in the lot of the Getty station on the corner. The car could still get ticketed, the owner warned. But unless the cops really have been doing nighttime surveillance and knew the Éclair was due for inspection and were just waiting for me to fuck up, it shouldn’t attract any attention, except maybe to the wisdom of its owner in putting it in the lot, as our street is being torn up tomorrow. No Parking Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.

There is so much commotion on the block. They are still working on the elevated station (once every hundred years, whether it needs it or not), which involves sprucing up the areas under the elevated that are owned by the M.T.A. A patch of broken concrete on our corner, under the El, separated only by a fence from T.’s deck, has been torn up (jackhammers, backhoes, rude awakenings). Right around the corner, a truck from the D.E.P. is pumping sewage from a manhole near the corner to one up the street. In between is a major sinkhole, caused by a blockage in the sewer line. This is what they are going to fix.

Yesterday, a man with the face of a villain in a Beatles movie came down the block with a camera. He was documenting conditions, he said, in case property owners complain of damage. Though his face could so easily have turned to a snarl, as he took pains to explain to me that he was completely neutral, that these pictures would show an impartial view of what had been here before the excavation and would be used to solve arguments between the contractor and the property owner after the excavation, his face mellowed, and I saw that he was not a villain but a nice man with a camera.

Much as I hate to see the summer end, there’s nothing like a sewer project to make a girl's fancy turn toward thoughts of fall in Manhattan.

Kidnapped

2010-08-04T13:55:00.000-07:00

[From the archives]

Ship’s Log, September 6, 2003

Splendid day. Started out at high tide (around 4 P.M.) after bailing half a foot of water (and one dead fish) out of the boat. I had a vague plan to go around Broad Channel counterclockwise. Pete suggested an alternative route: up through the Wildlife Refuge and back via the airport channel. Angela, his wife, was in New England. An old friend of Pete’s named Brian had turned up at the marina, and before I left, Pete said that Brian wanted to take him and Angela out to dinner to celebrate their birthdays, which were within a day of each other, and he (Pete) was entitled to a substitute, so if I got back in time . . . It was a kind of round-about invitation to dinner. When I finally figured out what he was saying, I didn’t have the heart to tell Pete that I had already made dinner plans. I had accepted an invitation for seven o’clock from friends of a friend. The friend himself couldn’t make it, but I was stuck.

(I was struggling with whether or not I was part of a couple. I had met this friend—I’ll call him Dick—on the beach in late July, after an e-mail correspondence begun during the World Series the fall before. I’d taken him out in the boat, we’d gone to the Wharf together, he’d treated me to dinner at Popeye’s. We’d gone out in a big sailboat with a friend of his in Long Island Sound. We’d had bad sex, we’d had good sex. Our sex life was about three days old. When the invitation came from Michelle, his friend and my neighbor in Rockaway, I didn’t consult with him before accepting, because I wanted to be independent. I WAS independent, and though being with Pete and Angela had made me long to be part of a couple, I couldn’t assume that I was; I was afraid to. I didn’t know if Dick felt we were a couple. Anyway, I saw no reason not to accept the invitation, but I didn’t want to go if Dick wasn’t going. Michelle was HIS friend. As it turned out, he was busy that night with something he didn’t elaborate on, and he was trying to get Michelle to switch the day and time.)

I chose Pete’s course. They were dredging the Cow Path, a channel navigable only at high tide—and frankly not visible to me, on the chart or in the water, at high tide or low—so this was not the time to discover the Cow Path. A plume of dark clammy sand rose from the dredging equipment in the marshes. I went west, past the Wharf, to the buoys marking the channel at Ruffle Bar—Pumpkin Patch Channel. Watching the other boats, I found my way into Shad Creek, where I saw the backs of the houses on stilts that are visible from a car on Cross Bay Boulevard in Broad Channel. There was a tiny yacht club, some huge houses, lots of American flags, boats moored and docked.

I tried to find my way into the Wildlife Refuge by the route Pete had shown me on the chart (I’d learned not to call it a map), but all I could see was reeds, so I went back out to the channel and headed north, toward the skyline and the North Channel Bridge, to circle around by JFK. I was still alongside the Wildlife Refuge when the motor died. I got it started again, but it quit on me again after about three minutes or three hundred yards. I checked the gas line, checked the connections, made sure the throttle was at Start and the gear was in neutral. I got it started again, but it kept choking. I tried to sweet talk the engine, stroking it. By now I was under the North Channel Bridge, in water that was very shallow, according to the chart. I was very far from home and I was cutting corners. (This was the first sign of panic. I’d always been careful to stay in deep water even at high tide, but now, instead of observing the buoys, the channels—the lane markers of the sea—I was just heading straight for my objective. Not a good idea. If I were in a car, I'd be going offroad, cutting through fields.) I called Pete on my cell phone, which I had bought for precisely this purpose, but I didn’t have his cell-phone number, so I knew that my little SOS was sounding in the bungalow at the marina with no one there to hear it. Even when Pete came in from the boatyard, it was unlikely he would listen to his messages.

The motor conked out again under the bridge. I was drifting, between efforts to start the engine, and three guys who had been out fishing tried to help. They had a gaff hook and one of them came aboard. He got the engine started and said that maybe I had flooded it; it was idling O.K. They had just come from my home marina and didn’t much like the idea of towing me all the way back over there. Pete had often stated that beginners make the mistake, when something goes wrong, of thinking they have to get the boat home, which is not the most important thing and which is how motors get ruined. I could have asked to be towed to Howard Beach, on this side of the bay, but all my instincts were for going home.

My fishermen friends advised me to go full throttle across the bay. One of them gave me his cell-phone number and said that if I didn’t call he was going to assume I was safe and forget about me. Need I mention that three men on their way home from a day of fishing on Jamaica Bay were three sheets to the wind?

I managed two or three more spurts across the bay. Each time the motor died, I tried sweet-talking it, stroking it, crooning instead of cursing. It felt hot, feverish. At one point, I was so involved with the engine and ever so slightly panicked that I let go of the buoys: I lost track of them, like losing the count in a piece of music—it’s hard to find your way back in. I had been bobbing among some buoys that I knew marked the channel wide of the airport, but I couldn’t see the next buoy to line myself up with, and when I got the engine started again I headed directly for the smokestack on the peninsula. Basically, I set a course directly for home, with no regard for any obstacles in my way. When the motor died yet again, and I tried to restart it, I noticed it was smoking.

I started making phone calls. I called the fisherman and left a message and my vague location. By this time it was twenty to seven and I realized I wasn’t going to make my dinner date. I called my hostess, Michelle; she’d called me that afternoon to confirm, so her number was stored on the phone. “Hello, Michelle? Listen, I’m stuck out in Jamaica Bay and won’t be back in time for dinner.” “You can come late—we will wait for you.” “Oh, no, don’t do that.” Why wouldn’t she just let me cancel? “Unless you think it would be too much for you . . .” “That’s it, by the time I get home I will be . . .” I felt like a fraud. It was such an extreme excuse for getting out of a dinner date.

About Pete I realized that my only hope was to be in mid-message, sounding urgent, as he happened to be passing the phone. As I was prolonging my message—“Help! I’m out here off the airport and there’s about an hour of light left”—someone picked up the phone and said, “Mary?” “Oh Pete, thank God you’re there.” “No, it’s Pete’s friend Brian. Pete is upstairs in the shower.”

I was saved.

I explained to Pete, when he got out of the shower, that the motor was smoking, that I was alongside the airport, in the channel.

“Did you set the anchor?” (He pronounced it "ankuh.")

“No, I was trying to row.”

“Hah! I’ve seen you row. Set the anchor and relax. I’ve got to borrow a boat and we’ll come find you.”

I had in fact made a stab at rowing, but my oars had disappeared over the winter, and I was working with a pair of mismatched paddles. I wasn’t going anywhere. So I threw in the anchor. The phone rang while I was waiting. It was Dick, the man who couldn’t come to dinner, whose friends I was standing up. It sounded like he was at a party. “I’m stuck in the middle of Jamaica Bay,” I said. “Well, get out of there,” he said and hung up. No goodbye.

There was nothing to do now but enjoy the sunset. I had a camera with me (I’d taken a few shots of Shad Creek when it looked like that would be the high point of my adventure), so I used up the rest of the film on shots of airplanes taking off and the Manhattan skyline and the orange ripples on the water and the Rockaway skyline, with the trestle bridge I’d been heading for and the smokestack. When I ran out of film, I tried to write everything down. The buildings on the skyline were a deep, palpable gray. Gulls were shrieking all around me. Planes were taking off. Sunset was at 7:11. And now the moon was appearing. The water on the side of the boat away from the sun had a coat of purple over gray, all iridescent. On the side near the sun a network of gold veins formed by the wind or the current spread over the water, gold on black, weaving together into orange. Was it almost ugly?

I had only two light beers with me. I drank the last one.

Pete had given me his cell-phone number and I called him again.

“You’re not where you said you are,” he said. (No hello.) “Do you see any other boats where you are?”

“No.”

“Do you see a runway?”

“Yes. It’s all pilings coming out from the airport.”

“Is it to your right or left?”

That was a hard question. Both. It was to my north, but Pete, for good reason, didn’t trust me to know the points of the compass. So he said, “Where is the moon, from where you are?”

“Southeast.” That was a trick question.

“And the control tower?”

“East.”

“Now look at your chart. From where you are, is the water deep between you and the sunset?”

Between the cell phone, the chart, and the bifocals, I wasn’t sure I could manage in the waning light, but yes, the water was deep between me and the sunset. Pete needed to know, because he couldn’t risk ruining the boat he had borrowed by scraping it on the bottom.

He came out of the sunset in a flat white boat, with Brian in the bow. I was so glad to see them. I hauled up the anchor, and Pete tied the boat to a tow line. “Climb into this boat,” he said. “By the way, you need a lesson in reconnoitering.”

My job on the ride back was to make sure the little boat didn’t get caught in the wake of the tow boat and tip over. It did get caught at one point. In the marina, I climbed out, and Pete told me to row my boat into its slip while he and Brian returned the boat they’d borrowed. When they came down the dock, I was still in the same place, struggling. “What’s at the end of that line?” Pete asked, pointing behind me. “You’re snagged on something.” I drew it up: it was the anchor. It must have flipped out of the boat when it got caught in the wake.

I had told Pete about the three guys who told me to go full throttle across the bay, and he said there was a lesson in that: Don’t take advice from bozos. And another lesson: Don’t think you have to get the boat home. “And now we’re going to dinner, right?”

So we went to the Harbor Light, my second-favorite restaurant, after the Wharf, and I had Guinness and London broil. “No fish, right?” Pete said. I had told Michelle I’d call her when I got home. I didn’t mean to make anyone worry, and I did have the cell phone, but there were about four hours, from sunset to eleven, when I was incommunicado, sitting quite pleasantly, first in the boat and then in the bar with my rescuers. How was I going to account for this to Michelle and Dick? I decided simply to say that I had been kidnapped.

When I looked at the chart later, I saw that I was in a little back bay off Kennedy Airport, and if I had succeeded in going in the direction I’d been headed, I’d have gone up on a runway. A few weeks earlier, there had been a piece in the paper about some fishermen whose boat washed up on airport property, and they wandered the runways among jumbo jets before finding their way to the Port Authority Police. (That was point of the story: that in the age of the war against terrorism, the wayward fishermen at the airport had to find the police, not the other way around.) What would have happened if I hadn’t reached Pete? I probably would have tied up at the airport and sat there until the police came to arrest me.

Michelle rescheduled the dinner for the next day, and Dick went with me. We never did become a couple, though. Things started to unravel right after I referrred to him in public, twice, as my boyfriend, both times in a context of complaint. I think I knew that night that it wasn’t going to work out: him on his cell phone at a party in Manhattan, checking in; me riding at anchor in Jamaica Bay, ripe for other invitations.

On Curb Cuts

2010-08-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

For everything you ever wanted to know about curb cuts, see this article in yesterday's New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/realestate/01cov.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

For a long-overdue three-part piece on boating, see below. If it's too long, read it one part at a time.

The Last Sunset

2010-08-02T14:07:00.000-07:00

1. The Phone Call

With Angela and Pete, more than with anyone I know, I always call at the wrong time. I called last summer to ask how Angela’s mother was doing—she was very old, and had finally fallen and landed in the hospital—and they were just walking out the door to go to her funeral. There I was in Pete’s pocket. On Sunday, I was going to wait and call at about six, cocktail hour, but I called at four-thirty, determined to check one more thing off my list of things to do: See Buster about outboard (check). Call Angela and Pete (check). I needed to get the boat registered, which meant I needed the title, which meant I needed to get in touch with Angela, who had registered the boat to her and Pete’s business. I caught them in the car: they had just gotten into Rockaway with a load of plants that Angela’s sister the nun, out on Long Island, had gotten on sale at Lowe’s, and they were going back upstate to the farm in the morning. Pete handed me to Angela, who said in her mild voice, “Hi, Mary, how are you?” And then, after I gave her a hearty “I’m fine!” she said, “Mary, you just almost deafened me.” Pete had put me on speaker phone.

I was overjoyed to hear that they were in Rockaway. I invited them over for dinner—my friend Clancey and I were going to make chicken salad and grilled vegetables—but Angela griped about parking and also said that they were not comfortable leaving the dock once they were down there. Well, I blurted out, could we come to the dock for sunset?

One of the things I have always loved about the people on the dock was that, though they’d lived in those stilt houses on Jamaica Bay forever, they never got tired of the sunset. The night before, Clancey and I had gone to the Wharf for dinner and, failing to find a table outside, we were sitting just inside a window, rather forlornly. I went out to the car to get my cap and returned via the ladies’ room to be greeted at the bar by the Boss’s girlfriend, Sandra. The Boss was there, too, hiding behind his sunglasses. They had seen me dancing out the door. (The Beach Boys or something silly of my vintage were on the jukebox, and I guess I wasn’t that forlorn.) I was so relieved for having gone to the marina a week earlier and paid the Boss: $1,500, $500 for the remainder of last season (when I didn’t take the boat out at all) and $1,000 for this season. He and Sandra got a table outside, having left their name with the head waitress, and I was trying to do the same (though we’d already ordered) when Sandra relented and said, “Why don’t you sit with us?” I was elated to be at the Wharf watching the sunset with the Boss and his girlfriend. They are like Rockaway royalty. It was about eight o’clock, and sunset was at eight-twenty. The Boss complained that some guy who was waiting for a table was blocking his view.

So I was crowing about this on speaker phone when Angela said, “To be honest, Mary”—uh-oh, what was coming?—“I totally believe that the Boss stole everything over the years.”

2. The Message

Angela needed to get off the phone—Pete had gone into a deli, leaving her double-parked in the middle of the Boulevard—and she said she’d call me back. With one phone call, I had shattered the serenity of a Sunday afternoon. I started the coals and strung up some twine for the morning glories to climb on; if I was going to be in agony, I would at least be able to check one more thing off my list. So I missed the callback from Angela, but she left a message:

“You can come over for the sunset, but these are the ground rules: Bring a bag of ice. You can have two beers apiece. We can’t offer you anything else—all we have is some leftovers, just enough for ourselves. It’s a little embarrassing, but that’s the way it is.” She was almost inaudible, or maybe I didn’t want to hear anymore. For the boat, she told me I should bring the registration and a Xerox of my driver’s license. (Pete in the background: “Or she can fax it.”) “And there’s no water.” They hadn’t turned on the water in the bungalow since the start of last season, when they came home to find the place vandalized.

I couldn’t decide what to do. Clancey didn’t know Angela and Pete—they’d never met, though Clancey had been out in the boat with me—and she was disinclined to go. I decided to jump in the ocean before the lifeguards went off duty, at six. Actually, the last thing I wanted to squeeze into the hundred and forty minutes before sunset was a search for a photocopier on the peninsula. On the way down to the beach I had the idea of taking a picture of my driver’s license, downloading it to my computer, and printing it.

When I got back, Pete called, in his role as apologist for Angela. Really, my friend and I were welcome. “If you do come, we’d like to know what time, so we can be semi-prepared,” he said. So I told him I’d be there at eight: twenty minutes to sunset. I repeated all this to Clancey. She was more disinclined than ever to visit the dock. To her it was blazingly clear that Angela, at any rate, did not want company. Plus dinner was almost ready. “Could we take them some food?” I asked, knowing they would have already eaten. It was just too awkward. Not even my plan to take a digital picture of my license worked: the crucial information came out blurry. The ocean had solved nothing. Pete’s phone call had solved nothing.

While I stewed, Clancey grilled. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that this was all a Tom Sawyer-style ruse to get my guest to do the cooking. We had grilled-chicken salad with fresh dill and free mayonnaise that the girls in the deli had given us in packets (after telling us that a small jar of Hellman’s cost a shocking $5.49); potatoes, striped squash, eggplant, and a multicolored pepper—Clancey said it was called a chocolate pepper—from the organic farmstand; and a bottle of red wine, which I sipped just a little of. “I’m glad I ate before going over there,” I said. I had enough anxiety without adding hunger to it. “You sure you don’t wanna come with me?” I left, alone, at about seven-thirty.

I bought a bag of ice and called Pete on my way over. The gate to the marina was locked, no sign of Pete—I was a little early—so I showed how independent and resourceful I was by parking on the Drive. They had taught me to call it “the Drive,” instead of Beach Channel Drive, as they had taught me to call Rockaway Beach Boulevard “the Boulevard” (the neighborhood kids call it the Dirty Boulevard) and Ocean Parkway “the Parkway” and Rockaway Freeway “the Freeway.”

3. The Visit

The dead-end street from the Drive to the dock, High Tide Street, smelled of sewage. A few years ago, a developer put up apartment buildings here, on a street that floods regularly, twice a month. Who would choose to live on such a street? Did the agents arrange to show the apartments only at low tide? Many black children, including a toddler, were playing outside on the stoops and in the street. There’s a storm drain here, too. Between that and the tide and plumbing that obviously wasn’t adequate, the street had turned into Rockaway’s own cholera epidemic.

Angela had come out to dispose of one small plastic bag of household garbage. “I shouldn’t have said that about the Boss,” she said right away. “I can’t prove anything, and you don’t need to hear that.” She mentioned some things, like their dinghy, that had gone missing over the years. I hoped she didn’t suspect that he was the one who broke into their bungalow, that it was an inside job.

Pete had gone into the boatyard to wait for me at the gate—we had just missed each other. I gave Angela the bag of ice and went out to meet him. He made me go back up to the Drive and pull my car in the lot. “Otherwise,” he said, “you have to walk down that nasty street again.”

“So is this a hit-and-run or are you going to stay for a while?” Pete asked.

