The announcement that alternate-side parking will resume its twice a week schedule prompted a writer named Clio Chang to interview me for Curbed at New York Magazine. Now let's see if I can still find my way around this blog site ...

https://www.curbed.com/2022/04/mary-norris-alternate-side-parking.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=curbed.socialflow&utm_medium=social&utm_content=curbed&fbclid=IwAR0mYIVDS0FB1tVIG9U0TvyjJW7vjYYwj4OcIY7SgWQHVeB1elIkI16Z27U

Found

On the first sheet of a legal pad from 2007:

Just started a blog on parking. Did it because I got frustrated trying to get published in print journalism.

I would still like the blog to give me a body of work that would be publishable or lead to my dream job: newspaper columnist. It's a little like being a newspaper columnist, but the circulation is low.

One conflict: I don't want to reveal my name, as it would give too big a clue as to my parking spaces. I am very discreet in the blog. Yet I want fame.

Goal: Earn enough $, get book contract, put car in garage.



It took seven years, and I have yet to become a newspaper columnist, but that earnest goal? Met!

Back in the Saddle

My new Mini fits in some amazingly tiny parking spaces! This happened to be garbage-collection day. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

Out of the Loop

It has been almost a year since I wrote something in this space, and that's partly because I've been writing a book (on grammar, not on parking) and partly because I seem to have lost my parking chops. Last Sunday I lucked into an incredibly rare spot, good all week except for a three-hour period on Thursday. I had passed up a man standing by a car with keys in his hand, and slammed on the brakes. "Are you by any chance leaving?" I asked. "Yes, as soon as my wife gets here," he said. So I backed up and idled while he touched up his car and we both waited for his wife. I should have turned off the motor, but how was I to know that she was taking a sauna or something? Finally the man came to my car window and said, "I'm going to move so that you can park, and I will wait here for my wife." He spoke with an Indian lilt. I couldn't believe he was being so nice. "It's a beautiful day," he said. "So we can be nice to each other."

Four days later, I showed up at the car with a clipboard and my notes, ready to work in the car for three hours. I was surprised that most of the other cars were gone. I hadn't been there long when a cop came by and said, "You have to get out of the loop." I know I'm giving away the parking spot, which is against my religion (where else are there loops?), but that's what he said: "You have to get out of the loop." I asked for how long, and he said, "Ten, fifteen minutes—just till we clean."

This was actually an opportunity: I remembered that I needed gas. I got out of the loop, and went to the gas station down by the river, put in forty dollars' worth of regular (this car has only a ten-gallon tank and used to not take more than twenty dollars' worth), and considered using the vacuum cleaner. My interior needed cleaning, and I had enough quarters in my ashtray. But there was a tiny traffic jam in front of the vacuum (someone was parked and someone else was putting air in his tires), so I headed back to the loop. Ten minutes had passed, but the cop had been so laid back that I felt I had plenty of time.

I got stuck behind a truck on my way around the block, and sat at a light, and when I finally turned into the loop, every single spot was taken! Where had all those cars come from? The parkers were socializing, sneering at me as I passed. Clearly I was not in the loop. Fortunately, I didn't need a spot that was good for a full week, so I found a spot that was legal right then and there but would mean I'd have to come back out in the morning. Across the street was a full block of empty spots that would be good in an hour and a half. Judging by the leaves and litter, the sweeper hadn't come yet. I waited. The sweeper came. I moved. I waited another hour. I tried to work, but I was too distracted by having been shut out of the loop.

At the time that I was interviewed for this piece about alternate side parking by Alex Dworkowitz, posted on The Awl (http://www.theawl.com/2014/05/how-the-alternate-side-lives), I was still in the loop—still happy enough to take a mezzo self-portrait with the single blossom that my wisteria produced this year. It has recovered from the hurricane.

Service Restored

Today I tried a new maneuver, one that I have seen performed but had never executed. I was parked at the end of the block, the last space before the intersection, and when the street sweeper came  I pulled up into the crosswalk, not so far as to block traffic or cause a head-on collision but far enough to permit the street sweeper and other traffic to get by behind me.

When the sweeper had passed, I reversed into my precious Monday/Thursday 7:30-8 space, which I found last night when I got home from Rockaway, where I dipped in the ocean for the first time this year. The water temperature was 58 degrees.

