Mayor's Cup

Two of my (sort of) interests converged on Sunday when ukulele players were invited to entertain the crowd at the Mayor's Cup, a kayak marathon that began in the Hudson River at Battery Park City and ended somewhat short of circumnavigating the isle on a Sunday afternoon. I could see it was too windy for me to go out in a motorboat on Jamaica Bay—frankly, it was too windy even to bike downtown to the Battery—but this did not stop the kayakers from pushing off into the Hudson. Now, make no mistake: I have never been caught in a kayak, for the simple reason that if I ever got into a kayak I would never be able to get out again. I would be like one of those mythological creatures, a Centaur, half woman, half surf-ski: a surfosaur.

So I was lazing around on Sunday, feeling bad not so much for missing the kayak race as for not coming out to support Ukulele Fun, in which some friends were playing. I hoped they had brought along fingerless gloves. I needn't have worried: the event was cancelled, both uke and race. Here is a description of the conditions from the Times: "The wind picked up speed ... and worked against the current to create a volatile chop, said Greg Porteus, a retired New York State trooper and the safety officer for the race. The currents in the river overtook several racers immediately after they turned north from the harbor, leaving them struggling to control their boats." One guy ran into a barge, and there was a pileup as kayakers tried to avoid him and negotiate the current. Several people had to be rescued from the water. Luckily, nobody drowned. If I were the Mayor, I would take my name off this event.

Read the whole article here and watch hair-raising footage of the race from the makers of the kayaks, who believe that there's no bad publicity.

Magnolias?

This was blooming in New York City on the first day of October, and though it's not a great picture, it seemed to me remarkable. I have never seen magnolias bloom in the fall before.

The Mayor has been all over the papers this week, having decided to bust through the term limits and run for a third term. I guess he thinks we need him, what with the economic crisis and all. His work has just begun. Actually, those little pedestrian strips he's creating at the Crossroads of the World? Another mayor would bulldoze right over them.

The mobile surveillance tower in Bloomberg's Broadway bench zone has moved to the other side of Forty-second Street, where it takes up less pedestrian room. The best use I've seen so far of the tables and benches was by a homeless person. He was just resting there, among the tourists, with all his worldly goods in a post-office-issue canvas bin-on-wheels. Tourists sit on the benches, taking a break from hauling their luggage between the train station and a hotel. I wonder what it's going to look like in the winter. Will someone shovel? Or will they use it to pile up the snow from the street?

Bloomberg has all three New York papers in his pocket, and of course he has a lot of money, so he could buy the city, if he wanted. He doesn't have (and here's the rub) too much competition. One guy who wants the job is Anthony Weiner, a congressman whose district includes Rockaway. Weiner is a little guy, and hard to take seriously. (Mayor Weiner?) Another contender is the City Council president, Christine Quinn. We can probably wait four more years before having our first lesbian mayor.

I must admit that none of what the Mayor has done so far has seemed too onerous to me. I'm a little worried about those windmills. It has already been decided that they'll be built off the coast of Queens, but they are supposed to be far enough offshore that they won't ruin the view from the beach. I'm still not convinced about the people sanctuaries. I think Bloomberg thinks it's cosmopolitan, something the French do, have places for people to sit outside. I told my hairdresser this (he's French), and he said, Yes, but not in the Champs-Elysées.

Here is the evil-eye that I got the ticket in Pennsylvania for.

Comfort Level

I couldn’t help but notice that the new pedestrian sanctuary on Broadway below Forty-second Street now sports one of those mobile surveillance towers that the NYPD placed just off the boardwalk in Rockaway. I asked a policeman stationed there what it was called. “A watchtower?” he said. That’s all? Didn’t the police have some slang term for it? “A surveillance tower?” he said. I guess I wasn’t making myself clear. He said I could call it whatever I wanted.

So the mobile surveillance tower has an I.D. number at the top, preceded by the letters MSTF, which I have doped out as “Mobile Security Task Force.” A new sign at the pedestrian level says “NYPD Security Camera.” I knew there was something about sitting out in the middle of Broadway that I didn’t like, but I thought it was just the hot sun. Now I know: it’s being under surveillance.