“One beer,” I replied. I had to get back to Clancey, and I knew they were busy—they were always busy. That’s why I hadn’t yet descended on them upstate, in the house they were fixing up to rent out to skiers. I was afraid they’d feel they had to drop everything and entertain me.

Pete was sorry that Clancey hadn't come with me. “See those clouds?” he said, pointing to a tiered arrangement of fluff to the north. “If the sun goes down right, those will light up beautifully.” But there was a bank of clouds at the horizon, and the sun might just plop behind it with no fireworks. “A nothing sunset,” Pete called it. A dud.

He showed me the plants they’d picked up from Angela's sister. The S.U.V. was crammed with them—hibiscus, phlox. The sister had gotten carried away—some of them cost only sixty cents. The plants surrounded an ancient pump that originally cost thousands of dollars; Pete had picked it up for a few hundred.

The Boss had mentioned the night before that Pete and Angela had auctioned off all their furniture, so I was semi-prepared for the empty bungalow. Pete stood outside sort of ruefully, almost ashamed, as I regarded the splintered railing and shuttered windows. The back windows were shuttered, too. Angela had set out the paperwork on a table against the back wall. “We’ll take care of business first,” she said. I signed where she told me to. I gave Pete an envelope with eighty-five dollars and the betting sheet from the Kentucky Derby. When I’d offered to pay for the boat, earlier in the summer, he refused, then said I could give him ten dollars. I wagered his ten dollars on a horse in the Kentucky Derby, choosing the horse on a hunch, but trying to channel Pete’s hunch: I picked Super Saver, and we won eighty-five dollars. It was not the fortune I imagined on my way back to the O.T.B., clutching the betting chit in my greedy little hands. Still, as Pete said, “It’s more than ten dollars.”

Pete offered me a beer. “We’ve got one Spaten and three Schaeffers,” he said. I took the Spaten. They had no bottle opener, so he had to perform the cigarette-lighter trick with a screwdriver.

“Pete, Mary brought us ice,” Angela said in her role as Pete’s etiquette coach.

“Thanks,” he said. Now I know: for people who are staying in a house on stilts without running water in the summer, ice is the perfect gift.

I had a few other little gifts for them: a package of artichoke seeds from Amsterdam and a box of matches from Greece. Pathetic, but it could have been worse: I’d almost grabbed an open bag of tortilla chips to share, but Clancey discouraged me. The matches now seemed ominous. I hoped they’d be used only to light a candle.

The Boss had been sweet to them lately, Pete said, and told me a story: The Boss had called about the sewage over the winter, and someone came out, but the guy said the building was in foreclosure, so there was nothing he could do. Then he asked the Boss, “Who owns this property?” They were outside the tumbledown bungalows, uninhabited for decades, that the Boss’s grandfather the bootlegger had owned. “I do,” said the Boss. So the guy gave him a ticket for a crack in the sidewalk. Pete shook his head disgustedly. “And they come after us for pooping in the bay.”

Somebody over at the other marina that Pete does business with was also giving up on Rockaway. “It’s Third World,” Pete said.

“When are you going to come visit us?” Angela said. “We’re happy up there.” They bragged that the deer hadn’t eaten any of their garden. “Every day, he pees the perimeter,” Angela said. Pete described the drive along the reservoir from Ellenville.

The next morning they were having the gas and electricity turned off in the bungalow. They'd had the phone turned off last summer. “That’s thirty dollars a month we’ll save,” Pete said.

So this was it. I had been keeping an eye out for the sun from the gloom at the back of the boarded-up bungalow, but it was north of the door. There was no movement to go outside and watch, and only one chair out there. It was a long way from the days we’d sit outside at cocktail hour—Pete called it his favorite meal of the day—and I’d practice knot-tying, and he and Angela made fun of me: “She’ll learn to tie a knot when she loses a boat in the bay.”

Anyway, it was a nothing sunset. “Well, at least I don’t have to be sad,” Angela said.

“I have to go,” I said. No one protested.

“Mary, would you like that sailboat?” Angela pointed to a round stained-glass object on the wall: a boat at sunset, its sail shaped like a smile and striped like a rainbow. “Margie gave it to me, and I’m sure she’d be glad to know you have it.”

“Did Margie make it?” Pete asked. Margie was a friend of theirs who had a potter's wheel in her basement and decorated tiles and could probably do stained-glass work if she felt like it.

“No. I think she found it somewhere.”

That made Pete start scouting around for something to give me. He grabbed another sailboat off the wall, a 3-D one, its sculpted sail swelling out of the frame.

Outside, Angela offered me a low collapsible table with the points of the compass in blue on white—very nautical. It had come off one of the boats they handled, and I had admired it—coveted it, in fact. I took it gladly. Pete opened the door to the storage space between the bungalows. “Can you use a vase?” he asked, handing me a dusty glass vase that looked vaguely familiar.

“O.K., I suppose so.” But that was it—I couldn’t hold any more.

“Come back tomorrow morning and I’ll give you the Egg Harbor,” Pete said, trying to sell me the last boat in his inventory. “Two thousand dollars. You can take it to work.” That made me smile. So what if the Rockaway ferry was no more? I could make my own run to Manhattan.

It was not the sunset I had been hoping for, but it was good to see with my own eyes that Angela and Pete really are done with Rockaway. I will always be grateful that they accepted me on the dock and put me in a boat and gave me memories (besides the ones of getting towed in): water lapping under the bungalow, the A train rumbling over the trestle bridge behind Angela’s kitchen curtains, the swallows darting from their nests among the pilings in the evening, the swans gliding up to the dock, and the drip of the tap that the Boss left open so that the swans would have fresh water.

Miracle!

2010-05-18T08:27:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been so obsessed with landing a good parking spot that I have been cutting short my time at the beach. Last Saturday I had to rush home to attend a concert of the group I used to sing with (they are doing just fine without me), but come Sunday I just could not leave the beach until I had inhaled every whiff of rose my head could hold and heard every bird and imprinted on my mind’s eye an image of the ocean, rippled as far as the horizon, with clear, pale bands of sky stretching out, panorama style.

Sometimes all of Queens smells like roses. This weekend, the breeze coming off the dunes held a light, waxy fragrance, something like laurel. On a cinder path at Fort Tilden I came across a stand of wild white wisteria that was still in bloom. At the top of the stairs there is a viewing platform, but I didn't linger, because two guys were up there with a sad-eyed boxer named Max.

I had a doctor’s appointment at 8:30 on Monday morning—and I was hoping to get a 7:30-8 spot on K Street, but by eight-thirty on Sunday night the cars were parked bumper to bumper. No other Monday-Thursday spot would do, which seemed a great pity, because alternate side is suspended on Thursday for Shavuot, the feast of cheesecake. No cheesecake for me . . . I was lucky to find a Tuesday-Friday spot that a couple were just leaving.

So this morning I organized myself for an hour and a half in the car and headed out into a light rain. I was parked on a friendly block where I have never or rarely participated in the double-parking exercise—I’m not even sure it’s customary there—so I decided to cruise a little, maybe check out the Sanctuary, just to see if there was a Monday-Thursday spot somewhere, so I could quick convert to Judaism. Down the street, a right on the avenue, a tie-up at the intersection, a left on the block where there is hardly ever a spot because of the car-rental agency . . . and there on my left, before a curb cut, was a spot that was just my size. I made sure I wasn’t crowding the car behind me, and then sat there for a while, stunned. Suddenly I was free not only for the next hour and a half but on Thursday and Friday morning as well. I could have my cheesecake and eat it, too.

K Street, Mon., 7:30 A.M.

2010-05-11T05:44:00.001-07:00

I am parked where the garbage truck usually double-parks, and a truck from some industrial supplier, with long black pipes on its bed, is double-parked opposite me. It is an excellent spot, which I squeezed into (without tipping over the Ducati at my rear) on Sunday at a little after 6 P.M., especially desirable because alternate-side parking is suspended this Thursday for the Ascension: the first break we’ve had since Passover. I don’t know when I’ve looked forward so ardently to an event in the life of Christ.

I’m here with no coffee and yesterday’s paper. But wait: here’s something I threw into the car last Thursday, before my life was hijacked by a flat tire—an issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues (Vol. 12, No. 4; 2002), salvaged from two pathologically neat stacks of psychiatric journals in the basement of my building. It opens to an article called “Naughty Girls and the Adolescent Tendency.”

The bill at the mechanic’s was steep: $440. I’m not sure how it added up so fast. He didn’t replace the battery, but the air-conditioner sealant was leaking, and the transmission fluid was dangerously low, and it was time for an oil change. The tire had a nail in it (how mundane). I picked up the car on Saturday, and just as I found a parking spot—I knew the spot was legal because it was raining and I could see the dry outline of the car that had just left it—my cell phone squawked, and I parallel-parked one-handed for the first time, while answering a serious question about which brand of beer I would like to drink that night at a party. (Palm, a Belgian beer, but it would be impossible to find.)

On Sunday, in Rockaway, the cacophonous work on the elevated platform at Beach 98th Street was suspended. Instead, there was a big operation on the beach, moving sand. I get a kick out of it when people write letters-to-the-editor insisting that their congressman do something about beach erosion. But then various government agencies actually try! It was low tide, and an enormous pipe was spouting sea water and sand onto the beach, and a bulldozer was moving the sand into pyramids, later to be redistributed in places where the last winter storm bit the sand right out from under the boardwalk. They're supposed to be done with the "beach replenishment" by Memorial Day. Meanwhile, it looked like some vast Egyptian sandworks.

Damn, here comes the garbage truck: 7:42. At least I am at the right (front) end of it. Cars thread between it and the double-parked industrial-supply truck. The trucker, down from Newburgh, loosens the straps on his load. He’s very systematic. So are the garbagemen. I notice that they don’t recycle (these are private haulers), but one of them removes a five-gallon plastic jug from the cardboard box it came in and reserves the cardboard, which he uses to chock the wheels of the empty dumpsters, so they won’t roll into the street.

When the garbage truck pulls out, the street sweeper is right behind it. I back up quickly as far as I dare before pulling over to triple park next to the double-parked delivery truck. Through traffic is unhappy: there is no lane left for it. But in two minutes it’s all over. At 7:53, I’m back in place. The industrial truck makes its delivery, tightens its straps, and leaves; another truck pulls in behind me, and men in white offload food to the hotel. I barely have time to notice that the city has planted four new trees on this block, where there was already a ginkgo, when an acid-yellow truck belonging to NYC DOT Meter Maintenance double-parks alongside me and a man gets out and unlocks the Muni-Meter. He is wearing big gold rings. He returns to his truck just as I am leaving my car, at the stroke of 8, and I have a chance to survey the inner workings.

Some things are worth getting up early to see.

Indisposed

2010-05-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

Too much adventure this morning. I arrived at my car, in a lovely Tuesday-Friday spot on K Street, between a Toyota and a Mercedes-Benz, at seven-thirty, and checked out the right front tire, which has had a slow leak. Well, the slow leak had speeded up since the last time I put air in the tires, and now the tire was flat as a potato pancake. I thought about it for a while: Was it absolutely necessary to spend this glorious May morning dealing with a flat tire? Or could I throw myself on the mercy of the street sweeper and let it wait a day? While I was thinking, the street sweeper came brushing and blinking down the street. He pulled up and idled behind me, and I cupped my hands at my mouth and shouted “Flat tire!” He nodded and went around.

I called AAA—might as well get it over with. Then I hauled the doughnut out of the trunk. The tow truck came in pretty short order, but got held up at the intersection while a garbage truck digested several dumpsters’ worth of trash from the hotel on the corner. The driver was a big guy with a big, close-shaved head. The car was parked close to the curb, and he asked me if I would “tip its nose out a little.” I complied. He took the flat off and was about to put the doughnut on when he noticed it didn’t have any air in it, either. I was afraid of that.

Now what? I did not want to be towed. My idea had been to put the doughnut on and leave the car right where it was until at least tomorrow. But I can’t go anywhere without air in that tire. The driver said he could tow the car to the garage that he works out of. “Let me make sure they fix tires,” he said. But when I found out where his garage was, I decided I would rather get towed to my own mechanics, nice guys who like my car and would take care of some other little matters while they were at it: like the air-conditioner, which isn’t working (as I discovered during last week’s heat wave); like the battery, which went dead over the winter (so far, it has held its charge); like the oil, which hasn’t been changed since last fall.

So the Éclair gets hoisted onto the bed of the tow truck, and I hoist myself up into the cab, and away we go. The driver seemed pretty mellow for a guy with a job that was potentially so frustrating. He had only been on the job for this company for two weeks, he said. It was a second job for him; he was retired. A few blocks later, I asked him what job he had retired from, and he said, “Corrections.” Right away, I asked him if he knew Tommy, but he said, “State, not Rikers.” He decided he was going to have to make an illegal left turn, but it was O.K. “If I get a ticket, it won’t stick,” he said. (Apparently he is very close to someone who is related to Ray Kelly, the Police Commissioner.) He then told me, in quick succession, a raft of stories about convicts he has known: serial murderers, child murderers, even cannibals—things I thought happened only in Greek mythology. I kept remembering, with relief, that he was the Corrections officer and not the convict.

When we got to the mechanics', I placed in his meaty hand a ten-dollar tip. He does not live in the city, and so he had no idea what I gave up when I left that parking spot. The Eclair will remain in the garage overnight.

Exercise

2010-04-30T13:48:00.001-07:00

This is a detail from a photo taken by my friend N. of the Dr. Seuss Room in the Sylvia Beach Hotel, in Newport, Oregon. We both stayed in this cheerful room, on separate visits, a month apart. Here is the big picture:

I thought of Ned the other day when I decided to move my car. I thought:

Who am I?
My name is Dot.
I do not like
this parking spot.

It is not like me to move a car before I have to, but here is what happened: My personal trainer stood me up (for the second time; I've only stood her up once), and when she finally did show up, as I was hauling myself out of the pool like an elephant seal, she suggested we reschedule for Thursday morning. All I could think was: But I have to sit it in the car on Thursday morning. This felt like an extremely lame excuse not to exercise. Then I remembered that the spot I was in was on a block that has felt very cutthroat lately, so maybe it would be just as well to get out of there, and I made the commitment to be at the gym at eight-thirty.

I got to the car super early on Thursday morning, and drove off with wan hopes of scoring a space on K Street, where I was now in the position I have so often observed others in, smugly and without pity: that of an interloper hoping for a 7:30-8 spot to free up. There were already two cars lurking, so I cruised on by and started on my grand rounds. Hydrant, driveway, meters, hydrant, loading zone, driveway ... I was cursing myself for ever having signed on with a personal trainer. My approach to exercise has always been to strive my best to exert the least possible effort. As a child, I used to practice jumping rope without ever letting my feet lose contact with the ground. It's easy: Rock back on your heels as the rope comes under your toes, and then roll forward onto your toes as the rope clears the heels. No sweat. Literally.

And then that rarest of things appeared on my right: a Tuesday-Friday spot on a Thursday morning. It was just west of a fire hydrant, with ample clearance. So I was actually early for my session with the trainer.

The only problem (besides having to work out) was that I had to move the car again today. It was in a 9:30-11 spot, and I got to it at a little after nine and headed for an 8:30-10 block. The street sweeper should have just passed, and there might still be a space for me. Right away I saw a legal spot, with a limo double-parked in front of it. I motioned to the driver to ask if he would let me in. Unfortunately, this involved triple-parking, and made some taxi-drivers pretty mad for a moment, but it worked. Now, thanks to the determination of my personal trainer, I am comfortably ensconced on a much friendlier block.

By the way, I highly recommend the Sylvia Beach Hotel.

Beer and Hollyhocks

2010-04-27T09:52:00.000-07:00

“I’ve got as much of a right to it as you do!” I found myself yelling as an old Mercedes, maroon with squared-off chrome fenders, like big teeth, refused to let me wedge the Eclair between it and the broom. I had found this spot on Sunday, in the rain, when I came in from Rockaway (where my sainted neighbor T. turned on the water in the bungalow; no leaks—hurray!). Penny Lane is a street, like many others, with a barbershop and a Chinese laundry and a history of violence. It’s not ideal, requiring a one-and-a-half-hour sit on Monday and Thursday mornings, part of it double-parked on the opposite side of the street. Double parking is not my favorite activity, but we alternate-side parkers cannot afford to be particular.

How it works is that you have to back up as far as possible to have a better chance to be the first car behind the broom when it appears. The Mercedes was lurking in the space at the fire hydrant when I arrived. I double-parked in front of him. When a metered spot opened behind the Mercedes, he backed up, I backed into the fire-hydrant spot, and the car double-parked in front of me backed into my spot.

Then, just when I thought I’d seen everything, what should appear but a moving van! It took up three cars’ worth of curb space. I had been telling myself there’d be room for everybody—usually there is room for everybody—but this threatened to ruin everything.

When the Broom appeared, abruptly, at a little before nine, I fired up the engine and got in line behind it. But the Mercedes was stuck to it as if by magnetic force. I’ve never seen a front fender up that close in my side-view mirror. That it was cold hard steel, sharp and angular, instead of newfangled plastic, made it especially menacing. It looked like it was going to take a bite out of the Éclair. And the hood ornament looked downright savage.

Even the moving van had to pull out when the broom came, and as the street sweeper waited behind it, I wore down the beast behind me, and he let me inch in. As the cars behind us threaded into line, someone honked to make sure I pulled up far enough to leave room for the cars behind me that wanted to be in front of me. We all watched the moving van parallel park. (Now, there’s a test of skill.) A red Isuzu Trooper had gotten in front of me, and the driver was worried because the back door of the van was inches from her hood, but the moving men used the side door of the van. Once they had parked, they activated some kind of hydraulic system that let out a big hiss of air and made the moving van sink, like the front steps of those buses that lower for the elderly.

Now I was right in front of the barbershop. It is not a pretty spot, containing such sad sights as this, although the barber does his best. Four bicycle messengers in various getups—one in a helmet, three in caps, all with clipboards and cell phones and backpacks—were waiting to be dispatched. “I can do your job, but you can’t do mine,” one of them said to another, and then, into his phone, “Talk to me, papo.” They reminded me of baseball players, or guys in a Spike Lee movie.

Just at ten o’clock, a light rain began to fall. As I left the car, I thought about apologizing to the Mercedes for being so aggressive, but I didn’t. All’s well that ends well. I had spent my time transferring notes from an old filled-up notebook to a new one—carrying over unfinished items from lists of things to do. One note said “Hollyhocks.” I have been meaning to plant hollyhocks along the side of the bungalow. Another said “Beer.” I got a beermaking kit, with hops and yeast and barley, for my birthday. Now that the water is on in Rockaway and the season has officially begun, these seem like excellent projects. So I started a new list:

Find hollyhocks.
Brew beer.