The beach has changed, of course. The Parks Department has heaped up dunes where the boardwalk used to be, and there are new signs, long mats at select spots between the dunes for pedestrians to reach the ocean, and lots of red flags to indicate swathes of the beach that are closed to swimming. There are also many guards posted to enforce the closings. It’s sad not to have the boardwalk, but at least now I don’t have to choose between the boardwalk and the sand.

The Éclair spent the winter in Maspeth, Queens, in the care of my displaced Rockaway neighbors. She was parked on high ground, in Manhattan, during the hurricane, and suffered no flood damage (thank you for asking). Those neighbors, who have now returned to Rockaway (yay!), have a new used car, their third in as many years. The last was ruined in the flood; the water came up to the EZPass.

Since my car was still parked at the beach, I took the A train to Rockaway for the first time since the storm.

Who ever would have thought we would miss the A train? Sadly, one trip was all that was needed to remind me of the frustrations it delivers. First, at West Fourth Street, the train marked Lefferts Boulevard came instead of the Far Rockaway train. I got on anyway, because I always take the first train that leaves the station. Then, while I was waiting at Rockaway Boulevard to switch to the Far Rockaway branch, another Lefferts Boulevard train came by. (A friend once asked, “Just what is at Lefferts Boulevard that makes it so popular?” Good question.) At last my train came, and I glided over Jamaica Bay. There is a new stretch of corrugated steel along the restored tracks, rusty like a Richard Serra sculpture. It was high tide, and there were what looked like white sacks, or swan rumps, in the water. The Broad Channel station has been freshly painted. I always go down to the end of the platform to peer around the station wall—not that I have ever seen anything except swamp grass—and there on the ground beside the tracks was a blue metal trunk stenciled with the words “SNOW DESK.” I was just getting out my smartphone to take a picture of it when another train came on—I assumed it was another Far Rockaway train, but as it approached I saw that it was the Shuttle, and I had to run for it, because the shuttle is a short train and the last car lines up with the middle of the platform. The shuttle used to wait on a siding, in plain view. I guess they haven’t repaired the siding yet, and I wonder where the shuttle sits between runs.

Fortunately, I have lost my watch, so I was not able to keep track of how long the trip was taking, and I had brought along a copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s book “The Mani,” about travelling in the southern Peloponnese, which is completely absorbing. Still, one trip on the A train was enough to cure me of nostalgia, and I drove back to Manhattan. When I went out to park the car early this morning, I felt alive for the first time in months.

Written in haste on April 16th

I have been to a lot of Baby Dee shows, but Sunday night was a first: Baby Dee and Little Annie at a bowling alley in Cleveland—Lakewood, actually, one of my favorite suburbs on the West Side. I drove there straight from the airport in a rented car, with directions printed out from Google maps. I felt like some out-of-body version of myself. For one thing, it was a late-model car, and I am used to trolling around in a 1990 Honda Civic. For another, I don’t usually require printed directions to get anywhere in my home town. It probably added to the disorientation that I had flown in from Madison, Wisconsin (I usually arrive by car from the opposite direction), and that I had seen Dee and Annie perform in New York two nights earlier. 

The bowling-alley venue was not as odd as you might think (though I did accidentally get in line to rent shoes instead of to buy a ticket). The lanes were on the other side of the building, past the bar, and you couldn’t hear the pins crashing. My friend Paula was there with her sister Donna, and my cousin Nancy brought Alice, who is also my cousin. Alice was raised by my grandmother, and as a young mother she was our upstairs neighbor, in the house just up the hill from the Cleveland Zoo, where the peacocks shrieked in the night and a Galápagos turtle occasionally made a break for it.

There was an opening act: a girl called Blisse, who hopped around like a boxer and sang to the accompaniment of her laptop. She introduced Baby Dee, who made a spectacular entrance and vamped as Little Annie took the stage. They did songs from their new CD, “State of Grace,” and indulged in an occasional anecdote. One number that is not on the album but was in the show was “The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities” (“Bobby Slot and Freddy Weiss were not so nice but I like their names a lot, so I’ll say them twice”). Bobby Slot and Freddy Weiss were actually known to three people in the audience: Nancy had lived at the family compound long enough to have an indelible memory of Bobby Slot, and Alice had lived there earlier and knew things about them that we never knew. For instance they were brothers from different fathers. (Dee said, "I always thought they were gay.") Freddie was the older, and he was born without testicles. When his father died, Rose, Freddie’s mother, remarried and had Robert, as Alice called him. So Bobby Slot’s mother was Rose Slot.

As it was a home-town crowd, Dee favored us with a few extra songs: she did “Fresh Out of Candles,” and for an encore “I’m not the only pisspot in the house.” There was another liturgical number (“Jesus has a plan for you”) and she finished with the Mormon underwear song. At the end, Dee, acting as her own impresario, shouted out “Little Annie!” and the audience applauded. Then she shouted, “Me!” Wild applause. The next morning, they were off to Toronto, and then on to Detroit, Minneapolis, Cedar Rapids, Calgary, Dee Creek (in Washington), San Francisco, Los Angeles, and—whew!—Louisville.

And I am on the way back to New York, worried about friends who regularly attend the Boston Marathon. Dusty, are you O.K.? Deni? Hoping to hear from you.

HELP!!!

I left my car with my Rockaway neighbors for the winter, so I have not gotten out much lately. I was delighted last weekend to find myself in New Jersey, in the passenger seat of a vintage Corolla, with a friend who used a GPS, but mostly to defy it. (The GPS is especially useless when it directs you into one of New Jersey's infamous jughandle turns.) We stopped at a place called Taste of Crete, which was having a moving sale (not surprisingly, a small Greek specialty shop all by itself at the side of a road did not thrive in the Shopping Mall State), and then proceeded through Princeton and past some gigantic sculptures of figures like something out of a Monet painting, set down on lawns across from manufacturers of ceramic plumbing fixtures, to the Grounds for Sculpture. The forsythia and magnolias were just starting to unfurl their blossoms, amid scores of sculptures, all mind-boggling. The biggest surprise, though, was the peacocks gliding low in the shadows. Anyone who grew up around peacocks, as I did (believe it or not), knows what they sound like. We lived up the hill from the Cleveland Zoo, and once someone new in the neighborhood ran outside in the middle of the night because he thought he heard a human cry for help.

The Next Wave

As you know, Hurricane Sandy made landfall at the worst possible time for people who built their castles on the sand. To quote a wise friend: You take your chances when you live by the water. Heroic friends helped me start digging out last weekend, and if I can gas up the car I'll go out again . . . after the nor'easter. It's bad, but, incredibly, the bungalows did not wash away. They stood firm on their cinder-block foundations.

If seawater were as nourishing as the floodwaters of the Nile, our scrappy patch of land would bloom like Forest Lawn.

I wish I could lift this whole piece from blog to blog. This is the illustrated version.

Sandy ... so far

The only real precautions I took for the hurricane were to get my flashlight out of the car and to download some episodes of Moby-Dick.

As I write, the tide is still rising in Rockaway. My neighbor Tom and the dog and Dave have moved up into the loft. I haven’t heard from the Master Plumber. If the water in my neighbors’ bungalow is up to their stovetop, my bungalow is full of water. The posts for the pergola are floating. Let’s hope that the worst damage is the sack of quick-set cement I left on my porch, carefully covered with a shower curtain.

Tide still coming in. Take to the lofts! 

Big Read

If you really want something to read, dear reader, check out the Moby-Dick Big Read. You can listen to a chapter a day (they're up to Chapter 20), read by a different person, speaking in a different accent, every day till the middle of January. More background on the project (and my involvement with it; I read Chapter 6, "The Street"), with ukulele accompaniment, here.

Picture Car

I was dismayed this morning to see cones along the street where I had parked last night—blue cones and “No Parking Today” signs that were not there last night and that meant, among other things, that I would not be spending the next half hour in leisure mode, catching up on the Moby Dick Big Read. Someone had put the signs up after midnight, for no good reason (a travel show was being installed in a nearby building). A few of my fellow-parkers got belligerent and refused to move. I am not nearly as disgruntled as I might have been, because I drove off and found a spot on the Monday-Thursday side of a 9:30-11 block, squeezing between a car with a deadly tow hook sticking out the back and a shrouded motorcycle, which I found a bit more forgiving than a car, without actually knocking it over. 