Showdown on K Street

2010-04-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning, when I went to my car, which is parked in a beautiful spot almost opposite where I was parked last week (in the space just past the fire hydrant, where the motorcycles were), three double-parked cars were lurking, each of their drivers hoping to swoop in and grab a spot after the street-sweeper went by. One of the cars, with New Jersey plates, was forced to relinquish its perch when a garbage truck double-parked behind him on the other side of the street, and thru traffic could not slalom past. Mr. New Jersey gave in and drove around the block, but just as he reappeared, a car on the Tuesday/Friday side of the street left a legal spot, and New Jersey was able to appropriate it instantly. He got out of his car, looked at the sign, looked at the car … he couldn’t quite believe his luck.

Another serious lurker with Jersey plates remained, though it did not look good for interlopers. The street sweeper came, and I pulled over, holding up a cab that very much wanted me to move (but did not honk). A Ford pickup truck in front of me had to pull quite a ways down the street to let the street sweeper get by (the car in front of him did not move; I later noticed a placard on its dashboard). I was able to reverse into my spot with an economy of motion borne of having that cab breathing down my neck. Before the pickup could get back up the street, Ms. New Jersey made a play for his space. She had a spotter on the sidewalk, but even with direction she could not parallel park to save her life, and her situation was complicated by the existence of a set of low cast-concrete pillars protecting a street tree. She crunched her fender as I looked on, then pulled out and tried again, and again, and again. It was painful to watch.

Meanwhile, the pickup truck had backed up and was double-parked next to me, riding herd on the interloper. He squeezed out of his door and spoke to the woman. She had finally gotten into the spot when, with equal difficulty, she pulled back out and drove away, and the driver of the pickup truck reclaimed his space.

“What did you say to her?” I asked him when we were free to go about our business.

“I said, ‘You don’t do that, take someone’s spot when they’ve been waiting a half hour,’" he said. “She said she didn’t know anything.” She may not have mastered the art of parallel parking, but she has learned one of the unwritten rules of the road.

Meanwhile, in Rockaway, things were much more serene.

Eyjafjallajokull

2010-04-16T13:20:00.000-07:00

At 7:35, the cop arrives in his three-wheeler. I am eating strawberries and reading about the “dark and spectacular volcanic cloud” that Iceland released over northern Europe. The volcano (pronounced EYE-a-fyat-la-jo-kutl) apparently caused flooding in Iceland. How does a volcano cause flooding? You have to get all the way to the end of the Times article to find out: the eruption melted a glacier.

Three motorcycles are parked across the street, taking up a perfectly good parking space east of a fire hydrant. A fourth arrives and parks on the other side of the fire hydrant, in a spot just big enough for a Mini Cooper. In front of me is a boxy gray Mercedes-Benz G500 (descended from a military vehicle, she is “loaded with standard luxury features such as a leather interior, premium wood trim, rear parking assistance with camera, rapid HDD navigation system with aerial view, bi-xenon headlights, rain-sensing wipers, dual zone climate control, heated/cooled power driver and passenger seats with memory” —this from Wikipedia). Behind me is a woman who looks like a gym teacher, circa 1968; her car has been here since last Friday. I should talk: as of tomorrow, the Éclair will have been gathering rust in this spot for three full weeks.

A reader named Dexter commented (see below) on StreetParkNYC, the new service “matching drivers looking for street parking spaces with those leaving spaces.” It is a Web-based service (not, as I wrote, an iPhone app), so even I could use it, and Dexter says it’s fun. I will add it to my links and consider joining, but here is my qualm: I like to think that my parking blocks are well-kept secrets, and if I sell my space to someone, that someone will then know my secrets and may return, so that I would be creating competition for my favorite parking spots. Hmm …

At 7:48, the Broom heads south on the avenue ahead of me. High drama in the rearview mirror as a truck tries to squeeze past a garbage truck, churning away in the double-parked position favored by all garbage trucks. The truck squeezes through, but the next truck will not risk it. At 7:59, the garbage truck moves, freeing the stuck truck and an Access-a-Ride minibus that cuts it off. The Broom must have seen the congestion and swept on by. In any case, it is a no-show, and once again I don't have to start the car.

The lady behind me gets out of her car. I don’t suppose she really is a gym teacher. She is wearing one of those therapeutic cervical collars. Either that or a really big turtleneck.

Good Show

2010-04-13T13:39:00.000-07:00

I had guests over the weekend, including Baby Dee, who arrived from Philadelphia via Baltimore and Brooklyn. She did a show on Saturday night at Santos Party Space, downtown on Lafayette Street, with several musicians—on flute, oboe, trumpet, French horn, English horn, cello, violin, and mandolin—rounded up by the violinist Maxim Moston, who produced and arranged the work on Dee’s new CD, “A Book of Song for Anne Marie” (out—finally!—from Drag City on April 20th). The highlight of the show for me was probably “Lilacs”; the violin part makes a person feel as if she could levitate. The winds also had that effect, buoying up Dee at the harp and the piano. Maxim had said earlier, “Dee is in a heightened state,” and I thought that was a polite way of describing the state Dee was in. She has a touch of pneumonia, and was probably feverish, and should probably have been home in bed. But the show must go on. Yesterday she left for Montreal and Toronto, and then will play two shows at home, in Cleveland, before staggering on to Chicago and Cedar Rapids and Dubuque and Minneapolis and Calgary.

Dee has mastered the Muni Meter and the commercial parking hours on my street, and Sundays are free, so instead of parking we read about parking in this article in the Sunday Times. A reporter named Ariel Kaminer went around with two people who have developed different parking apps for the iPhone. Rufus Davis calls his app StreetParkNYC; his is a capitalist approach, in which a person about to leave a space advertises it and collects a small fee from a person looking for a space. The other system, by Nick Nyhan, is called Roadify, and it treats parking as a charity, encouraging people to send a text message whenever they see a free parking spot. Enter Donald Shoup, professor of parking sciences at U.C.L.A., who was consulted as to the value of these apps. What a killjoy. He said that both apps were a waste of time. Of StreetParkNYC, he said that money for parking spots should go not to the individuals who are selling spots but to the city for cleaning the streets. As for the virtuous Roadify donating parking spots to the needy, he said, “It’s too difficult for me to get my head around, because it’s just such a useless idea.” The Times went on, “Empty spaces in congested areas get filled so quickly, he said, that ‘giving’ them seems as useful as sending out a bulletin about a $20 bill that’s lying on the sidewalk.” Professor Shoup believes in meters.

This morning, having reached my car within the five-minute grace period, I found myself tempted by a free spot on the opposite (Monday/Thursday) side of the street. I could have taken that spot and sold the spot I was in on StreetParkNYC, or, alternatively, I could have phoned it in to Roadify—if I had an iPhone. It was a tight spot, though, and at its rear were two motorcycles that one would have to be careful not to administer a bump to, starting a motorcycle domino effect. I read the latest puzzling bit of news from the Vatican (in the midst of its crisis, the Holy See cries out that the Beatles were not so bad), and when I looked again a third motorcycle had made the spot even tighter. It was almost eight o'clock, and there was no sign of the Broom. The woman behind me had already gotten out of her car and was standing on the sidewalk talking to the guy in front of me when the street sweeper made a belated appearance, trying to corral the cars in back of me. One car at the top of the street moved, but then double-parked in such a stubborn way that the Broom couldn’t get past it, and by the time the street sweeper got through, it was eight o’clock, the cars were legally parked, and no one was moving. All the street sweeper could do was sweep down the middle of the street in what felt like a huff. Nobody had given him a five-minute grace period.

So the only reason that I had to start up the car this morning was that the guy in front of me asked me to back up a little, to give him some space, and I obliged. The Eclair started up O.K., though it sounds like she has a bit of cough, maybe even a touch of pneumonia.

Grace

2010-04-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

A cop in a three-wheeler was hanging at the back of the line of cars when I arrived at my parking spot this morning. A week ago, I showed it to some friends—my car, my spot. Neither of them owns a car, and one of them was naïve enough to think that because I owned a car we could go anywhere we wanted. There’s no use even trying to explain to these kind of people the precious commodity I was sitting on: twelve feet of prime curb real estate.

Today was not only the first time in eleven days that I would be trying to start up the Éclair since I had it jump-started in Rockaway after the winter but also my first test of the five-minute grace period. There has been a lot of talk about this since it passed City Council: the Mayor is against it, but he is, as we have noticed, not one of the people (I’m being polite), and the wary among us worry that the new leniency will just make the cops more vigilant, that instead of jumping gleefully on your car at the stroke of 7:30, they will jump on it even more gleefully at the stroke of 7:35 and won’t take no lip. I like to think that the five-minute grace period is designed to bring out the best in the parking police and let them show that they can be magnanimous ... for five minutes.

My watch said 7:32 when I arrived, but it’s three minutes fast. My cell phone said 7:29. Let’s do the math: 3 minutes of personal grace + 5 minutes of grace mandated by the city = 8 minutes, minus 2 minutes of personal lateness = 6. I arrived at the car with an unprecedented six minutes to spare. Still, I was in a bit of a quandary. If, when the Broom arrived, the car wouldn’t start up, what should I do? Was this rainy day as good a day as any to call AAA and get jump-started and go straight to the mechanic? Or, once I got the car jump-started, should I drive somewhere to recharge it? Or would it make more sense, when the Broom came, if the car didn’t start, to shrug helplessly and put off the calling of AAA till another day? What am I doing next Tuesday?

I had plenty of time to rehearse my alternatives, because at 7:49 (my time) the Broom had still not come. In my rearview mirror I could see that someone was squeezing into a parking space up the street, as if the Broom had already come and gone. Was it possible that after all this time—after two full weeks of no street cleaning (not that it makes any difference)—the Broom would not show up? Maybe the question to ask myself was: If the Broom doesn’t come, do I even need to start the car? And the answer to that question was a definite NO.

At 7:51 (M.T.), I spotted the Broom in the rearview mirror: it was on the far side of the avenue, on the other side of the street, standing and blinking. Maybe this was its grace period. At 7:54, it moved, and the cars around me, even the police three-wheeler, started their engines. I turned the key in the ignition, and voilà: she started up. The line of cars waited till thru traffic had gone by, and then we all, including the cop, pulled diagonally across the street, leaving just enough room for the Broom to sweep through, and then reversed into position, politely leaving room for our neighbors on either end to jiggle closer to the curb. What a relief! I reverted to cell-phone time and waited till eight on the dot before getting out of the car.

Walking back up the street, with a whole new outlook on life (at least for today), I passed one car with its lights on and its driver sound asleep, his seat in the reclining position. The cop was still sitting in the three-wheeler carlet, reading the News and drinking takeout coffee, just like one of us.

Return of the Eclair

2010-03-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

The moon is in the seventh house (or something) and Passover aligns with Easter (both Western and Orthodox), so the D.O.T. sent out a long-winded but welcome statement to its people: “Alternate side parking (street cleaning) regulations will be suspended Tuesday and Wednesday, March 30-31, for the first and second days of Passover, Thursday and Friday, April 1-2, for Holy Thursday and Good Friday, and Monday and Tuesday, April 5-6, for the seventh and eighth days of Passover.”

Surely this was a sign that I should bring the car in from Rockaway, where I left it for the winter. I could have brought it in last week, but I didn’t, and this turned out to be a mistake, because in that extra week the car languished … or at least its battery did. I ran into my neighbor and long-distance valet Mr. T., carrying his baby’s car seat in, and he said he’d had to jump the car the day before. He wasn’t sure whether he’d left something on, or if it got too cold, or if the battery was just old. (I have had the car almost six years, and have never worried about the battery, but I know it was a problem for the previous owner, who left the car in Rockaway all year round and drove it only to Dunkin' Donuts on Saturdays.) Mr. T. offered to go with me to see if it would start up.

The Eclair was parked in a Friday spot, and looked quite lovable to me, although it is true that it had grown despondent over the winter; the coffee residue in the bottom of the styrofoam cup next to the driver’s seat was green. And when I turned the key in the ignition, the car showed no vital signs. Mr. T. got his truck and jump-started me, and then led me to a place that he said carried my brand of batteries, to see if I needed a new one.

A mechanic named Julio (according to his shirt) stood by with a battery tester. Julio had a thick accent, so that even if I had known what he was talking about, I couldn’t have understood what he was saying. (He couldn’t pronounce the essential word “charge.”) He said the problem was both the battery and the alternator—“It can’t be both!” T. said—and he’d have to order the part and he couldn’t start the job till Monday. All that was clear was that it was already one o'clock on Saturday afternoon and Julio was eager to be gone for the weekend, and who could blame him.

I was all for driving—that recharges the battery, and I hadn’t been behind the wheel since New Year’s Eve. So I drove first west, to Breezy Point, and then east, over the Atlantic Bridge ($2 toll each way), through Long Beach and back, racking up about thirty-five miles before daring to park and cut the engine. She started up fine when I was ready to come back to Manhattan, although I think the muffler needs work.

Saturday at around six seemed like a reasonable time to look for a spot. The first block I went up offered nothing, but then I turned onto one of my old reliable blocks, K Street, and on the right was a Tuesday-Friday spot with a large piece of furniture parked in it. I double-parked to check it out: it was some kind of wooden wardrobe or bureau, as tall as me and as wide as a double bed, with an inset (broken) mirror. I dragged it up onto the sidewalk. The spot had looked more than ample, but either I lost my depth perception over the winter or the car got bigger, because I had to jockey back and forth three or four times to squeeze in. It was worth it, though: thank you, Jesus, Moses, God of the Old Testament (but not the current Pope!), my car will be safe in that spot for twelve days, until Friday, April 9th. Which is not to say that it will start up again when I need it, but I can always have it resurrected by AAA.

There is a new parking blog, called Parallel Spaces (http://www.blog.parallelspaces.com/), whose writer has developed a Manhattan Parking Map. I will add it to my links, along with the Parking Ticket Pundit.

Crossing

2010-03-22T03:53:00.000-07:00

I took the ferry out to Rockaway on Friday for the last time—or so I thought. It was reported in the press that ferry service to Rockaway was stopping as of March 19th. What would keep this ride from being melancholy—if there’s no ferry, I’m back on the A train with Volume II of “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”—was that it was my maiden voyage of the season. I persuaded my neighbor T. to come along—we could take the bus the rest of the way home, if her husband couldn’t pick us up in my long-lost car.

We met at Pier 11, Slip C, where regular riders were waving signs that said “Save the Rockaway Ferry” and “Save Our Boat, Keep her Afloat“ and “No Boat? No Vote!“ At boarding, the demonstrators all rushed for the prow to wave their signs at a TV camera. That left some great seats for us up on the top deck, in the stern.

The American Princess gave three long blasts of her horn and we hove to. Naw, we didn’t hove, or heave … I just like nautical language. What we did was we opened our brewskis and went to town, getting a jump-start on the weekend. One of the problems with this campaign to keep the ferry running is that its most vocal champions are likely to be the guys who drink to excess on the boat. One of them did get hold of the microphone as we approached the Brooklyn Army Terminal. “Brook-LYN, Brook-LYN!” The passengers who disembarked at B.A.T. were told that there would be an announcement at Riis Park Landing, and [wink, wink] “we will see you soon!” Later someone announced, “Look at that traffic on the Belt Parkway. Do you wanna be out there?” “Noooo!” bellowed the crowd.

On land, it was the first intensely warm, inviting day of the season. My feet had been so oppressed earlier, in their black shoes and socks, that I stopped at Paragon and bought a pair of purple Tevas. But it got nippy in the open ocean. A regular commuter, a businessman in a suit whom I recognized from a ferry meeting last fall, pointed to me, chillin' (literally) in my sweatshirt and sandals. “I’m tough,” I told him. I was cold but happy: T. had brought me a big bottle of Guinness. She lives in Rockaway all year round and knows that it stays colder out there well into June, so she was wearing a hooded parka. The regulars actually went below to get out of the cold. At least we didn’t get splashed, though the deck in front of us got wetted down. A parasailer—a surfer in a wetsuit holding on to a huge kite—raced over the waves toward the Verrazano Bridge.

In Jamaica Bay, the American Princess curved gracefully past the sweet houses of Roxbury and entered the harbor. A crowd had gathered to greet the ferry, with more signs, and not thirty seconds after I had bade a warm farewell to my favorite crew member, into my hand was pressed this notice: “Rockaway Ferry Service EXTENDED!”

The ferry, which first sailed in May of 2008, was originally funded for two years. Eric Ulrich, a councilman, was handing out the flyers and taking credit for the reprieve: the ferry service will run until July 1st. Lew Simon was on a podium with a megaphone, working the crowd. Lew Simon is all over the place in Rockaway: he is a Democratic District Leader, writes a column for the Wave, accosts people at the supermarket, schmoozes the ladies at their annual card party at St. Camillus (T. said she’d given him a hug the day she won a flat-screen TV; he’s good luck).

Ever since I’ve been going to Rockaway, there has been controversy about the ferry. The editor of the Wave is sour on the subject. For years, whenever there was talk of a ferry, he’d wager in print that it would never happen, which outraged me, because that kind of behavior, betting against yourself, is exactly what makes things not happen. Even people who wanted a ferry complained, when they got it, that this wasn’t the ferry they wanted. They deride the American Princess as a refitted fishing/party boat, and say the trip takes too long. The riders don’t mind that: it’s a spectacular harbor—why torpedo through it? The schedule doesn’t suit everyone—how could it? T. agreed that taking the ferry home on Friday is a swell way to launch the weekend, but leave in the morning at five-forty-five in order to be an hour early for work? No, thanks. In summer, I leave at seven-forty-five in order to be an hour early for work, but the flip side is how highly motivated I am to get out of work early in order to catch that last ferry home, at five-thirty. And they're doing the best they can with one boat. The only way to offer more crossings would be to add a boat.

Which brings us to the inevitable: the cost. At $6 one way, it’s controversial to everybody except the people who pay it. I think it’s a steal. The operating cost per passenger, I read, is more than three times that, at current ridership. Yet there are also complaints that $6 is too much. The Staten Island Ferry is free.

Is it elitist? It is. Is it impractical? It is and it isn’t. Is it fun? Oh, yeah. Is it beautiful and bracing? God, yes. I will be on it as often as possible for as long as it lasts.

Fish Story

2010-03-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

My crazy brother thought I would enjoy riding down the Sandy River, in Oregon, on a raft with a fishing guide, clad in waders and a life jacket, looking not at all like Meryl Streep in "The River Wild." Steelhead trout are in season. Before leaving town, Miles plunked two jars of “egg cure” and a Mason jar on the counter, and said that if I got a “hen” I should prepare the eggs for him, so he could use them as bait. Yeah, right … Didn't he know that I have always been on the side of the fishes?