On my own street, which has meters, there was no parking because of a film shoot. Alternate-side parkers hate film shoots. Sharply dressed people (extras?) lingered at the corner, near a building that had been redesignated the Office of the Attorney General. Production assistants were all over the place. One of them was giving away miniature pastries to distract people as she encouraged them to take a different route to school or work. A cop directed a traffic jam while simultaneously munching. I could not help but notice that, for a street with no parking, there were an awful lot of dusty-looking beat-up cars lining the curb. I looked inside the cars. On the dashboard of each car was a printed form that said “Picture Car,” and gave a name and contact number. I asked one of the production assistants about the cars, and he confirmed that they were late-eighties models—old Hondas and Toyotas and an ancient Cadillac—parked there for the film set. (The film was “The Wolf of Wall Street.”) 

These were not what you would call “vintage” cars, except in a certain anonymous, nondescript way. Most of them were unoccupied, but in others people were seated behind the wheel, behaving like alternate-side parkers: one did a crossword puzzle, another read, a woman talked on the phone, a man listened to music. Next to one of the cars, a brunette with a clipboard was making notes, and I stopped and said, “I don’t want to interrupt you, but I wonder if could ask you something.” 

“What’s your question, I’ve got a lot on my plate,” she said. 

I hadn’t yet formulated the question, so I said “Never mind,” and let her go back to her glamorous Hollywood job. She was not exactly a good-will ambassador for the film industry.

But here's the thing: I have a dusty-looking beat-up car that would not have looked out of place among the Picture Cars, and I envied their owners. They were getting paid to park! I wanted to know how they got the gig. A friendly-looking man was getting into the passenger side of his Picture Car, and I asked him, “How do you get to park here?”

“You have to do a lot of spinning,” he said.

“Spinning?”

“Spinning.”

At home, I went straight to the laptop, found Creative Film Cars, and registered the Eclair. She has a lot of character—she ought to be in pictures. Before the money starts rolling in, I have to supply some photographs. Thanks to my friend NH for this stylish closeup of the dashboard.

O Possum!

The first time I saw an opossum, loping along at dusk in the vegetation at Fort Tilden (it, not me, though actually it was both of us), I had just come back from Tuscany, and I thought it was a wild boar. It paused and looked back at me. I do not think it thought I was a Tuscan boar hunter. I have since viewed possums a number of times at their condominium in Rockaway. Once, after a party (ours, not theirs, although we can't know that for sure), a possum sat on the roof of a bungalow receiving slices of Wonder Bread tossed up by my neighbor. Last weekend, the possum population reached critical mass. Here is a link to Night of the Opossum.

Be prepared to scream!

The Boot

The alternate-side-parking season got off to a dubious start this week. I returned to the city late on Monday (Labor Day) and, knowing that the pickings would be slim, passed up a Tuesday-Friday spot in the hope of scoring a Monday-Thursday one so that I wouldn’t have to devote two hours to sitting in the car on Tuesday morning. That is like standing on the subway platform and letting the local go by, in the hope that the express will soon be there. Not a good strategy. That Tuesday-Friday spot was the only one within a twelve-block radius.

On Tuesday morning, I tried again, but I still didn’t feel like sitting in the car for two hours, even though there was an excellent article to read in the Times about the arcane origins of the parking rules in the West End of Rockaway. I guess I’m out of practice. 

No Parking Saturday & Sunday, May 15-Sept. 30
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

The Eclair is in pretty good shape going into the fall: new exhaust system, new front brakes, two new tires. After a trip one Saturday to Stony Brook, I grudgingly heeded my neighbors’ advice to put air in the left front tire, because it was low. Running my hand over the tire, feeling for the cause of the leak, I scraped my finger on something. A nail? A row of acupuncture needles? Holy Camaro! I was feeling the steel in “steel-belted radials.” This tire was not just low—it was bald. I pumped it up anyway, and the next morning the bald tire was completely flat. (Warning: Inflating a tire may dislodge the nail that is holding the air in.) I called AAA, and a guy came out and put the doughnut on, after which I hobbled out to Brooklyn and got in line at Pep Boys. This was not my idea of a fun Sunday, but the alternative was to take time off work to go back to the mechanic who, after inspecting the car just two weeks ago, had let me drive off on bald tires. 