The guide’s name was Ed Fast. I think of him as Steadfast Ed Fast. Ed Fast endeared himself to me right away by calling to say he was going to be a little late because he was stopping for doughnuts and what kind did I like? (Cinnamon and chocolate.) Maybe fishing wouldn’t be so bad ...

He arrived at six-thirty in the morning with a catamaraft—a pontoon raft—on a trailer. All the other guides had been out on the river for hours, taking their clients to their favorite spots and fishing them out. It is bad etiquette to pull in where other guides have already staked a claim, so we leapfrogged them down the river: a big bald guy named Bob in a beautiful wooden boat, with three fishermen sitting athwart (how often do I get to say “athwart”?), and Dave Maroon, in an aluminum boat. (I would never go out in a boat with a guy named “Maroon.”) Ed knew a lot about the natural history of the area, and told me to get out my brand-new non-waterproof camera to get a shot of the canyon walls as we slid sideways over the rocks. (Agh!) On a beach, he pointed out cougar tracks, and what he thought was the track of a mink, and a single elegant elk print, and took my picture with a waterfall. He showed me how to cast—Ed casts beautifully, his line making a lazy loop in the air—and told me to try to place the line in the “seam,” so the bait would travel along the bottom, where the fish like to swim. He kept saying “Mend,” which I think means raising your pole to get control of your line, without jerking the bobber, which would make the fish suspicious. And "Open your bail."

At a spot called the Gauge Hole, Ed baited my line with a fake pink worm. The Gauge Hole has unsightly equipment along the bank that registers the depth of the river and that rangers can read from some remote outpost. I stood on a rock and cast a few times, and then felt something take my line and started reeling it in as we both saw, out in the water, a fish leap twirling in the air, like something right off the cover of Field & Stream. “You got a fish!” Ed said, incredulously. He was by my side in an instant, coaching me to give it line, to “pump and play,” never to point the rod directly at the fish (is that why it’s called angling?). I was all for reeling the fish in, though it was very strong. Finally, Ed said, “I’m gonna have to go after him,” and took the pole out of my hands and ran over the rocks along the bank and climbed over the gauge equipment. It seemed like it took forever to land the fish. He explained afterward that you have to be careful or you’ll rip the hook out of the fish’s mouth—the hook was just barely in the fish’s lip; it fell out as soon as he landed it. But if you let the fish fight, it gets exhausted and flops into your hands.

There was much documentation of the fish, after Ed had bled it out in the river and demonstrated how to hold it through the gill, without letting my fingers show through its mouth, and adjusted the flash on my camera so the trophy fish would shine. It had three rows of sharp little teeth in there! Ed estimated that it was thirty-two inches long and about twelve pounds. It was a female. Miles would be pleased. I was, of course, hoping that Ed would prepare the eggs.

I would have been content to just ride down the river, but Steadfast Ed Fast was getting paid to make me fish all day long. He would stand in the water, changing the bait, tying on a spinner or mashing fish eggs on the line, adjusting the amount of lead in a tiny mesh bag. That's another reason I don’t like fishing: it's like sewing, except that you have to thread the needle while balancing on a rock in a rushing stream. We changed spots again, negotiating some more white water. The sun came out, and on a calm, quiet place in the river we munched our sandwiches and drank hot coffee straight from the thermos. A bald eagle flew upstream.

At a spot that Ed said was a favorite of his, with the raft perched on some rocks and the water running over them, he hooked a fish and tried to hand the pole to me. “No, you land it,” I said. “I want to watch.” He was puzzled. As a guide, he was used to letting his clients bring the fish in—that is what people are out there for, that sensation of matching wits with the wily trout in its own element, blah blah blah. This time, Ed really did practically walk that fish ashore. It was a male, what he called a “chromer.”

At the landing, I peeled off my waders. I was surprised that my feet were dry inside of there. Ed addressed the fish. He showed me the scar on the side of the chromer, where a seal had tried to eat it. He slit open the female and uncovered two “skeins” of bright-orange eggs. “Do you want to eat a fish egg?” he asked. I declined. He put the eggs in a baggy and the two fish in a Hefty bag, loaded the raft on the trailer, and we headed home.

Ed stayed and prepared the fish eggs for me—or, rather, for my brother. He put on latex gloves and sprinkled the powder on them and instructed me to turn the jar over regularly until they puffed up. He filleted the chromer, which, though it had been caught by him, apparently belonged to me. Its flesh was red, like salmon. He started to fillet the female, but her flesh was pale, almost gray, and he said it would be no good to eat. So we walked down to the riverbank and he tossed her in, saying she would now be food for other fishes. He really believed that. He said she was a hatchery fish, after all, and just put in there for us to sport with. But I kept thinking she had put her whole being into making those eggs, and now they would be used against her, used to lure her own kind into being hauled ashore. It made me sad. You should have seen her when she was alive and leaping.

Three Pools

2010-02-16T12:54:00.000-08:00

In the midst of a snow shower, word arrives that alternate side parking will be suspended tomorrow for Ash Wednesday. Never mind that so few places have street cleaning scheduled for Wednesdays. The important thing is that this small consolation has been offered us by the Department of Sanitation: O.K., you and everyone you know are going to be reduced to ashes, but think of it this way: at least you didn’t have to move the car.

In the spirit of self-improvement, I vowed to follow through on one of my New Year’s resolutions and join a gym. The New York Health & Racquet Club opened a branch near me, and I have had my eye on it for the past few months, thinking it might inspire me to swim. I went in last Friday, while the cleaning lady was rearranging my personal effects (with the result that I will never be able to find anything again), and asked about membership. The pool was not yet open, but from the reception area I could see down two flights of stairs to a tantalizing glimpse of swimming-pool blue at the bottom.

A guide appeared and led me down to the pool. It turns out that this glimpse, this swath of blue, is in fact all the pool there is: two narrow lanes in a tastefully decorated cave. One lane will always be open, the guide explained, and the other will be available for lap swimming by reservation; you’re supposed to call twenty-four hours in advance. I expressed the worry that someone with better telephone skills would always get in ahead of me. The guide reassured me that there was another branch with a bigger pool not too far away, but I was not convinced: if that other branch was so convenient, why hadn’t I already joined?

The guide took me to the locker room, which was luxuriously tiled in shades of blue and green. Men were working in a lounge that will feature a fireplace and a waterfall. We went upstairs to the office area, and at first I thought, How nice, I can come up here and check my e-mail—but swiftly realized that the desks and computers are for the health-club staff, of course. The guide told me that I was probably eligible for a corporate membership: my employer would pay something like $500 toward an annual membership, and I’d have to pay only $380 for a year. It was hot in there; I hadn’t even joined and already I was sweating. I left with the e-mail address of the guy who could arrange the corporate discount.

The cleaning lady wouldn't be finished yet, so I headed over to the nearest facility of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. I joined it years ago, but my membership had lapsed. The guy at the desk sized me up immediately: ten dollars a year for age 55 and older. Behind him, in the pool, middle-aged women (of whom I speak as if we had nothing in common) cavorted in the water with pink neoprene noodles. In a corner of the lobby, some skinny people shot pool. Geezers lounged on benches along the walls. Someone delivered a plastic bag the size of a pouffed-up bed pillow full of snack-size packages of junk food.

What the hell, for ten dollars, I signed up. The junk food made me feel at home. They still had my picture on file, and I was wearing the exact same black parka and striped scarf that I’d had on the last time I joined. The only difference was my hair: in the picture it was light-ash-brown (that’s what it said on the bottle), and in person it was more ash than light brown. I asked if anything there had changed (meaning, Is the locker room any less depressing? meaning, Are the showers still those kind that you give you just three minutes before the hot water gets cold and dribbles out?). The answer was: "There are lots of free classes."

The cleaning lady still wouldn’t be done, so I walked over to the river, where there is a residential complex with an esplanade. A man at the entrance said it was closed because of ice. So I climbed the stairs of the building that houses the health club. I passed the entrance to the health club and looked out over the river and then back up at the building. On the second floor, where the pool is, tropical plants sat in the sun. My father always said that before plonking down your money for a major purchase, you should get three prices, so, in the interests of comparative shopping, I pressed the buzzer for the health club and went up. There was no one in the pool, and it looked very inviting: decent size, sunny, surrounded by glass, and with a view of the Chrysler Building. There were forest-green chaise longues arranged around the pool: I could picture myself having a cup of coffee on a chaise, reading in the sun ... after a vigorous swim, of course.

While I was talking to the girl at the desk, a guy came back from the grocery store and handed her a can of Red Bull before going out to the pool with a couple of bags of chips (he was a lifeguard). “This is a health club and you are eating that shit?” I said. The girl giggled. A year’s membership is $495, she told me ($400 of which can be reimbursed through a fitness allowance at work). For a twenty-dollar fee, I can suspend my membership over the summer, when I am in Rockaway and swim in the ocean. With that, the girl with the can of Red Bull overcame my last objection, and I joined. It’s not as convenient as the gym closer to home, but I often end up taking a walk over there by the river after I park the car on Sunday.

“Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon,” Melville wrote in “Moby-Dick.” I have been reading “The Whale,” a new book by Philip Hoare, and of course he quotes Melville a lot. Although initially I had been quite taken with the idea of a brand-new swimming pool in the depths of a high-rise building, I thought now, on my way home to the cleaning lady and my bathroom freshly washed with Clorox, of the descriptions Philip wrote (I hope he won’t mind my calling him Philip instead of Mr. Hoare) of whales that he had seen in captivity when he was a boy, and I realized that that is exactly how I would have felt, plowing the stationary waters of a narrow tank beneath the earth: like a whale in captivity. I am so glad I stopped short of paying for that.

Three Gigs: I-Joe's Pub

2010-02-09T16:06:00.000-08:00

Baby Dee has a new song called “Pie,” which is hilarious and versatile, as is the nature of pie. She sang it last Thursday night at Joe’s Pub, its New York premiere, and it was sweet.

The Joe’s Pub show was the third installment of “We Sing Baby Dee,” organized by Sxip Shirey, in which myriad performers—well, nine, anyway—gave their takes on Dee’s songs. A folksinger named Aimee Curl did “My Love Has Made a Fool of Me,” in a plaintive voice. Little Annie and Paul Wallfisch collaborated on “The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities.” (Annie loves singing about Bobby Slot and Freddie Weiss.) Lila, a women’s a-cappella quartet minus one (its leader, Rima, explained that one of its members, Vlada, couldn’t be there because she’d just had a baby), harmonized on “Small Wonder.” Curtis Eller, on banjo, augmented by a singer named Robin, did a fabulous version of “Calvary,” a song that has taken on a life of its own. Curtis has apparently been singing it to his daughter as a lullabye. Philip Raia got everyone to sing along on “The Song of Self-Acceptance” (known in some quarters as “Pisspot”). Andrew W.K. showed up late and played, appropriately, “(He’s Gonna Kill Me) When I Get Home,” about Dad being mad when Dee was late for dinner. But the star of the show was nine-year-old Frankky Lou Hightower, of Kansas City, Missouri.

When I first heard that a nine-year-old named Frankky would be performing some of Dee’s songs, I assumed that the child was a boy soprano. Many of Dee’s early songs seem to have been written for that kind of high, pure voice, and Dee even told me once that she heard a boy soprano sing in Cleveland, but knew his mother would not see the virtue in having her son work with Dee. Frankky Lou Hightower is a girl, and she has done pageants—but, she made a point of telling me, “only the ones that have talent competitions,” and on that basis alone she always wins. She was discovered in Kansas City by Sxip, when he was touring with the Dresden Dolls, and she discovered Dee’s music when Sxip played some of it for her. Her mother sews the costumes for all the drag queens in Kansas City.

Frankky chose to sing some surprisingly dark songs for a nine-year-old; for instance, “So Bad,” which has the line “Jesus got my mom in there, and beat her up so bad.” She also sang “Little Window,” and told me afterward that she knew the song was about Anne Frank. I had known that—Dee wrote the song in Amsterdam—but when I heard Frankky sing it, for the first time I made the connection with Anne Frank’s glimpse of the sky from her little window and how much hung on the final words: “Hope. Hope. Hope.” And, as for “So Bad,” the song is about childhood fears, and hearing it sung by this slim little girl with the sweet face and long blond hair, wearing a sequined red sheath and displaying utter poise onstage, was hair-raising. She was like a flame. It was as if she were expressing the soul of Dee at nine years old, as the girl no one knew she was.

At the end, Baby Dee herself took the stage, joined by Matthew Robinson on cello and Emmett Kelly on guitar. She played “Pie” and “Lilacs” and “As Morning Holds a Star,” which sounded both familiar and yet like something I’d never heard before.
Sxip, the impresario, brought Frankky Lou back on for an encore: “The Price of a Sparrow,” which has the lines “What does a hooker know about loving? And what does my Daddy know about me?” It is one of Dee’s saddest songs, and who knows what Frankky is thinking when she sings it? But it is good that she sang it in New York, at Joe’s Pub. I don’t know what the judges would make of it in the talent competition of one of those Little Miss Sunshine pageants.

II-The Stone

2010-02-09T14:48:00.000-08:00

Friday night’s gig at The Stone was pivotal. The Stone can be found online and on the corner of Avenue C and Second Street, in a brick building that looks abandoned but has its name in discreet letters on the glass door. It is a project of John Zorn’s, featuring artists chosen by other artists. There are no drinks or souvenir T-shirts for sale at the Stone: only a piano and a few rows of folding chairs and a few more folding chairs onstage behind the piano. Also onstage is a big white box that I took for some kind of backstage storage area. When Dee appeared, to warm applause, she looked baffled. “Oh, you thought I was making my entrance,” she said, laughing. “I’m only going to the bathroom.” And she proceeded to open the door of the big white box and go inside. The audience applauded again when she emerged from the bathroom, and a third time when she made her real entrance.

For this performance, Dee was joined by Matthew Robinson on cello, Emmett Kelly on guitar, and Maxim Moston on violin and mandolin. Maxim did the arrangements for the new CD, “A Book of Songs for Anne Marie,” and Dee began with a few of those songs: “Lilacs” and “Set Me as a Seal On Your Heart.” She also did one she had done the night before, “As Morning Holds a Star,” which I felt I’d never heard properly before. It is available only on “Baby Dee Live in Turin,” so I guess I’ve never seen the lyrics printed out. And, as promised, she did two slug songs: “Regifting of the Light” and “Brother Slug and Sister Snail.” I wonder if Dee is preparing for reincarnation as a slug.

Then Dee introduced a special guest, Aimee Curl, the folksinger who had sung “Small Wonder” at Joe’s Pub the night before. At the Stone she played guitar and sang what she said was one of her favorites, “The Robin’s Tiny Throat.” A friend who went with me said later that she had been watching Dee watch Aimee, and that Dee was beaming. Aimee is right: this is a beautiful song, and one that explains a lot about why Dee is out there singing.

Next Dee and Matthew played some of the music that they recorded this winter for a new new album. Dee calls it classical music for cowboys with cowboy-hat hair. (She was disappointed, incidentally, that more of her fans did not turn up with hat hair.) Dee has been inspired by having at her disposal a magnificent Steinway concert grand Model D, which belongs to Andrew W.K. (The piano could not be moved into Andrew’s high-rise apartment without one of those cranes which were needed to build the high-rise in the first place, so he lent it to Dee, who has it in the dining room of her house in Cleveland.) I don’t have any way of talking about this music, except to say that I liked it. It has a distinct structure, and it is humorous. It put me in mind of Beethoven in his lighter moments.

The room was packed: all the chairs were filled and people were sitting in the aisle. Frankky Lou Hightower and her mother were seated in the front row. Dee did her encore before leaving the stage. There is nothing in show business quite so excruciating as that moment when, who knows, maybe the audience has had enough, but the performer has to gauge the length and sincerity of the applause before either returning to the stage or holding out to leave them wanting more. The encore was a rousing version of The Pie Song, of course.

Outside, I spotted Maxim Moston, carrying his mandolin and with his violin case strapped on his back. He is Russian, and has a noble profile. I’m sure I was not the only one in the audience who was eyeballing him, but I know I was the only one who went up to him afterward and tried to thank him for his contributions to Dee’s recordings, but instead blurted out something about the mandolin, of all things. I felt like I was channelling my mother. I understand that Maxim has done arrangements of Dee's work for whole orchestras. All Dee needs is the orchestra.

This show at the Stone is probably representative of what Dee will be playing on the tour: some old songs and some new ones, lots of piano, and various combinations of strings. And plenty of renditions of Pie.

III-The Delancey

2010-02-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

Baby Dee played a third gig while she was in town, but first the answer to the all-important question: Where did she park the car?

Rather, where did I park the car, because it was I, of course, who was in charge of parking. [Insert pirouette here.] The importance of this task cannot be underestimated, in part because Dee has an unpaid parking ticket, and if that car so much as attracts a policeman’s attention and the officer runs a check on it, a tow truck would come and impound the car, and Dee would be screwed, because her budget does not include paying off tickets or redeeming a car from the pound, and her whole North American tour depends on getting from Baltimore to Albuquerque via Calgary and Santa Monica in that car, and her income for next winter depends on touring … So you can see how important I am, I mean, parking is.

Anyway, I didn’t have anything better to do last Sunday afternoon, so I decided to move the car to a Tuesday-Friday spot; that way, no one would have to worry about it on Monday morning. The block where we had left it was lined with orange cones, and orange plasticated flyers were taped onto the sign poles: “’Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’ is scheduled to film in your neighborhood.” The crew would start removing cars at dawn on Monday morning. When I told Dee this, she said, “I hate ‘Law & Order.’” Anyway, I drove around for a while and found a spot some distance away, down by the river, good till Tuesday at 11:30 A.M. It was actually kind of fun: not only did I have the gratifying sensation of having escaped a trap laid by NBC TV, in conjunction with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting and the New York City Police Department, but I rarely get to park a car as tiny as a Volkswagen Beetle. The spot I found was the last one before a fire hydrant at the end of a block, and though I almost rode up over the curb (VW bugs are wide in the hips) and the front fender overbit the yellow-painted curb by just the teeniest bit, it was legal, and it was still there on Monday afternoon when Dee went to get it to take the harp to her third gig, at the Delancey.

The Delancey is a bar with a performance space for a music salon called Small Beast, with acts chosen by Paul Wallfisch, who, among his other accomplishments, accompanies Little Annie Anxiety on piano. There is a long bar, and upholstered benches line the walls of three small rooms. The piano is draped in green silk and has candles on top of it. Annie appears there most Monday nights.