Anyway, I surrendered to the fifteen-dollar lot by the river, and the guy in the booth was very sweet. I took a chance and left the car in the lot overnight. This morning, after seeing off my house guests—my cousin and her husband, with whom I had had a riotous time in Rockaway, possum hunting (stay tuned)—I walked to the river to move the car. It was right where I’d left it—hadn’t been towed—but the left front wheel had a boot on it. I was not that surprised. It was almost as if I’d been waiting all my life to find out what happens when your car has a boot on it.

The same sweet guy was in the booth. I told him about the boot, and asked, “What do I do?” He said, “You pay me thirty dollars for parking overnight, and I take it off.” Fortunately, I had some money in my pocket. I’ve discovered that I like having money in my pocket. “Let’s go see your car,” the guy said. He unlocked the boot, which opened like a jaw. It was bright blue. “It looks like a toy,” I said. “It works,” he said, opening and closing the jaws. I gave him two twenties, and he gave me two fives. “I didn’t put the boot on,” he said. “The night guy did that.” I gave him back one of the fives.

Now it was Wednesday morning and I was cruising for a spot, and everybody knows that nobody moves on Wednesday, because very few blocks have street-cleaning rules on Wednesday. That is why it is such a waste when, say, Yom Kippur falls on a Wednesday.

I carried on—somebody had to be giving up a spot to go to work—driving to my most reliable 7:30-8 block. There were cones set up on the Tuesday-Friday side, but on my preferred Monday-Thursday side there was one free spot that I managed to wrangle the Eclair into. On another block where I hadn’t been able to park yesterday, because some people were making a stupid movie, a police tow truck had been at work, removing a whole line of cars. Summer is over.

Rumble in Rockaway

Celebrating Labor Day with a piece on mud wrestling! (Photo by Bryan Fraser)

On and Off I-80

Reports of the Éclair’s demise were premature. The air-conditioning continues to put a strain on the engine, but with clean oil, a new exhaust system, and new front brake pads she made it through Pennsylvania and back on I-80 during the heat wave.

I hadn’t been planning on driving to Cleveland, but I picked up two hitchhikers who wanted to go there, and one of them was my nephew, so I took them. My nephew, Pat, is from Oregon, and it was the first time he’d ever been in Pennsylvania. His vision lent interest to tired old I-80. Pat had the same response that I had had to a certain sign I first saw more than thirty years ago, when my father drove me out east to college. “Scrotum?” he said, as we passed the sign for Scotrun.

He was also amused by someone's having plastered jolly red stickers on many of the deer-crossing signs, just over the deer’s nose, making all the deer in Pennsylvania into Rudolph. He was not amused by the mile markers, which are actually tenth-of-a-mile markers. “These are going to drive me crazy,” he said. Pennsylvania is approximately three hundred miles wide, so that’s three thousand tenth-of-a-mile markers, ticking by at the rate of ten a minute. It does seem excessive.  

On the drive back, I took my usual detour off I-80 at Milesburg and headed over the mountain to Route 45, where I stopped for the night at the Hotel Millheim. Sadly, it looks like my romance with the Millheim is over. I had been hoping to sit outside on the second-story porch with a beer and a book for a few hours at sunset, and although they had the beer and I had the book, the porch had been torn off. My room was a bit depressing, with a fake bird in a birdcage and windows that didn’t open onto the porch that was no longer there. But the worst thing was waking up in Millheim and remembering that there is no coffee for miles around.

I got on the road at seven, decaffeinated. After about ten miles, I came to a McDonald’s, but I wasn’t going to settle for McDonald’s; I held out for Lewisburg, where a friend had told me about a side-street café. There was a parking spot across from it, but the street sign, uncannily, said “No Parking Tuesday 7-9”: that was exactly my window of time in Lewisburg. I turned into a convenient parking lot just past the sign, and pulled into an empty spot. The Cherry Lane Café was lively, with latte and wifi, and I stayed there for about an hour and a half and bought an iced coffee to go.