Dee was playing harp with the Cairo Gang, a band led by Emmett Kelly, the guitarist who played with Dee and the cellist Matthew Robinson in the other New York gigs (and will be going on tour with them). The first act was a guy with a guitar who did a song about a “teenage alcoholic” (I misheard it as “teenage operaholic,” which would have been more interesting) not once but twice, first on guitar and then on piano. Paul Wallfisch did a set, in which he sang in French (with a little German thrown in). Then Annie made her entrance, slinky in black with a red sequinned beanie. I have never seen her in this venue before, and she seemed exceptionally loose and wonderful. Dee and Annie did a duet, with Paul at the piano, on “The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities.” Dee is wearing her hair short these days, and has beautiful new teeth. She had on her Dalmatian-print hoodie and a red wool hat that has shrunk to fit a pinhead. Little Annie and Baby Dee traded lines and the microphone back and forth like a hilariously demented version of Steve and Eydie.

There was some canned music while the Cairo Gang tuned up. I can’t imagine how musicians can tune while there is other music playing, but I know Dee has an electronic tuning device for the harp. Emmett’s music was good—I remember a rapt love song, with lyrics a lot more interesting than, say, a song heard twice about a teenage alcoholic. Despite his name, Emmett Kelly does not look anything like a Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey circus clown circa the nineteen-fifties. In fact, he’s a bit of a heartthrob. He looks like a younger, scrawnier version of the famously photogenic David Remnick. During his set, young women sat on the floor in front of the stage gazing up at him.

Then the trio turned around a notch, with Dee moving to the piano. She did a bunch of the songs that had been covered by others at the Joe’s Pub show: “So Bad,” made famous by Frankky Lou Hightower; “When I Get Home,” sung and played by Andrew W.K.; “Teeth Are the Only Bones That Show,” which had been played by Matthew on cello and a young woman named Sarah on vocals and electric guitar, and which, as material, seemed as unlikely for these fresh young musicians as Dee’s “Price of a Sparrow,” with its line about hookers, seemed for nine-year-old Frankky Lou. “Teeth” is a savage song, and Dee tears into it. She also did “A Compass of the Light,” one of the bee songs; a new song with what we all, especially Emmett, hope is just a temporary name (Dee loves incontinence jokes); and finished with the Pie song. When the crowd called for more, she did “Lilacs,” and I realized that no Baby Dee set is complete without “Lilacs.”

Dee was off to Cleveland first thing this morning, and leaves for England tomorrow. Before leaving, she reminded me of the song about the teenage alcoholic.

Three-Step/D Dates

2010-02-04T14:10:00.000-08:00

Baby Dee is in town, and she knows just how to flatter me to extract parking expertise. She had parked on my block last night, and this morning, at 7:10, I woke her up and instructed her to move her car to the other side of the street at 7:30. There it would be good till 8, at which point I made her go outside again and move it back to my side of the street, and deposit eight quarters in the Muni Meter. (It was Dee’s first experience with a Muni Meter, as opposed to an old-fashioned parking meter. She was a little intimidated, and parked directly in front of the Muni Meter, just in case—kind of like a person seeking out a pay phone to stand next to when using her mobile phone, as I used to do.) Then, after an hour of leisure, we went out together and drove six blocks, to a Monday-Thursday 8:30-10 street. The broom had already passed, and we snagged a spot right at the top of the block, before the entrance to a parking lot. Left to herself, Dee said that she would have mistaken this spot for a metered space and kept going. She made me feel that, though my car is wintering in Queens, I haven’t lost my touch.

It was cold out, and Dee left the engine on for part of the time, which I never do, because I am such a friggin’ stoic. Her car, a VW bug, in which three musicians and two cellos travelled yesterday from Cleveland, has seat-warmers, so we enjoyed having our seats toasted as we drank coffee and ate pastries from the Greek diner on the corner. The only thing that interfered with my enjoyment of this al-fresco breakfast nook was the gigantic Ford van that pulled into the spot in front of us and blocked our view. Now, instead of watching the latecomers trawling for a space up ahead while we basked in the satisfaction of a job well done, there was nothing to look at but the Republic of Croatia decals on the back of the van.

Croatia is not on Dee’s spring tour, but here is a list of dates so far:

Feb. 4 Joe's Pub, New York 
Feb. 5 The Stone, New York 
Feb. 22 The Sage 2, Newcastle 
Feb. 23 7 Arts Centre, Leeds 
Feb. 24 South Street Arts Centre, Reading 
Feb. 25 The Crane Lane Theatre, Cork, Ireland 
Feb. 26 Crawdaddy, Dublin, Ireland 
Feb. 27 St John's Church, Coventry 
Mar. 1 Norwich Arts Centre, Norwich 
Mar. 2 Band on the Wal,l Manchester 
Mar. 4 Ikra, Moscow 
Mar. 6 Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London 
Mar. 7 Hanbury Ballroom, Brighton 
Mar. 9 WUK, Wien 
Mar. 10 Locomotive, Bologna
Mar. 11 INIT, Rome
Mar. 12 La Casa 139, Milano 
Mar. 13 Ex Cimitero San Pietro In Vincoli, Torino 
Mar. 14 Ex Cimitero San Pietro In Vincoli, Torino 
Mar. 16 La 2 De Apolo, Barcelona 
Mar. 17 Sala Clamores, Madrid
Mar. 18 Sala Ambigù, Valladolid 
Mar. 25 Berghain, Berlin 
Mar. 27 Warehouse 9, Copenhagen 
Mar. 28 Literaturhaus, Copenhagen 
Apr. 12 La sala Rossa, Montreal 
Apr. 13 The Music Gallery, Toronto 
Apr. 14 Opening Nights Festival, Cleveland, Ohio
Apr. 15 Beachland Ballroom, Cleveland, Ohio 
Apr. 16 Hideout, Chicago 
Apr. 17 CSPS Legion Arts, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 
Apr. 19 Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota 
Apr. 20 West End Cultural Centre, Winnipeg 
Apr. 23 The Big Secret Theatre, Calgary 
Apr. 24 The Big Secret Theatre, Calgary 
Apr. 28 The Triple Door, Seattle, Washington 
Apr. 29 The Woods, Portland, Oregon 
Apr. 30 Amnesia, San Francisco, California 
May 1 McCabes, Santa Monica, California 
May 2 Trunk Space, Phoenix, Arizona 
May 3 Outpost Performance Space, Albuquerque, New Mexico 
May 6 Niles Gallery, Lexington, Kentucky 
May 7 Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, Michigan

Somewhere in there, she is also playing Stockholm. The release of the new album, “A Book of Songs for Anne Marie,” has been pushed back to March 1.

Memory Lane

2010-02-03T10:28:00.000-08:00

My friend Mary Beth (a.k.a. Turtle) had a car called Kermit, a frog-green Renault Le Car (a.k.a. Le Frog). Somewhere I have a picture of it lashed to the bed of a tow truck on I-84 in Connecticut. Mary Beth, who lived in Ohio—mostly in Cleveland, for a long time in Youngstown, and for a while in Cincinnati and across the river in Covington (Sin City), Kentucky—had come East, and we had driven together to Massachusetts by some screwy route that was my idea. We passed Hotchkiss, the boarding school—it was the first time I ever saw a school that had its own golf course—and ogled the horse country around Litchfield, and then found our way by some tortuous route to Worcester.

Le Frog’s gas gauge was broken, but Mary Beth delighted in believing that she was getting miraculous mileage. I don’t remember when it was that we actually ran out of gas—I expected it, so it was not traumatic. But on the way home the car kept stalling. Once we got it started, it was O.K., but if we stopped or if it stalled, it was hard to start up again. Le Frog finally croaked just outside Hartford and refused to be resuscitated.

This must have been in the early eighties. What did we do back then, in the days of no cell phones? Somebody, or even maybe the cops, stopped and offered us a ride to the nearest mechanic. By that time we were so furious at each other—I at her for her pigheadedness, she at me for my insufferable “I told you so”s—that we split up: Mary Beth went off with the Good Samaritan, and I stayed with Kermit. I realized as soon as she rode off that it was a mistake not to stay together. I tried to pass the time by reading—I can almost remember what book it was—but I couldn’t concentrate. I fumed by the side of the road, full to the brim with bad faith, not knowing what was going to happen next. I had not even been able to enjoy pointing out to Mary Beth my favorite landmark on 84, the tangle of overpasses near the exit for Farmington.

At last, Mary Beth reappeared in the passenger seat of a tow truck. It was a Sunday, so there was no way we were going to find anyone to look at the car before the next morning. I vaguely recall that we rented a car, and had it out on the drive home. She drove back up there the next day, and I went back to work. In the fullness of time, we forgave each other, and even lived to travel together again.

The verdict on Kermit was that once its gas tank was completely dry, debris entered the gas line and the gas filter, and the whole fuel-delivery system got mucked up. When the time came, Mary Beth was not sorry to bid Le Frog adieu. She liked a flashier car, anyway—I seem to recall a little red sports car—and, over the years, she got her share of speeding tickets. Once, en route to New York, she had an encounter with a deer. A fender bender had a way of turning into a bitter law suit, and an accident in Ireland, where they drive on the left, turned into a prolonged transatlantic battle with a car-rental agency. When Mary Beth felt she had the right of way, woe betide the person, car, or rowboat that failed to yield.

Mary Beth Richlovsky died last Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at the age of fifty-seven. The cause of death was cancer. From what I understand, she did not know she had cancer until three days before she died; she was at the end of such a long run of miserable luck that maybe it came as a revelation. Among the many memories that surface from a friendship that lasted more than forty years is this: She taught me how to drive a stick shift. It was 1975, and I had applied for a job driving a milk truck, and needed a crash course. We went out to Parmatown in her car, and she introduced me to the stick, with its "H" pattern: first, second, third, reverse. She explained about the clutch pedal, and about stepping down on the gas and letting up on the clutch. And then she turned the wheel over to me and gritted her teeth as we lurched around the parking lot. There is no better friend than that, no more generous gesture.

The news of Mary Beth's death arrived on the same day as that of J. D. Salinger and of Howard Zinn. I think she'd have liked that, being both a rebel and a history buff. I didn't know either of those other guys (though I liked Salinger), so of course her death overshadowed theirs. I like to picture her speeding past them on the highway to heaven.

My Heroes

2010-01-13T07:50:00.000-08:00

Check out this wicked piece about Wallace Shawn on the New Yorker Books blog.

And get set for Baby Dee's new CD, A Book of Songs for Anne Marie. This article, in a Minneapolis paper, and her MySpace page (left), give dates of Dee's upcoming tour. New York! London! Berlin! Cleveland!

Ticket!

2010-01-06T14:17:00.000-08:00

Well, the system has broken down. I spent New Year’s Eve in Rockaway, ingesting pulled pork, Mud Slides, prosecco, beer, Bellinis, and other drugs (one of my neighbors has invented an astonishingly effective pipe, a kind of snorkel-bellows hybrid, made from hospital parts, including a big blue rubber bulb that looks like a magic lamp), and camped overnight in my frozen bungalow, then took the train home in the morning, leaving the car in my neighbors’ care. Parking is much more intimate in Rockaway than it is in Manhattan. I knew whose house I was parking in front of and whose car I was parking behind (the Catwoman’s black Mustang convertible). I informed T. & T. that the spot was good until Tuesday, January 5th.

Then came Epiphany, and I celebrated Russian Christmas with my friend G., watching two Hollywood extravaganzas about Russia, one with Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great and one with three Barrymores—Ethel, John, and Lionel—about Rasputin (whose beard apparently inspired the Marx Brothers shtick about the three Russian aviators in “Night at the Opera”). G. served borscht and complained the whole time about anachronisms in Hollywood’s version of Russia (though even she fell under the influence of Rasputin’s glittering eyes). Also that day I bought a ticket to see the Shostakovich opera based on Gogol’s “The Nose,” at the Met in March. I don’t know what set off this Russian kick—it was either travelling with Dostoevsky or seeing Alan Miller’s documentary (“You Cannot Start Without Me”) about the conductor Valery Gergiev.

The next day, I heard from my neighbors in Rockaway: the Éclair got a ticket. On Tuesday, the man whose house I was parked in front of, the Napoleon of 101st Street, recognized my car, saw that it hadn’t been moved for the street sweepers, and called first the Catwoman and then Mr. T., who rushed to the scene but did not get there in time. “It’s not much,” Mrs. T. wrote, but they felt bad and insisted on paying the ticket.

I blame myself. It had occurred to me to remind T. & T. that the car needed to be moved on Tuesday morning, but I thought that Mr. T. might actually be using the car, or that he would at least see it. When I parked on New Year’s Eve, I could have gone around the block and seen if there was a space on the street with no signs, where it would be good all winter, but I was lazy. Anyway, I consider the occasional ticket the price one pays for parking on the street. And I certainly don't expect my long-distance valets to foot the bill.

Meanwhile, we were amused by the drama of it all. The Éclair continues to have adventures, even without me in it. I was in a good mood anyway, because someone had sent me this link (thank you, Silvia) to a story about "Lady Parking": a garage at a shopping mall in China with extra-wide slots for women who have "a different sense of distance."

Letters

2010-01-04T05:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Alternate Side Parker:

Why is it so hard to park behind an S.U.V.?

Dear Reader:

Funny you should ask. I recently parked in a tight space behind a blinding white Yukon XL. A friend in the passenger seat covered her eyes as I began my approach, but not before noticing that the Yukon's license plate began with the letters "CRK," an onomatapoeia for the sound of parallel parking.

The main problem with parking behind an S.U.V. (or van or pickup) is that you can't see around it. You tell yourself that it has the same footprint as an ordinary car—it's just taller—and you follow standard procedure: pull up along side it; back up, turning the steering wheel (and hence the rear of your car) toward the curb until your rear window aligns with the parked car's bumper; then straighten out and gradually turn the steering wheel in the other direction while backing into the car behind you. Crk.

At this point, as you put the car in drive and straighten out, you will notice that the S.U.V. is not only taller but also wider than your car by at least a foot. You may also notice that it is parked a foot from the curb. No wonder this is so difficult! But with the right combination of faith and skill, you, too, can successfully maneuver to within two feet of the curb.

Wish List: Update

2009-12-31T08:57:00.000-08:00

Item No. 3—No. 1 pencils—was my big score. An entire gross of the pencils arrived anonymously from some warehouse in New Jersey. Thank you, pencil lover, whoever you are. The reason I put them on my wish list is that the office-supply company that furnishes our needs at work doesn’t carry No. 1 pencils. They have the nerve, when I order, to send me No. 2s! So I buy my own (they're deductible), but they are getting harder to find. The stationery superstores don't carry them—art-supply stores are the only reliable source—and I live in fear that the No. 1 pencil will go the way of the incandescent light bulb, and two qualities that make life more worth living—of light and lead—will be unobtainable.

My exacting taste in pencils was formed when I worked in a job where my handwriting, in pencil, on galleys and page proofs, had to be transmitted by fax to a printing plant in Chicago. Actually, it wasn’t my handwriting that was the problem: it was my boss’s. He wrote in a very faint hand, which did not take well to facsimile transmission. The solution was to supply him with No. 1 pencils, which have a soft lead, and therefore require less force to make a darker impression. I got used to how they feel. I can always tell when I accidentally pick up a No. 2 pencil: the point feels hard and scratchy on the paper. With a softer lead, you can bear down when you’re sure of something and lighten up when you’re in doubt. No. 1 pencils are more expressive.

As for the rest of the wish list, until about an hour ago I'd have said it was a bust. No. 1, the iPhone, was actually taken off the market in New York City, because AT&T cannot supply a reliable signal for the masses. No. 2, the Smart Car, was perhaps a politically incorrect request: I should be asking Santa for a hybrid. As for No. 5, Congress is still working on an amendment to the new health-care bill guaranteeing every American the right to Hair Insurance. Surprisingly, there was action this morning on No 4, the Ciborium. When I came back from tending my parking spot—before the Mayor finally made up his mind to suspend alternate-side parking on the snowy eve of his inauguration for a third term, during which he apparently is not going to give anyone a break—the porter of my building said he had a package for me. The label said "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam" and the return address was Aquinas and More Catholic Goods, in Colorado Springs. Could it be? Had I downgraded No. 4 prematurely from ciborium to toothbrush cup? The box looked too flat to contain a ciborium, and it did not, but it did hold the next best thing: Cavanagh Altar Bread, a thousand wafers. It solved the mystery of a companion package, from Brewhaus, in Texas (no motto), that arrived two days ago: a bottle of Droolin' Devil gourmet hot sauce.

Amen and Happy New Year.

Lament

2009-12-31T08:20:00.000-08:00

NOW he cancels. I sat in my car in its spot in the Sanctuary this morning, cursing Mayor Bloomberg for not suspending alternate-side parking on a day that began with a snow shower and just happens to be New Year’s Eve. I had to be at my car at 8:30. I called 311 last night, checked my e-mail for an update this morning, called 311 again, and yet again from the car, but it was not till I got home, and Prokofieff’s “Romeo and Juliet” had spun to an end on WQXR, that I heard, at 10:15, that alternate-side parking was suspended today for snow removal. Quoth the city, in its memo of 9:42 A.M.:

Thursday, December 31, 2009
Alternate Side Parking Rules are Suspended on Thursday, December 31
The New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) in conjunction with the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) today announced the suspension of Alternate Side Parking (ASP) regulations Citywide for Thursday, December 31 to facilitate snow removal. However, parking meters will remain in effect throughout the City.
The 2010 alternate side parking (street cleaning) rules suspension calendar is available on the DOT Web site, along with other alternate side parking information, at http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/motorist/scrintro.shtml. The calendar is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Italian, Korean, or Russian.

Grrrr. This does not bode well for the third term of Mayor Bloomberg. I could have stayed home. What did I gain by my morning excursion? I retrieved from the trunk my new Jesus Overnight Bag, a lovely, thoughtful gift from my friend L.; stopped at the bank; refilled a prescription; and bought the ingredients for chili. Now I am home, and it has stopped snowing, and the one thing I am grateful for is that I don’t have to feel guilty if I don’t go out again all day.

I was going to write about how I ran out of gas last week in Rhode Island, northbound on I-95 for Cape Cod. I was so distracted by my desire to get someplace fast that I forgot to look at the gas gauge. I had that awful sensation of the gas pedal, when you step on it, acting like the brake, and I looked at the needle hovering over Empty and wondered “How long has that been there?” The answer was "About sixty miles." I had just enough momentum to get from the fast lane to the shoulder before the car passed out. It was very humbling, like getting a sunburn in middle-age, though you haven't got burnt in decades, not because your skin has become less sensitive but because (duh) you've been applying sunscreen religiously. I spent about twenty minutes on hold with AAA (the phone battery, of course, draining, draining) before finally reaching an actual person, who said, cheerfully, “We’ll make this a priority—you’re in a dangerous spot!”