When I returned to my car, a car had parked perpendicular to me, blocking me in. Taped on my car window was a note: “This is a PRIVATE PARKING LOT. If you want your car, call 532-0527." Sure enough, there was a sign stating clearly that this was a private lot and unauthorized cars would be towed at the owner’s expense; “my” spot even had a number stenciled on it. Oops. Caffeine deprivation can make you blind.

I called the number, mildly irritated that whoever left it hadn't included the area code. A woman answered. I said that I felt very stupid: I didn’t know how I could have missed the sign, but I was the person who had parked her car in the private lot, and I was extremely sorry. The woman sounded nice enough. She said she was involved with something and would be down as soon as she was free. I stood in the hot parking lot with my iced coffee for about thirty seconds before I saw a nice bench under a tree. I thought, How hospitable of Lewisburg to provide this shady bench right near the parking lot I’m trapped in. After a while, an elderly woman limped into view. I sprang up and apologized again, but she was not easily mollified. She didn't like that I wasn't sweating in my car while I waited. “The sign’s down right now, but it could have cost you a hundred dollars,” she grumbled.

Again, I said I was sorry. I offered her the ten-dollar bill in my pocket, but she didn't want it. She wanted to keep complaining. As she got into her car, she said, “You pay to park here, and it’s not very nice when someone takes your spot.” O.K., O.K., I got it already. I said I was sorry. What more did she want? "You better never park here again."

She moved her car, but instead of pulling into the spot I had vacated, she took a different spot. I wasn't even in her spot! My car, with its out-of-state license plates and dashboard moose and Buddha-on-a-spring, had made her day. Vigilante justice on the Susquehanna.

So I escaped the wrath of the self-appointed Sheriff of Lewisburg and got back on I-80, where it was business as usual: Road Work Ahead, Bridge May Be Icy, Expect Delays, Rudolph Crossing, Left Lane Closed Ahead, All Trucks Must Enter When Flashing, Scrotum, Expect Major Delays George Washington Bridge to NYC.

We had gotten out to Cleveland in nine hours, but it took me three days to get back home.

Requiem?

The Eclair went to a memorial service without me yesterday, at the Jersey Shore, and I'm afraid the ninety-nine-degree heat and the air-conditioning and the Garden State Parkway may have conspired to put too much of a strain on her system. After meeting up with my friends to get the keys, I noticed, on the drive back to Rockaway, that she was laboring. I hope she is not a goner.

Actually, I was a little surprised that my friends didn't decline my offer to lend them the car, after I started to itemize her eccentricities. (The shoulder belts are only cosmetic—don't attract attention from the police; don't open the left rear window, as it will never close again; pay no attention to the fact that the right rear bumper is hanging off—she was in a three-car accident while legally parked.)

Lately I have been remembering another Honda Civic, of the same vintage as the Eclair, a hatchback that was owned by a former copy editor named Lu Burke, who had retired to Connecticut. It was red—Chianti red (she always insisted on the manufacturer's description)—and when Lu died, about a year and a half ago, I found myself wondering what would become of her car. She only ever drove it to the grocery store and the Honda dealer, and then to the gas station, to have it topped off.

Lu Burke left a will, in which she did not bequeath me the 1990 Chianti-red Honda Civic. I didn't visit her often enough, which really is too bad, because she turned out to be a millionaire: she left her entire estate to the Southbury Public Library. I drove up there last month to check out the lucky library, and wrote a story about Lu Burke, the millionaire copy editor (you can find it here, on the New Yorker Web site). I refrained from mentioning the car. But I am dying to find out what happened to it.

Meanwhile, here is Lu, at one of our infrequent lunches at the Friendly's in Southbury.