Refrigeration

2009-12-23T07:54:00.000-08:00

I made it out to Rockaway yesterday to retrieve the Éclair, which I’ll need for gallivanting around over the holidays. My original plan was to get the car on Saturday, but even if I had been on the road before it started snowing and got back into town before the snow started accumulating, and Mayor Bloomberg suspended alternate-side parking, as expected after a snowstorm, so that, if I found a spot, I wouldn’t have to move until I wanted to … it still seemed dim to choose that particular moment—in the eye of the blizzard—to drive into Manhattan.

So I waited, and yesterday, with a sensation compounded of equal parts hunger and happiness, I took the A train to Rockaway. My car was nowhere in sight, but Mrs. T. had said she would make sure it was dug out, and I figured that once it had been dug out there was no reason for Mr. T. not to use it. So I called him on my cell phone, its battery rapidly dying, and we connected. I had time to finish a few little tasks in the bungalow before he came with the car. For instance, although the bungalow itself is like an icebox in winter, I had not yet turned off the refrigerator, which means that I was using it to keep things warm, for which perverted use of refrigeration may Gore forgive me. When T. came, he helped me pack the car (I had enough raisins and walnuts and parmesan-cheese crusts in the refrigerator to sustain the Donner Party for a week), and I gave him a ride back to work.

In Manhattan, I started praying that the city would give me a Christmas gift in the form of a humble parking spot, a prize rarer than usual with snow barricading the curbs. It was about four o’clock, and I was meeting someone at five, so my plan was to trace my route and, if I found nothing, park at a meter for two hours and worry about it in the morning. At a light a block from K Street, I set the trip meter and my diver’s watch: there is nothing like taking a scientific interest to distract one from overwhelming feelings of despair.

Nothing on K Street, nothing on Penny Lane, nothing on the street with the independent coffee shop that is now a fishmarket … I was about to embark on the next long leg of my territory—let’s call it the Circus Maximus—but I decided first to buzz the Sanctuary, just in case, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but the most beautiful parking spot ever beheld by man: spacious, outlined by a modest snow bank—nothing I could not hump the car over—and carpeted in slush, allowing me to maneuver closer to the curb. It was a spot worthy of a car owned by a dentist.

Before locking the car, I poked my head back in to look at the trip meter: nine-tenths of a mile. According to my diver’s watch, I had been submerged in the search for seven minutes. Not bad—far less energy consumed therein than in, say, heating with refrigeration for a month. Now, if the Mayor will give us a break tomorrow, and I don't have to shiver in the car for a half hour, I will consider it a very merry alternate-side-parking Christmas.

Wish List

2009-12-18T16:09:00.000-08:00

1. iPhone
2. Smart Car
3. No. 1 pencils (twelve gross or lifetime supply)
4. Ciborium
5. Hair insurance

December is a momentous time of year for many reasons, among them the need to renew my car insurance. I switched insurers last year, and saved enough money to see a Broadway show. Because I stuck my head up, all year I got junk mail from insurance companies. Earlier this month, I went online to see if I could get a better deal. I had barely finished filling out the form when my phone rang: it was a guy from Allstate.

It turns out that the secret of saving money on car insurance is to fill in the blanks right. This time, I gave my Rockaway address for the place where the car is “garaged.” I do keep the car out there most of the time now—in fact, it has been exactly one month since I entrusted its safe parking to my neighbors in exchange for letting them drive it. The Allstate agent has his office in nearby Howard Beach, and he recognized my zip code, which turns out to be a little pocket of safety in New York. He said he could insure me for six months for $329.20.

That was almost half the cost of my current insurer, Liberty Mutual, at $1,214 a year.

Of course, I don’t know what he’s going to charge me for the second half of the year, and I am wary by nature: I always try to follow my father’s advice when I’m pricing something, and go to three different places. So I called Geico, which I dumped last year; Geico has been pestering me with junk mail to lure me back. Their price was higher than Liberty Mutual's. An outfit called 21st Century gave me an estimate of $1,861.93 for six months, six times as much as Allstate. What do they take me for?

Meanwhile, the Early Bird of Howard Beach kept calling back, and I asked him why he was so much cheaper. He went over the old premium statement with me, and what kept the other estimates so high, besides the Manhattan zip code, was that I was insured for theft and collision. For a 1990 car, he said, it doesn’t make sense—unless it’s a Mercedes or something. The Éclair is the only car I’ve ever had collision insurance on, because it was in mint condition when I acquired it. By now, it’s a little banged up. There comes a time, the insurance man said, when you have to admit that your car is old. None of the other insurance companies even bothered to ask if I wanted to keep that coverage. So I went with Allstate, though it pains me to let go of my car's youth.

Now, about that hair insurance. Lately I’ve noticed that my hair looks more and more like the hair of the person who cuts it, which would be O.K., except that he is a middle-aged Frenchman. His hair looks fine on him, but he has been creating me more and more in his image. The last French hairdresser I had did that, too, and he had terrible scraggly hair. I think hair salons should offer some kind of insurance: (1) that your hair will not form wings over your ears as soon as you leave the salon; (2) that your hair will grow out gracefully; and (3) that you will not look like a middle-aged Frenchman unless that is what you are. Is that too much to ask?

Baby Dee & the Archbishop

2009-12-04T11:31:00.000-08:00

For parking purposes, the four-day Thanksgiving weekend lasted two weeks. If you were industrious enough to find a Friday-only spot on November 20th, today was the first day you would have had to move. This is because, as the Times noted last Saturday, the Muslim holiday Idul-Adah (commemorating Abraham’s not having to sacrifice Isaac) overlapped with Thanksgiving, giving alternate-side parkers a break on the Friday after Thanksgiving, traditionally a day of great ticket-giving by New York’s finest.

Of course, this schedule of parking meant not using the car at all over the holiday, but that need not keep one from travelling. For the holiday itself, I took the train to Hartsdale. On Monday, I took a bus to Newark airport for a nonstop flight to Madison, Wisconsin, to see Baby Dee perform, and flew back into LaGuardia via Milwaukee, where Archbishop Timothy Dolan operated before moving to New York. I treated myself to a taxi home from the airport.

It was all a bit of a whirl. For one thing, the night before Baby Dee played Madison, the Archbishop played—I mean, celebrated Mass at—St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village. It was the First Sunday of Advent. A friend had invited me, and I was excited—I don’t think I’d seen a bishop in person since my confirmation (plus we were going out afterward for fried artichokes). The Archbishop wore a high purple cone-shaped hat and deep-purple vestments. His crosier was immense and shiny. His face was pink, with a sweet perplexedness in the brow, and a glow, when he worked the crowd, that can only be described as, yes, beatific. Archbishop Dolan is a man of the people. Like Sarah Palin, he drops his “g”s: “I hope you know I love doin’ this.” The proper form of address for an archbishop, incidentally, is “Your Grace.”

I hope His Grace knows that I didn’t mean to be rude by taking notes in church and will forgive me if I mix them up with the notes I took at the Majestic Theatre, in Madison, where Baby Dee was opening for a duo called The Books. The Majestic was not as majestic as St. Joseph’s, which has a painting of the Transfiguration instead of the traditional Crucifix at the front, and crystal chandeliers hanging by chains wrapped in ice-blue crushed velvet from a Wedgwood-blue coffered ceiling. Still, the old movie theatre, which has been reconfigured into a performance space with folding chairs, a few tall tables, and a bar, was just as crowded as St. Joseph’s. The décor consisted of a single banner advertising a radio station with the call letters WORT. Both venues had balconies, and the Archbishop did not fail to play to the upper tiers. The Majestic had royal boxes on both sides. St. Joseph’s had a good piano; the Majestic had none.

Baby Dee took the stage bare-headed in a Dalmation-spotted hoodie. She started on the harp, with some of her inimitable dirges. After the second song, a few girls in the second row got up and left. “They realized they were in the wrong place,” Dee said later, more in pity than in condemnation. Anyway, their seats were soon filled. Dee did one of her most popular songs, “So Bad,” which includes the refrain “Jesus got my mom in there, and beat her up so bad.”

Then he took the bread into his hands and he broke it and said—no, that’s not right, though it reminds me that Communion provided the most awkward moment at St. Joseph’s. Of course, I don’t receive Communion—not that I have been excommunicated, like that Kennedy boy in Rhode Island; I am just too full of sin to participate. Everyone else in the church, however, rushed the communion rail; seated at mid-pew, I was like a boulder that the river of communicants had to flow around. But at the Majestic we all drank freely of the local beer (the Archbishop, I understand, enjoys a beer now and then) and cheered when Baby Dee moved from harp to accordion.

The Archbishop’s homily was, appropriately, about St. Joseph, and the value of silence and action and grace under pressure. Dee’s text was “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which we first sang as tykes beside our grandmother’s piano. Dee’s version is called “Rudolph the Disgruntled Reindeer,” and Dee told the story of how she once sang it, inappropriately, to a group of children caroling in the Village, and as their horrified chaperones hustled them away, Satan himself turned to Dee and said, “What were you thinking?”

The more I think about it, the more I see the influence of religion on Dee’s material. She did a song about Mormon underwear, and one about “God’s Great Plan,” and finished up with “The Song of Self Acceptance” (these last two are from “The Baby Dee Hymnal”; the words can be found online at Baby Dee’s Song Lyrics). Everyone sang along on the last verse: “I’m not the only pisspot in the house.” I would say that Baby Dee was for the most part well received. She did not overstay her time onstage. The Books proved to be clean-cut guys with a guitar and a minimalist electric cello, who accompanied videos they had made from old tapes found at thrift shops. This stuff is not for everybody.

At home, there was more parking news: the advent of an app for parking. The application, using something called “crowdsourcing,” was devised by Bryan Choi, an alternate-side parker in Inwood, who very sweetly hopes that people will use it “to build a sense of community.” For Christmas I will have to ask Santa for an iphone.

Son of Plumber

2009-11-20T18:23:00.000-08:00

“The mayor and his aides are extremely sensitive about his luxury lifestyle.” Quoth the Times on Mayor Bloomberg’s victory celebration, at an exclusive restaurant in Paris.

I don’t think the Mayor will be getting a lot of sympathy on this issue from the hoi polloi, especially since he came out against a bill, before the City Council, that would give the little people who park at meters and observe alternate-side parking a five-minute grace period before getting ticketed. Now that he is in his last and final terminal term, Mayor Bloomberg has no reason to court us wee voters anymore, and it’ll be No more Mr. Nice Guy. Our days of sleeping in when it snows are over.

The parking has been easy for me lately. I came back from Rockaway last Friday evening, having seen the ocean under the influence of a nor’easter, and slid into a Tuesday-Friday spot. Returning to the car on Tuesday morning—at eight-thirty sharp—instead of double-parking and sitting in the car for an hour and a half, I adjusted my attitude and went hunting for a Monday-Thursday spot. I found a beauty, on a street I haven’t parked on in ages.

On Thursday I had an appointment with the plumber in Rockaway, to turn off the water in the bungalow for the season. It always makes me sad to turn off the water. For one thing, I know that as soon as I turn off the water, the temperature will go up to sixty degrees. But the longer I wait, the more likely it is that a routine procedure will turn into an emergency, and the plumber and I will be out there between the bungalows in icy sleet and gale winds, our fingers frozen around frigid wrenches. Brrrrrr.

As it is, this year I waited so long to call that when the plumber called me back he was already in Florida. But at least he called back. He said his son Gary would turn off the water for me. Jimmy the plumber is bound to retire one of these years, so I figured it was just as well to begin the transition. I got everything prepared for Gary, and even started the job myself, cutting off the gas to the hot-water heater and fitting the key over the underground valve to turn the water off, a feat that, to my utter amazement, I accomplished in one swift try. (I used to allow three hours for this blind maneuver alone.) I was trying to connect a hose to the hot-water heater to drain it when Gary showed up, with a pump and a better hose. We went about our business, flushing toilets and opening valves and removing plugs.

It had started to mist a little. “I told my father, ‘It always rains when we turn Mary’s water off,’” Gary said. I loved the way he talked about his father. He said his father has earned those winters in Florida.

Gary went back to the truck for the compressor that he uses to pump any standing water out of the pipes. “Feel this,” he said, letting me heft the vintage gizmo. It was heavy, all right. “It’s copper and brass.”

“A family heirloom,” I said. “So are you in business with your father?”

“I take his calls in the winter,” he said. “I’m an accountant. My business is accountancy.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, you’ll never starve.”

Gary saw that I had been working from notes, and before he left he told me to check my list. Let’s see, red plug in waste pipe, check. Antifreeze in traps, check. Antifreeze in toilets, tanks. “Did you put antifreeze in the tanks?” I asked. He said it wasn’t necessary, and I could see that he’d scooped every last drop of water out of the tanks. “You want me to pour some in?” he said, taking the jug of antifreeze from me. “Will it make you feel warm and fuzzy?”

I had filled a bucket with hot soapy water, like a proper cleaning lady, and after Gary left I mopped my way out the door. Both of us had left muddy footprints. I emptied the bucket in the storm drain on the street. Then I moved the car to the next block, into a Thursday 8:30-10 spot, where it will be good for two weeks. I seem to have decided to stay in town or take trains over the holiday. Then, instead of getting on the train, I walked up the boardwalk to the next station up. The iffy weather was getting worse. A few bouquets were tied around a pole, a tribute to a surfer who drowned last week. It had been a horrible story: the leash on his board got wrapped around some underwater pilings and trapped him underwater. There was a hand-printed sign on a pole that said “Memorial Services for Alessandro Will Be Held at Cassese Funeral Home at 101-07 101 Avenue, Ozone Park, 6 PM-9PM. All Are Welcome.” There were a few surfers in the water.

At the train station, I found out that the shuttle wasn’t stopping there—they are reconstructing the 90th Street station—and I had to ride back in the direction I’d come from, cross over, and ride back up again. The weather got worse and worse. It took forever to get home.

Plan C (continued)

2009-11-12T14:12:00.000-08:00

When I woke up this morning, the Éclair was still way across town in a spot that was good till nine. I wanted to get over there early so I could get back to my side of town in time to snare an 8:30-10 spot. I left the house at about 8:20, and, I must say, my timing was perfect. I got to Penny Lane just in time to pull in behind a white S.U.V., in the first spot on the block. I had to ask the driver, a woman (a skier, judging by her vanity plates), if she would mind pulling up a foot—my rear end was sticking out a little too far beyond the pole with the sign for metered parking. “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” I said. “I know the parking lot is right there.” (Someone has put a splotch of yellow paint on the curb to communicate the need for clearance at the parking-lot entrance.) The woman was very nice: without interrupting her cell-phone conversation, she started her car and pulled up two feet.

A Mack truck turned the corner and I watched in my sideview mirror as it stopped and the driver got out and moved two garbage cans into the crosswalk, blocking the street. This was not anarchy but a thoughtful (if wasted) civic gesture: the truck was delivering oil to an apartment building, and the street would be impassable for a good half hour. A delivery truck went around the garbage-can barriers and parked behind me. The stuffed animal strapped to its grille was a camel, I decided. Then a U-Haul went around the barriers, followed by an off-duty cab, the silver truck that picks up dry-cleaning from the Chinese laundry, and several cars, a few of which squeezed into the parking lot. Soon cars were lined up all along the street, honking. Finally, the cabdriver got out and motioned for everyone to back up and the street cleared—until a garbage truck turned onto the block, and the whole exercise began again.

The skier left her car at 9:20; I noticed that she had a parking permit. It occurred to me to pick up a few shirts that I had left at the Chinese laundry weeks ago. And then there was nothing to do but sit in the car. I haven’t sat on this street for a long time. I meant to try to notice whether the Mack truck circled around and the driver moved the garbage cans back to their respective curbs. But I got absorbed in the jacket of an audio version of “Crime and Punishment” that I found last weekend in a funky little store attached to an orchard in Massachusetts. Books on cassette are almost obsolete now, and my technology for playing CDs with a converter on my car’s tape player has broken down, so I was delighted to come across this used two-dollar Dostoevsky. When I ran out of radio stations in Connecticut, around Hartford, I slipped Raskolnikov into the tape player. He is a strangely compelling travel companion.

The book, in a translation by David McDuff, is abridged, a literary act that I usually don’t hold with, but in the case of a Russian novel on a short trip it was a good idea. Raskolnikov commits his crime right away—none of this sitting around gassing till page 400, as in “The Brothers K.” There is a riff on the difference between being poor and being destitute (Raskolnikov is destitute), and a long letter from Mom. When the reader, a British actor named Alex Jennings, who is excellent, does a woman’s voice, he sounds hilariously like one of the “Monty Python” troupe playing an old frump. I broke off on Tape 2, Side B, in which R., who has been ill and delirious (uh-oh), is taken by a friend to a party and overhears gossip about the murder of the old pawnbroker and her sister …

I will have to plan another trip to resume my adventures with Raskolnikov. Meanwhile, here is his garage.

Wit’s End

2009-11-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

My Friday-morning strategy went all to hell this morning when I made the mistake of sleeping in. I got to my car at eighty-thirty and found it surrounded by orange cones; notices posted on both sides of the street announced that they would be shooting an episode of “Nurse Jackie” today. O.K., no problem, I’ll drive around. Jeff Spurgeon was playing excellent music on WQXR—something Spanish, a Mozart Horn Concerto, a souped-up version of Vivaldi’s Autumn . . . As it turned out, I got to hear quite a lot of music.

I made my usual rounds, even visiting the Sanctuary, though I had little hope of finding solace there, and after a half hour I gave up and headed for the parking lot by the river. A woman there said she had nothing for me and directed me down the road to a section of the lot that has to be entered through a toll gate. She said it was the same price—fifteen dollars if you get there before ten-thirty. I have never liked this lot, so when the attendant said it was full and I would have to double park and leave my keys, I said no thanks and headed out again.

It was necessary to stop at a deli for coffee and a muffin before implementing Plan C: Drive across town and poach a spot in someone else’s territory. By the time I got over there, the street sweeper had passed, and I pulled into a very luxurious spot, all town houses, playgrounds, and yellow leaves. At ten, I got out of the car, and the man in front of me also got out of his car, a black Lexus. “Is it ten or ten-thirty?” he asked me. “Ten,” I said, looking at my watch. “I mean the sign,” he said. Oh my God, he was right: the sign said “No Parking Tuesday & Friday 9-10:30 A.M.” I certainly was in foreign territory. “I wish it WAS ten,” he said. “I’m tired of sitting here. But you just know as soon as we leave the meter maid will come along.”