Baby Dee's Summer Tour

Baby Dee's West Coast Tour Dates

6/15/12 DETROIT, MI MOCA DETROIT

6/16/12 CHICAGO, IL OLD TOWN SCHOOL OF FOLK MUSIC

6/17/12 DUBUQUE, IA MONKS KAFFEE PUB

6/18/12 MINNEAPOLIS, MN BRYANT LAKE BOWL THEATER

6/20/12 MISSOULA, MT BADLANDER

6/21/12 CALGARY, AB #1 LEGION

6/22/12 CALGARY, AB PALOMINO SMOKEHOUSE

6/23/12 CALGARY, AB THE IRONWOOD

6/24/12 VANCOUVER, BC THE WALDORF HOTEL W/ TIM COHEN

6/25/12 SEATTLE, WA RENDEZVOUS W/ TIM COHEN

6/26/12 PORTLAND, OR MISSISSIPPI STUDIOS W/ TIM COHEN

6/29/12 SAN FRANCISCO, CA BRICK AND MORTAR MUSIC HALL

6/30/12 LOS ANGELES, CA THE ECHO W/ TIM COHEN

7/1/12 TUCSON, AZ SOLAR CULTURE

7/3/12 DENVER, CO WALNUT ROOM

7/5/12 ST. LOUIS, MO THE FIREBIRD

I just had to post this fabulous picture.

Reno

Reno is not a place you want to be alone in. I was sitting at a table at the Brew Pub on the mezzanine level of the Eldorado Hotel and Casino. At first, I was seated on a stool at a high cocktail table, but I felt a tremor and, as a waitress had yet to approach, I was about to flee. I’d forgotten the reading material I’d set aside to bring with me when I left the hotel room, and I didn’t think I could get through a meal alone at a restaurant with nothing to read. All I had was the little folder that my key cards came in. (My favorite sentence: “For your convenience, the servibar is touch-sensitive, and anything that you move will be charged to your account.”)

But I ran into the hostess, and the waitress said she’d be with me shortly. Before sitting back down, I told the waitress that I felt a trembling. “That’s because you’re on the overhang,” the waitress said. The what? “The road is underneath.” I looked down at the floor, which was planked, like a deck, and remembered that the driver of the shuttle bus from the airport had told me that the five downtown casinos were connected at the mezzanine level, so you never had to go outside. I asked the waitress if it was OK if I moved to a low table. “Sure,” she said. Would it tremble less at a low table? “Probably not.”

It was a little ridiculous: I had chosen to sit “outside.” Although everything is inside, the architectural details say “exterior.” All the restaurants have facades, as in a mall. There is a fountain, as in a piazza. My eye kept falling on a narrow, pulsing, black horizon that turned out to be the lip of the up escalator. As I watched, heads rose over the little horizon of the casino: a guy in a cowboy hat, a couple who could have been shoppers at the Mall of America, a lush holding a beer in a flimsy plastic cup. There was a tournament of "gal bowlers" in town.

This is when you want an iPhone—I could be carrying on conversations with people all over the world! I could be tweeting the bejeezus out of Reno! I have a pen, but no paper. My own beer, a Redhead Amber Ale, in a tall glass, has already left a wet ring on my placemat. As a last resort, I reach across the table for a dry placemat, featuring all the Brew Pub microbrews—Big Dog IPA, Double Down, Wild Card, Gold Dollar, Carano Extra—flip it over, fold it in quarters, and start writing to keep myself company. This is pathetic.

My day began at 4 AM. Three-thirty, actually, but I stayed in bed. It was pouring rain. I swore I would never fly out of LaGuardia again. It is so stupid when you have a home in Rockaway and a free place to park the car, not to fly out of JFK. And yet I am forever trundling my suitcase to Grand Central to catch the bus to Newark Airport, or taking a cab from Rockaway to LaGuardia at dawn. And here I was again, up with the first robin—I could hear him out there, singing in the rain—having to drive to LaGuardia and put the car in a long-term parking lot before catching a flight to Reno via Denver at 7:49 A.M.

Parking at LaGuardia is more expensive and less convenient than the Long-Term Parking Lot at JFK, no doubt because everything is packed into a smaller area. I had checked it out online the night before. It was hard to know which deals were legitimate, but in the end I had paid in advance to park the Éclair, for thirteen dollars a day, in a lot behind the Extended Stay Hotel, or ESH. I found directions to the parking lot online, but I knew they were wrong—you don’t have to get off the BQE and wiggle around on Roosevelt Avenue to get onto the Grand Central Parkway. My parking lot of choice was well beyond the airport. It sickened me to barrel past it on my way to the Whitestone Expressway, in the dark and the rain, unable even to pour a cup of coffee from my thermos without sloshing the coffee all over the dashboard. The directions printed on the receipt I printed out were in a cruelly tiny font, impossible to read by the roof light while barrelling up the Whitestone Expressway in the dark and in the rain. Luckily, I had called the Extended Stay Hotel the night before and had enough of a memory of what the guy said to get as far as the service road off Exit 15, 20^th Avenue. There I could stop and read the fine print by the interior roof light in the car. I had to continue to the light at 14^th Avenue, turn left and then left again onto the service road for the Whitestone Expressway southbound, and the hotel would be on my right.