As long as I was out of the car, I went to a diner on the corner and got another cup of coffee. Then I resumed my vigil. Fortunately, I had bought a copy of the Times and it had this great article on lobstering by Charles McGrath.

Otherwise, it was the kind of morning that makes a car owner's thoughts turn fondly toward garages.

Alternative Candidate

2009-11-02T08:46:00.000-08:00

I drove into the city from Rockaway just before sunset on Halloween, determined to find a Tuesday-Friday spot, to take advantage of the suspension of alternate-side parking for Election Day. I felt out of practice, almost as if I were in a foreign country; my strategies are all geared to Monday-Thursday. I went all the way to the outer limits of my cruising range, and saw a band of Mexicans in sombreros walking up the street—and Marie-Antoinette in the crosswalk—before I gave up. Luckily, I had a plan in place: enough quarters to buy an hour at a meter, after which parking was free. A woman wearing a painted paper cat mask and a kimono stood on the corner, waving one white paw up and down. In downtown Manhattan, Halloween is for grownups.

We set our clocks back, and on Sunday morning I spent my extra hour cruising for a parking place. Actually, I spent less than ten minutes. Down the street, a left on the avenue, a decision not to turn right at the first block with Tuesday-Friday street-cleaning hours, because the car in front of me turned right, and I knew it would beat me to any spot on that street. Instead I took the next right, watching on the south side of the street: hydrant, driveway, hydrant, driveway, metered parking only . . . nothing. I went around the corner and up the next block, watching on the left: double-parked van, hydrant—there were a couple of spots on the Monday-Thursday side, but I was holding out for Tuesday-Friday—another hydrant, and, finally, up ahead a van pulling out of the last legal spot on the block. Yes! I nosed in to claim the spot while through traffic flowed past, then pulled out and did a proper job of parallel parking. All set for Election Day.

Mayor Bloomberg has been pretty friendly to the parking lobby, ever since he riled up so many car owners in Queens by implying that they were too lazy to get up in the morning and chip out their cars, which were embedded in the ice like mastodons in the Swiss Alps. Over the weekend, a friend was trying to talk me into voting for Bloomberg's Democratic rival Bill Thompson. What Thompson has going for him, according to my friend, is that he has two cats. (She seemed pretty desperate to find common ground between us.) I have to admit that there are a couple of reasons to stick it to Bloomberg: the term-limits thing (he was very much against an exception to term limits when Giuliani was so popular, in the wake of 9/11), and the cynical assumption that with his vast wealth he can simply buy New York City. Also, I am tired of getting junk mail from him—there’s another pamphlet every day—and his telephone campaign stepped over the line by calling me on Sunday.

So I ask myself the eternal question: What would Dennis Kucinich do? And I remember that Bloomberg and Thompson are not my only choices: I can vote for Reverend Billy, of the Church of Not Shopping. Actually, now it’s called the Church of Life After Shopping, but Reverend Billy really is on the ballot, as the candidate for the Green Party. He has about as much chance of being elected mayor as my cousin Dennis had of being elected President, but it will still be fun to vote for him (check out this video of him dissing Bloomberg), and better than not voting at all—a truer expression of patriotism.

Some flowers for All Souls' Day:

Last Friday

2009-10-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, not relishing the idea of sitting out in the car for an hour and a half, I left the house early, strongly motivated by the need for caffeine (it seems I accidentally tossed the basket component of my espresso pot in with the recyclables). Friday mornings one can sometimes find a spot that is good right away, because people give up prime spaces to get an early start on the weekend. Sure enough, there was a man with dress shirts on hangers draped over his shoulder, opening the back of an S.U.V. “Are you pulling out?” He nodded yes. “Great. Thanks.” We were on a marginal road, with cars parked on both sides, and I shamelessly blocked traffic until he moved.

Come Saturday, Diwali, I was off to Rockaway to begin the great experiment: lending my neighbors T. & T. my car in exchange for their parking it. I am hoping this will be a win-win proposition. So far, so good. They get to use the car to take Little T. to the doctor. Little T. is fine and healthy, and looks contented enough in the Éclair, though I hope they take him someplace fun in it, too, so that he doesn’t associate it solely with doctors. I am going to move the moose bobblehead so he can see it from his backward-facing car seat.

Then T. the Dad put me onto a whole new parking scene in our neighborhood: just two blocks away is a street with a Thursday-Friday street-cleaning schedule, which nicely complements the Monday-Tuesday schedule on our block. Furthermore, this block has a median strip, which doubles the number of spaces available. I already knew about the street around the block, where the city has not yet put up signs; if you can find a space there, theoretically, it’s good forever. T. the Mom assures me that the car is fine, but I don’t think she understands the alternate-side-parking ethos. I am not content to know the car is fine—I want to know exactly where it is and how long it can stay there.

If I had had to sit in the car this week, I would have enjoyed reading about the Vatican’s reaching out to disaffected Anglicans. Good luck with that, Your Holiness. Why do you think they formed the Church of England, anyway?

Perfect Plan

2009-10-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

My plan was to get to my car by nine this morning—I had parked in a Tuesday-Friday 9:30-11 A.M. spot, having buzzed with no success my two favorite spots when I got home last night at eight. I made a brilliant U-turn on a major crosstown thoroughfare (saving precious minutes), and peeked into the Sanctuary, where an S.U.V. had just scored a spot, and a van was trying to squeeze into a space in front of two motorcycles (I could see that no good was going to come of that). When I turned down the street that was my main chance, on the block ahead I recognized the flashing lights of the street sweeper. So far, so good. Traffic was blocked ahead, in part, no doubt, because of my fellow-parkers, and I sat through two red lights before traffic started to flow again. I might have had to slow things down by creeping along on the Tuesday-Friday side, hoping there was still room for me, but, joy of joys, the first car on the left had generous space behind it, and I was able to coast into place, right in front of a doorman building. Perfect.

Strangely, while I was sitting in the car I got a call on my cell phone from a man I talked to last summer at the ferry meeting in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach. He kept apologizing for taking my time, but he couldn’t have called at a better moment: for the next hour, I had nothing but time. It seems he will be offering an alternative ferry ride at some point. I told him I was definitely interested, and I am (even though I am not commuting from Rockaway right now). When we were through talking, I turned to the Times and read about the big sticker crisis: apparently the glue was defective on two million registration stickers that the Department of Motor Vehicles sent out, and on another two and a half million inspection stickers, and people are getting ticketed for not displaying their stickers properly, and complaining bitterly.

Later, walking up the block, I noticed that more than half of the vehicles with New York State license plates did indeed show, as the Times reporter Danny Hakim put it, “signs of profound registration sticker distress.” I recommend transparent packing tape, the same kind I used for holding my right headlight in place, until my new mechanic refitted it with a judicious screw. It never occurred to me that the glue was defective. I thought it was my windshield.

I hope it is not against the law to have a moose bobblehead (upstaged in this picture by the street art in the background; I'll have to remember to take a picture of that when I go back to move the car on Friday). The moose is good company on a long trip. He bobs his head in time to the music and agrees with everything I say.

Friday Morning

2009-10-09T16:44:00.000-07:00

This morning I went off to the car with my new bobblehead moose (a souvenir of Maine from my friend T.) and gave up my spot for a trip to the mechanic’s, to get a new headlight and an oil change, and maybe to see about fixing that shudder over 60 m.p.h. (wheel alignment? tire balancing? one bad tire?). The radio was tuned to 105.9, and I was about to change it to 96.3, but it was playing such nice music that I left it alone. Then I remembered: WQXR moved last night, and the familiar Nebraska voice of Jeff Spurgeon moved with it. This was his first day on the new job.

So I get to the mechanic’s, leave the car, and decide to explore the High Line, the park built on the old railroad elevated over Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Chelsea. It’s spectacular! The landscapers have retained a lot of the weedy effect, and the views are great: segments of the Hudson River, Chelsea Piers, monstrous modern glass buildings in the swooping Frank Gehry style, New Jersey, parking lots . . . I ran into an Australian tourist up there—she sounded like Nona Appleby. (Nona should visit the High Line.) I got her to take a picture of cars parked on elevated risers in front of the back of a billboard. “Is that aesthetically pleasing to you?” she asked. I swore it was.

Then, on my way across town, I saw a black dog being pushed down the street in a stroller. The street cleaner was just coming along, and cars were shifting to claim spots. (It looked like there was a fair amount of space over there, on a 9-10:30 A.M. block; I’ll have to remember that if I get desperate in my neighborhood.) Finally, just before getting on the subway, I heard music and saw a woman sitting on a stoop practicing the banjo. At least, I think it was a woman. It was definitely a banjo.

I wish I had thought to stop in the flower district for potting soil. Just now I asked around the office, where there are lots of gardeners, and got enough soil to pot my alternate-side-parking aloe in a styrofoam cup. I hope it survives. It’s on my desk with the bobblehead moose, which I forgot to leave in the car and carried to work, where it has been greatly admired.

Unexpected Gift

2009-10-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

I could not be fussy when I got back into town last night, after driving the five hundred miles from Cleveland. I took the first spot I found, a Tuesday-Friday 8:30-10 A.M. spot, which meant sitting in the car for an hour and a half this morning. It was not an entirely unpleasant interlude. I was outside a building with a beautiful old wooden door and a wrought-iron gate, daisies and vines, and a stone lion. I’d had a passenger on the trip, a twenty-year-old cellist who works in one of those fancy soap shops in SoHo. The car was still fragrant from his clothing.

Soon after eight-thirty, all the cars shifted to the other side of the street and double parked. A white Maxima backed in ahead of me. It was the first time I ever saw anyone parallel double park. The broom came at around nine, and there was the usual back-and-forthing, with the Maxima humping up onto the curb, to get in position. When we were all settled in, a legal spot unexpectedly opened up on the other side of the street, and the Maxima moved again. The spot in front of me was vacant for thirty seconds.

I could have taken the Eclair to the mechanic’s this morning instead of just sitting there. My left headlight blinked out on this trip. The other big event was that the odometer turned over to 65,000. When I pointed this out to my passenger, I could feel him doing the math: the car was as old as he was—didn’t I mean 165,000 miles? I explained that the car had less than 30,000 miles on it when I bought it. It had belonged to a woman who drove it only to Dunkin' Donuts on Saturday afternoons. Its next owner may have to explain that I used it only to chauffeur my cats to the beach and drive to Cleveland twice a year.

At 9:40, a black Jeep with New Jersey plates stopped across the street, and a man jumped out and looked around. Finally he came to me and said what sounded like “Veel o stop dat? Na veel in cruising?” I said no. (I was pretty sure he was asking if I was going to pull out.)

At ten to ten, the guy behind me, a healthy, public-spirited sort who drove a Subaru Forester with a Bowdoin decal, suggested that if he moved back and I moved back, there would be room for another car. I was willing to go along with that, although I didn’t want to have to watch as whoever parallel parked in front of me crushed my license plate. Two cars tried and couldn’t get in. Just as it was time to leave, Bowdoin said that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. “You move up and I’ll move up.” He had been talking to a guy on the street who looked like a cook, probably because he was wearing white and clutching a thick bunch of greens. This guy now approached and said he’d seen it many times: a truck comes along, determined to fit in the space, and pushes the little car to make room. “It ruins your transmission,” he said. The greens he was holding turned out to be an aloe plant.

“Would you like an aloe plant?” Bowdoin asked. “I have some extras.” And he reached in a black tote bag and gave me an aloe. I could pot it in the car on Friday.

Stet, Baby

2009-09-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

At last an image that combines two of my professional interests: parking (or having a freshly paved road, preferably with a view, to do it on) and copy editing. "Stet" is something copy editors scribble on a proof when they wish to make sure no one messes with what is printed. It's from the Latin "stare," and means "Leave it alone!" or, more mildly, "Let it stand." "Stet" might be the answer to those signs that say "No Standing" or something you say as you leave your car in a beautiful spot. I took this picture in Flores, in the Azores, in the spring of 2008, just before having to walk down a freshly oiled road with my wheeled suitcase.

Bonanza

2009-09-28T08:38:00.000-07:00

I was wrong last week about Sunday morning at ten-fifteen being the optimal time to find a parking spot in Manhattan. I got an earlier start this Sunday, coming in from Rockaway in torrential rain (“light rain,” it said on the radio; the truth was somewhere in between), and looking for a spot at closer to nine-fifteen. I figured that the folks who park in the sanctuary would still be lingering over their bagels at that hour, waiting out the rain, but I drove there anyway, not daring to hope, planning my strategy in case there wasn't a spot, and reassuring myself that any Monday-Thursday spot would do, because today, Monday, is Yom Kippur, and alternate-side is suspended, and Thursday I am leaving the city at dawn. And behold, when I turned the corner, there were only two cars parked in the sacred seven-car precinct!

I pulled into the very same spot I had vacated on Saturday, behind the red Honda Prelude, with its front wheels cocked into the street, as if parked in a hurry by someone who really had to pee. Its owner is a sort of crusty older woman who reminds me of a retired proofreader. One of her headlights is taped into place. I watched last Thursday morning as she approached her car, removed a flyer from the windshield, went blindly to the nearest litter box to throw it away, and then ambled across the street to put something in the mail before settling into her car, leaving the door slightly ajar. It surprised me that she didn’t start the engine and straighten her car out in the space—I had left enough room for her to maneuver. But I guess I’m just a perfectionist.

Last week a friend put me onto this site: primospot.com, another new link. At first, it scared me: it makes a lot of information available, and it could increase the competition for a spot. But though it showcases a lot of lovely parking spots, it doesn’t yet have the technology to tell you whether they’re available or not. And as for piecing together a parking strategy that will minimize time spent sipping coffee in the car and watching for the broom in the rearview mirror, anguishing over whether the S.U.V. behind you is going to move in on your spot and crowd you off the block, ruining your week—well, I think I am pretty good at that already.

But it would make sense to have some kind of network of like-minded people you could notify if you happen to see four lovely spots open on a prime block. I don't have a Twitter account, or an iPhone, but it may be time for me to upgrade (my cell phone is ancient—almost as big as a ladies' size-7 shoe). I could start with the retired proofreader.

New Link

2009-09-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

Which sounds like the harder sell: a book about parking by a copy editor or a book about copy editing by a parker? See Andy Ross's blog Ask the Agent: Night Thoughts About Books and Publishing.

Working on the Railroad

2009-09-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

Ten-fifteen on Sunday morning is the optimal time for finding a parking spot, or it was for me yesterday. I’d spent Saturday night in Rockaway, where a crew is laying new track on the elevated A train (see below, where I took a major detour on a Friday night). In addition to all their trucks and cranes, there was another piece of heavy equipment parked on our block when I arrived on Saturday morning: a thing they use for “milling” the pavement, which is like plowing asphalt. Opinion was divided as to the desirability of having our block milled. My neighbor T. said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if they did some actual work on our little street?” The Catwoman said, “Wheah are we gonna park?”

The road miller disappeared, but I found it later, in the church parking lot. (Seriously, look at this thing.) The train operation went on all night. On the street there was a stack of new sections of track, which comes preassembled, as for a model railway. There was a crane that was hoisting the sections up onto the elevated.

On the elevated was a whole string of yellow cars, the kind you dread seeing because it means there is a free shuttle bus in your future. One of these cars had a crane mounted on it to lift the section of track, move it down the track, and drop it into position. I stood below, taking pictures for a while. It can’t be often that they lay new track for the Iron Horse. One of the men, who I took for a supervisor, told me that they would be there for three weekends in a row, working around the clock, and planned to replace the track at both the Beach 98th Street and the Beach 90th Street stations. Next year, they will lay new track between the stations. Then, he said, from Far Rockaway to Beach 116th St., we’ll have a whole new railroad.

I watched as the men on the ground prepared these PVC joints and pounded them into the track sections. It was hard to get a good picture of the yellow car as it moved along the tracks, but I kept trying, until the man at the rear of the car yelled down, “Hey, Bobby, what is this?” and pointed at me. I guess he thought I was a terrorist or was somehow a threat to the future of the railroad. “I’m just having some fun,” I said. The supervisor said, “You can take all the pictures you want.” By then, my battery was beginning to flicker and the light was waning. Here is the crew, moving out, as I went home.

The next morning, the pile of new track was gone and there was a stack of old track, waiting to be trucked away. I took a quick walk to the beach, packed the car, and got back to the city just in time to snag the most beautiful parking spot in the world, one of only seven in what I like to call the Sanctuary (though it has no official recognition from the Vatican). There were actually two spots on this exquisite Monday-Thursday, 8:30-9 A.M. block, as somebody was leaving just as I arrived. I wished I could think of a friend to call who could use the other spot. Alternate side is suspended today, for Idul Fitr, so the Eclair is golden until Thursday, when I have to sit in it for only a half hour, and a civilized half hour at that.

Thanks to the railroad for all the heavy lifting.

Morning Guy

2009-09-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

The broom made us move today, and what a mess. The four cars parked between the curb cut and the crosswalk pulled diagonally across the street, and an S.U.V. that had been lurking behind me, at the curb cut, sat in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, as the street sweeper honked. “You’d better not try to steal my spot, buddy,” I grumbled over my shoulder at the S.U.V. as we all reversed into place.

But he was good—he even backed up a little to give me room to maneuver. I couldn’t understand why he was content to remain in an illegal spot, though. Maybe he had business in the neighborhood, or was waiting for someone.

Then, just before eight, he came to my window and asked me to move up. He was a black guy with a foreign accent. I had a few inches to work with, so I agreed. But after I had moved I got out of the car to see what he was up to. “You don’t actually think you’re going to fit in there, do you?” I said. He was right up against my bumper, and the rear third of his car was over the yellow line, leaving barely enough room for a car to turn into the driveway behind him. He was planning to park an entire S.U.V. in the space formerly occupied by a motorcycle (a Ducati—today it was parked across the street).

My watch said eight o’clock, but the woman in front of me, in the blue Subaru, had not gotten out of her car yet, so I turned on the radio. Folk music poured out of it, and I did a double take: yes, the radio was set to WQXR, the classical station, at 96.3 FM, soon to move up the dial to 105.9 and become a public radio station. I am looking forward to that, because the public station will have fewer commercials, and often when I'm listening to WQXR I have to jump up and turn the radio off, because the commercials are always about cancer. Then I recognized the folk music as Peter, Paul and Mary; I had just read the obituary of Mary Travers in the Times. When the song was over, Jeff Spurgeon, the morning guy at WQXR (he used to belong to my singing group), identified it as Bach—modern lyrics to a chorale from the St. Matthew Passion. He had found the perfect thing to play in memory of Mary Travers.

The guy in the S.U.V. thanked me before he left. Afraid he might not be familiar with our customs, I pointed to the yellow curb and asked, “Are you sure you can get away with this?”

“I come back after two hours,” he said, and rushed off. Then I remembered my own sometime mantra: Anyone can paint a curb yellow.

Season Opener

2009-09-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

I had to consult the parking calendar yesterday for the first time in almost a year, and was disappointed to see that, with the exception of Yom Kippur, all the Jewish holidays—Rosh Hashana, Succoth, Shemini Atzereth, Simchas Torah—which usually make this such a joyous parking time of year, fall on Saturday and Sunday in 2009 (5769-70). I was lucky last night when I came in from Rockaway to find a Monday-Thursday 7:30-8 A.M. spot. I had to squeeze behind a blue Subaru Outback and be careful not to knock over an Italian motorcycle, a Pugaci (is there really such a thing as a Pugaci? Or am I thinking of Bugati? Or Ducati? I was reading it in my rearview mirror). This morning, I was relieved when the motorcyclist moved, giving me access to the curb cut behind him. There were traffic cones set up across the street—No Parking on the Tuesday-Friday side—and I was tempted to cross the street and shift the barriers, to have more room to maneuver—I am out of practice. But, for whatever reason, when the broom came, at 7:40, it swept by without making us move at all.

So I sipped my coffee and paged through the Times, which contained this useless nugget: “Because of Rosh Hashana and Id al-Fitr, alternate-side street cleaning rules are suspended Saturday and Sunday.” It failed to mention that Id al-Fitr runs through Monday (Allah be praised).

Tease

2009-09-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

I worked late last night and took the A train home to Rockaway, probably for the last time this season. There had been signs posted all week that the Rockaway Park shuttle would be out of service beginning at 10:30 P.M. on Friday, September 11th. After ten-thirty, riders were directed to stay on the train to Far Rockaway, get off at Beach 60th Street, and take a “free” (whoopee) shuttle bus back in the other direction.

Somehow I got it in my head that if I just caught the train in midtown before ten-thirty, I would be O.K. My train got into Broad Channel at about ten-forty, and the conductor didn’t say anything about the shuttle being out of service, so a bunch of us detrained, as usual, to switch to the shuttle. There was no S train lurking on the siding beyond the station, but soon one came along from the other direction, and after sitting for a while on the siding it reversed direction and slid down the tracks toward us. It looked as if we were in luck: the M.T.A. was going to provide one last ride.

The train started sounding its horn—not a good sign—and as it got closer we could make out its destination: “Not in Service.” It stopped anyway, the big tease, and sat there for a few minutes, while we hoped it would open its doors, and then slithered away.

Hmm. What to do? Clearly no more shuttles were running. I have a friend in the bungalow courts who works for a car service, but I couldn’t find his number, and it was just late enough (going on 11 P.M.) to be too rude to call anyone else. I could walk from Broad Channel. But it had been a long day, and if I wasn’t going to get home till midnight anyway, I might as well wait for the next A train and let myself be herded along to Far Rockaway and the stupid free bus with everyone else.

It drives Rockawegians crazy when people assume that all of Rockaway is Far Rockaway. Far Rockaway is the easternmost part of the peninsula, the armpit, and the rest of the Rockaway Peninsula is the arm, forming the southern rim of Jamaica Bay and a ten-mile barrier beach along the Atlantic: Rockaway Beach. A whole spectrum of neighborhoods stretches along the peninsula from east to west: Arverne, Seaside, Rockaway Park, Belle Harbor, Neponsit, Riis Park, Roxbury, Breezy Point. The A train crosses the bay at the longitude of approximately Beach 84th Street. If you live on, say, Beach 101st Street, it is a gigantic bore, on a Friday night, after you've already been on the train for an hour, to take a four-mile detour to Far Rockaway. Grrrr.

When the next A train came, the conductor made the announcement about the change in service, and we all trudged aboard, but the M.T.A. had a little more fun with us before the night was out: as the train pulled into the Beach 60th Street Station, we let out a collective groan, watching from the windows, as the shuttle bus pulled away. There was nothing for it but to follow the signs down to the street and wait. At least it had stopped raining, and the breeze was mild. A bus came: “Out of Service.” Another bus came: also “Out of Service,” but this one stopped and picked us up anyway. It took a strange route down Rockaway Beach Boulevard to Beach Channel Drive and then along the Rockaway Freeway, under the El. (Note the many applications of the name Rockaway: there is no Near Rockaway, or Close Rockaway, but there is a Rockaway Boulevard and a Rockaway Turnpike and a Rockaway Avenue and a Rockaway Point and a Rockaway Point Boulevard and an East Rockaway—and a Rockaway, New Jersey, but let's not go there.) Nobody on the bus knew what the deal was, whether the shuttle bus would automatically stop at all the train stations or whether we had to request a stop, as on a regular bus. So the bus zipped past Beach 90h Street, where I was planning to get off, to see if I could find an open deli on the way home. Then someone lit up the “Stop Requested” signal, and the driver stopped at 94th Street. Nothing was open except the bars and a pizza joint and a Chinese restaurant.

This morning, after I complained at length to my neighbor T. about getting stranded in Broad Channel and not getting home till midnight, she said, “You coulda walked one block and got the 53.” Or, her husband said, "you coulda got the 21." Of course! Both those buses come straight out Cross Bay Boulevard, through Broad Channel, and turn west, toward Rockaway Park, stopping a block from my home. What was I thinking?

Well, at least I got to complain. And the journey home gave me a strong incentive to pack up the cats and move back to Manhattan.

The End (Again)

2009-09-08T14:33:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken on the Thursday before Labor Day as the Rockaway ferry pulled into the dock at Riis Landing. I have one ride left on my forty-ride season ticket, and I meant to take it this morning but I overslept. Alternate-side parking rules were in effect, so, for the first time in months, I had to get dressed and dash out to move my car. I found a spot across the street, the last spot before the Stop sign, where the Eclair will be perilously vulnerable to large turning vehicles. I hope she will be O.K.

I have been resisting nostalgia over the passing of summer—resisting, in fact, the passing of summer. Why must it end? The ocean is warmer than it's been all season (though there are some jellyfish floating in it). The cats have completely settled in, and forgotten all about their city life. Norbert was on the Greek porch this morning, among the morning glories. Eventually it will get too cold to stay in the bungalow, which is unheated. Until then, the main reason to decamp to Manhattan is the brutal commute.

On the A train today, I had ample time to consider what to do about the car when I move back. I could park it on the street again. Or I could call the garage and ask if they can still give me the good deal they gave me last year. (It's hard to go back to the street once you've parked in a garage. It may be impossible.) Or I can work something out with my neighbors in Rockaway, who borrowed my car a few times over the summer: maybe they would park it in exchange for getting to use it occasionally. This seems like a good idea, but I run the risk of having them begin to think it is their car. Or of getting tickets.

First Family Reunion

2009-08-28T15:00:00.001-07:00

I missed the hurricane that shut down the beach last weekend, though I drove through a blinding thunderstorm on I-80 in Pennsylvania, on my way to the family reunion in Cleveland. I had seen the sky all black up ahead, but still it came as a surprise to be in that blackness. I pulled over and waited out the storm, with my flashers on. When it calmed down enough to see the lights of a truck ahead of me, I ventured back onto the road. What a dilemma: on the one hand, if you can keep up with the truck, you have a guide; on the other hand, the truck is going awfully fast.

At a gas station, I called my friend the Catwoman in Rockaway, who said that that line of thunderstorms was purple on the radar. It hadn’t reached New York yet. The rest of my trip was calmer. The climax, as I rolled through the wilds of Pennsylvania, was passing a Tootsie Roll truck while listening to Prokofiev. It was a semi, painted to look like a Tootsie Roll—not exactly the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, but with a bombastic Russian accompaniment it was monumental.

As for the family reunion, either it was the only serious family reunion to take place during my lifetime or my branch of the family was never invited to any of the other reunions. (Or—and this is entirely possible—our parents were too antisocial to attend.) There are a lot of mysteries in the family: Why did Grandma’s family leave Canada when she was a small girl? How did our grandfather’s family lose the farm in Parma, a prosperous suburb of Cleveland, full of subdivisions that used to be farms? Why aren't we rich? What exactly is the relationship between the fabulous Baby Dee (my sibling) and Congressman Dennis Kucinich (our father's cousin's son)? I think they’re third cousins. Anyway, here they are:

Found and Lost

2009-08-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

I was walking along the boardwalk on a Sunday afternoon with my friend Cynthony when I spotted a tiny ziploc baggy with about a joint’s worth of marijuana in it. I bent down and picked it up, and as I put it in my pocket I thought, “I’m being framed” (no doubt because the first thing I saw when I looked up was a police car—not that I’m paranoid or anything). But nothing happened—I was not handcuffed and carted off to jail—and in fact I succeeded in getting to the hardware store before it closed, to buy boric acid (for use in my war against ants), and then I took Cynthony to the Wharf, my favorite place in the world, where we sat out on the deck overlooking Jamaica Bay.

We ordered drinks and appetizers, and then the skies opened and it began to pour down rain. We had a roof over our heads: what could we do but order another round? At one point, I escorted the waitress to the door holding my umbrella over her. But finally the rain was coming down so hard that the head waitress wouldn’t let her staff out on the deck anymore. Just when it looked as if we would be cut off, a bus girl offered to convey our order to the bar. When it was ready, she hollered to us from the door to come and pick it up.

Finally, the rain died down, and we decided to hit the boardwalk. I had my money—a five-dollar bill and three singles—in my right-hand pocket, and my keys and the little baggie in my left. In a gesture of drunken largesse, I decided to give the bus girl a big tip—after all, she had risked getting struck by lightning to bus our table and take our order, and she wasn’t even our waitress. I separated out the five-dollar bill, folded it, and kept my hand on it, in my left-hand pocket, so that when I found the girl, on our way out, I could give it to her and thank her personally.

We get home, I reach in my pocket, and . . . no tiny postage-stamp-size plastic ziploc bag of marijuana. Easy come, easy go, I think. I don’t say anything to Cynthony—I don’t want her to know what a ditz I am. I act like I forgot we had any plans for our little windfall. But it’s driving me crazy—it has to be somewhere. I search my pockets over and over, and look in all kinds of places where I might have systematically, if absent-mindedly, emptied their contents—a purse flap, the desktop, my knapsack. Can it have fallen out of my pocket when I used the ladies’ room at the Wharf? Did I accidentally hand it to the bus girl, wrapped in the five-dollar bill? I picture an aerial shot of the bungalow, as if this were a movie: the camera pans from bedroom to kitchen to living room and zooms in on the tiny, plasticated thatch of dry grass lying innocently . . . where?

A week later, I’m sitting around with another friend, whom I’ve told this story, and my neighbor T. calls out from across the walk, “Ladies, would you like some pot?” We’re not sure we heard her right, but, just in case, we fall all over ourselves to get out the door and over to the fence. “What?” I say. “Marijuana,” T. says. "My husband found a dime bag out on the sidewalk and left it on the deck table. 'What’s this?’ I said. He said, ‘I found it.’”

“I wonder if it’s the one I lost,” I say, and tell her how I found a little baggie on the boardwalk and got paranoid and then lost it and thought I gave it to the bus girl at the Wharf wrapped in a five-dollar bill. She shows it to me. “That’s it, all right,” I say. We all giggle maniacally. Now at last I can compose the last shot in the movie: I am carrying my keys on a long yellow lanyard that I draw out of my pocket as we approach the door, flipping the little baggie out onto the walk.

So that’s what a dime bag is.

Summertime ...

2009-08-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

... and the livin' is easy.

Morning Glory

2009-07-29T10:04:00.000-07:00

Below Deck

2009-07-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

Having rhapsodized and apostrophized and otherwise sung the praises of the Rockaway Ferry yesterday (see below), in my loyalty I rushed down to Wall Street in torrential rain to get on the 5:30 boat. It was the first time ever that I sat inside. I am exaggerating when I say there was “torrential rain,” but only because inside the boat there was a TV tuned to the news and they were giving the weather, which we could see perfectly well for ourselves out the ferry windows, and the weatherman was saying (according to the captions) that there was now or would be later “torrential rain” somewhere. The boat sped through the harbor, lurching over the waves, and water sloshed up against the windows and I felt ever so slightly as if I just might be seasick . . . I didn’t dare go up top for my customary beer, choosing instead to cling to my tabletop, turning my eyes occasionally onto the horizon (still visible) for stability.

Probably my choice of reading matter didn’t help any. I had forgotten my current book yesterday morning—I am on a Jonathan Ames kick, and he can be so perverted and scatological (yet hilarious) in his personal essays that they might have helped distract me—so on the way out of the office I grabbed a review copy of “Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World,” by Glenn Stout. The book begins, for reasons that will become clear, with a description of the Slocum disaster, the worst maritime disaster in New York history. On June 15, 1904, more than a thousand women and children drowned when the General Slocum, an excursion boat that was carrying a party of German Lutherans up the East River, caught fire. The captain and crew made all the wrong decisions, and none of the lifesaving equipment worked—it was ancient or inaccessible, and hadn’t been inspected in years. Women were not taught to swim in those days. Most of them drowned in shallow water off North Brother Island. Two chapters later, in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, Trudy Ederle (born October 23, 1905) learns to swim.

The ferry arrived safely and not a moment too soon at Riis Landing, and rain fell well into the night, though once we were on land it did not seem quite so torrential. I went to bed haunted by visions of maritime disaster. If it got really bad out there in the harbor, it would be so much worse to be on (or under) water than it would to be in a subway.

This morning, I reverted to the A train. Rather than continue with “Young Woman and the Sea,” I read this week's Wave. In a letter-to-the-editor, the paper’s historical columnist, Emil Lucev, wrote eloquently about, of all things, the Slocum disaster. The letter ends, “In nautical circles, the General Slocum is known as the ‘Poor Man’s Titanic’! The captain, William H. Van Schaick, was sent to prison at Sing Sing, New York … and was pardoned by President William Howard Taft in 1912. Shortly thereafter, the real Titanic went down with another great loss of life. The cause was ice, not fire, but the reasons were similar.”

Ferry Tales

2009-07-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

I have been commuting from Rockaway to Manhattan by ferry for the past few weeks, and between getting up early to catch the 7:45 in the morning and rushing downtown to get the 5:30 at night, lately I’ve been feeling as if I lived on this boat. My desk in Times Square sways back and forth like a ship's deck all day. The commute costs almost four times as much as the A train—the ferry is six dollars, plus another $2.25 for the subway from Wall Street to Times Square (not counting any celebratory beverages)—but to me it’s worth it, this twice-daily eyeful of New York Harbor.

Last week, the skipper of the American Princess announced two public meetings that might help New York Water Taxi get another boat put on the run—maybe one that left a little later in the morning and returned a little later at the end of the day. Last night, I went to the meeting at Kingsborough Community College, in Brooklyn. The college is at the eastern tip of a peninsula that forms the southern shore of Sheepshead Bay. Its major landmark, conspicuous from the water, is a rotunda, like an extra-thick silo, topped with a squat cone of green beams. It doubles as a lighthouse. The campus has its own tiny beach, Oriental Beach, an extension of Manhattan Beach, to the west. Manhattan Beach itself is a sweet little enclave, with a footbridge over Sheepshead Bay to Emmons Avenue, which is lined with restaurants and party boats for fishermen. I had been worried about where to park, but a guard at the campus gate told me I could park anywhere that wasn’t restricted.

The meeting was part of a Comprehensive Citywide Ferry Study to identify locations in Brooklyn that could be developed for ferry service. Although politicians from Rockaway were there to praise the ferry, and suggest that more runs be added and that passengers ought to be able to transfer for free to a bus or train, the agenda was soon hijacked by locals.

“Why would I pay six dollars on a freezing December morning when I can walk one block and get a train for two-twenty-five?” one woman said. (“You’re not riding a raft,” someone behind me muttered.) A woman from Coney Island seconded her, bragging that from Coney Island “we’ve got a one-seat ride.”

Mostly, locals were worried that a ferry landing in Manhattan Beach or Sheepshead Bay would mean more cars parked on their streets. “People who live in Manhattan Beach have a major problem with parking,” a well-groomed woman said. “This is a very small peninsula. . . . We have to preserve this wonderful community.”

Taking the other side, an administrator from Kingsborough said that his college is surrounded on three sides by water, and to get from Far Rockaway to Manhattan Beach by public transportation can take more than two hours. He joked that students not only get a diploma when they graduate but a certificate of survival. He would like a ferry landing at the college for students. The local ladies jumped all over him. “We have people with houses on the beach that need parking!” one woman exclaimed.

There were only a handful of people at the meeting who actually rode the ferry. A regular on the 5:30 Rockaway-bound who lives in Breezy Point had left his car that morning at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, where the ferry makes a stop, and driven from there to Manhattan Beach. “The schedule is always a problem,” he told the public. A ferry can’t run every fifteen minutes, like a subway. But he conceded that there does need to be “plenty of parking—that’s a key factor. If you don’t have it, you might as well forget it.” And he added, “If the trip is longer than an hour, it’s not worth it.”

The length of the trip was another hot-button issue. A young businessman acknowledged the need for alternatives to the Belt Parkway (which, incidentally, is sinking), but he said the ferry was too slow and that he was going to drive. A guy named Joe Hartigan, in cap, shorts, and sneakers, began his spiel by saying, “I’m not a big fan of Weiner,” meaning Anthony Weiner, the congressman who gets most of the credit for bringing ferry service to Rockaway (and who will never be mayor because of his funny name). Joe had hoped that a high-speed boat would be put on the route. He had made test runs in high-speed boats that got to Manhattan in twenty-eight minutes. He was outraged that New York Water Taxi had assigned a brand-new boat to the Yonkers run—Yonkers!—and given to Rockaway a boat that was used for whale-watching.

A well-spoken, well-prepared woman from Red Hook named Carolina Salguero was especially exercised about the fact that there was no ferry service between Red Hook and Governors Island. A ferry has been taking people from Manhattan to Governors Island for free, but they’ve done nothing for Red Hook, which is desperate for parks and ferry service and is right across Buttermilk Channel from Governors Island. When the moderator started to respond, Carolina said, “Enough already, Phoenicia, enough already.”

I found myself wanting to defend the ferry. The crew of the American Princess is friendly, and service has been remarkably reliable. Only once, in my experience, has it been late, and that was last Thursday, when Obama was in town to give his speech at the NAACP. In the afternoon, he flew from the downtown heliport to a fund-raiser for Governor Corzine in New Jersey, and the harbor was closed, so the boat could not come through. The man in front of me in line had a pinched nerve, and was extremely annoyed at Obama. But my feeling, as I waited, was that our lives were being touched by greatness—or at least delayed by greatness for twenty minutes.