I found the driveway and went behind the hotel to the slots numbered 1 through 50 (I chose slot No. 37), put the receipt on the dashboard, as instructed, and lugged my stuff into the lobby of the Extended Stay Hotel. The woman at the reception desk said approvingly that it takes “a cruel woman” to get up early. Her Queens wisdom took me by surprise. As I waited for the shuttle bus, I tried to parse it: The early bird gets the worm: I was early; ergo a $13 a day parking spot near LaGuardia was the worm. I guess it does take a certain amount of determination bordering on cruelty to follow directions past LaGuardia and make a U-turn on the Whitestone to reach the lobby of the Extended Stay Hotel in time to catch the 5:30 shuttle bus to Terminal D, or whatever, in the rain. But what was the alternative?

I had had an extremely complicated weekend (my house guests’ house guests had house guests), and the day before leaving I had the near-deranging experience, as I was getting into the elevator, of dropping my keys—including the car keys—and watching them disappear soundlessly into the gap beneath the elevator door. It was only minutes before the blessed super restored them to me, but it was time enough to calculate the cost of taking a car service to the airport and leaving the Eclair exactly where it was for eight days, in its Tuesday-Friday parking spot, collecting tickets. Three tickets, at $90 each, is $270, plus the car service, and then the inconvenience of not having the car at the airport when I got back and not having it in Rockaway, either. I guess it was worth it.

End of placemat.

May Day

Just like old times—sitting in the car in the rain in my old 7:30-8 spot, on the Tuesday-Friday side of the street, as a predator lurks double-parked across the street. There’s always the hope that the streetsweeper overslept and the broom is still in the garage, but no: thar she goes, flashing and whirring in my rearview mirror. We move diagonally, like synchronized parkers, then jockey back into place, and by 7:40 it’s all over. We are good till Friday.

Big drops of rain roll down my windshield, on the inside. I have sprung a leak behind the rearview mirror. The Éclair has been back in the city for a few weeks now, peacefully occupying space in the Sanctuary, which I held on to over a weekend in Rockaway with a bold maneuver: I drove to the spot with my friend from New Hampshire, and gave it to her with the cooperation of several motorists who were double-parked. (Note that I have spelled "cooperation" without the two dots over the second "o" and see my highly controversial post on the diaeresis on the New Yorker Web site.) And when Live Free or Die left town, on Sunday morning, we made the switch again, this time without an audience.

The night before, I had parked on my own street. Traffic was heavy—it was the day of the Sikh parade—and I was lucky to nose into a spot at the head of the street, with my rear bumper slightly infringing on the crosswalk. I came out the next day to find on the windshield not a ticket but a slip of paper informing me that an accident report could be obtained at the local police precinct for ten dollars. I circled the car . . . the only damage I saw was to the right rear bumper, which had come loose at the flap where it wraps around the side. I could probably fix it with a large wad of bubble gum.

I went to the precinct anyway, out of curiosity. I was told that the ten dollars had to be in the form of a money order, so I went away and came back, only to find out that the report had not yet been filed. The lady told me to call later, and of course I forgot. I was kind of relieved not to have to hang around there longer—it’s such a dingy, inhospitable place. They did not offer me any of the baked goods prominently on display. As time passes, it becomes increasingly unlikely that I will return for the accident report.

Recently someone referred to the Éclair as the Tortilla. I hope that doesn’t turn out to be prophetic.

Comma Shaker

Much to my surprise, a piece that I was persuaded to write about punctuation has attracted a lot of attention on The New Yorker's Web site. Who would have thought that the comma would interest people as much as my other hot topics, parking spots and cleaning ladies?