There is another one of these sanctuaries farther down Broadway, below Twenty-third Street, just east of the Flatiron Building. I tried it out this morning and found it slightly uncomfortable. For one thing, there’s an entire park (Madison Square Park) right across the street, and wouldn’t you rather sit over there, among the fountains and the hydrangeas, enjoying a fine view of the Flatiron Building, than outside the parfumerie Jo Malone, which is promoting a fragrance called Sweet Lime and Cedar? (Sounds like a clothes closet that someone has spilled margarita mix in.)

But what really bothered me, I think, was that I didn’t know how much I could afford to relax. Could I put my bag down on the birdseed paving and sit back in the chair? Or would that be an invitation to a purse snatcher? Has New York City gotten so safe that I don’t need to be wary of purse snatchers? I guess not, if the NYPD must focus its MSTF on Times Square. So the message is that you can sit out there, but no, you should not get too comfortable.

Narrowway

The Mayor's latest initiative is taking shape on Broadway between Times Square and Herald Square. Two lanes have been cordoned off on the east side of the street and paved with what looks like birdseed; a green lane along the curb is supposed to be for bicycles. Yesterday the orange cones and barrels that temporarily separated vehicular traffic from this pedestrian sanctuary were being herded onto corners and replaced along the Great White Way with giant planters. A man with a hose hooked up to a fire hydrant was soaking the new plantings, and other men were busy securing shiny new blue benches to the pavement. A few people perched on the benches, their backs to traffic, pecking on sandwiches. A woman sat on the curb, painting her toenails.

I confess, I am dubious about this project. The other night, I had to take a cab to get downtown fast from the office and was irritated when my cab was stuck in the two narrow lanes of traffic remaining on Broadway. It was hot yesterday, the sun beating down on the bottom of the canyon, and you would not have caught me sitting out there, even under an umbrella, unless they were serving free beer. The Mayor's path leads directly to Macy's. I had a coupon for fifteen percent off anything I wanted at Macy's, but I couldn't think of anything I wanted. If the Mayor has visions of changing New York on the scale of Robert Moses, this is a very small start. He has cut a wider swath for jaywalkers.

But the Mayor's Broadway Promenade was upstaged by the Mayor himself yesterday when he described, in Las Vegas, his vision of windmills on top of skyscrapers and out at sea, generating power for the city. There is a tendency to think the Mayor is nuts. Doesn't windpower depend on wind? And isn't wind inconstant? Then again windmills would bring New Amsterdam back to its Dutch origins. The wind farms would be off the coast of Brooklyn and Queens—Breezy Point will be up in arms—but supposedly they could be far enough offshore to be invisible to a person who is near-sighted.

Let us be kind and say that this new scheme of the Mayor's is nothing if not quixotic and wish him luck.

Screeching Halt

I tuned in to Fox news at ten o'clock on Monday night to find out the fate of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan. I meant to write sooner (it's Wednesday as I write, and I'm at the airport), but I've had a busy time of it. I got back from Provincetown on Monday, and as I was heading down the F.D.R. at a little before six I was mindful of the possibility that this might be a historic last free entry into Manhattan below Sixtieth Street. I was beginning to believe that I could stay under the radar of congestion pricing. Afer all, I am one of those extremely lucky people who are already in Manhattan below Sixtieth Street. Surely I could arrange to enter before 6 A.M. or after 6 P.M. If I didn't want to pay eight dollars to come down the F.D.R. at twenty to six, I could stop and dawdle, and possibly end up paying twenty dollars for a lobster somewhere in the Bronx.

I dropped off some friends, then headed to my neighborhood, planning at first to go straight to my block, put a quarter in the parking meter (I had one), go upstairs for three more quarters, and worry about the car in the morning. But of course I had to just see if there was a spot on K Street, four blocks away. There was not, so I drove down to where my car had been so conveniently towed to last Thursday in the predawn hours and found a spot there. But the Muni Meter was in effect until 7, and once more I had only a single quarter, so I couldn't buy even fifteen minutes to run to St. Dunkin Donuts for change.

So I started her up again and went on my rounds. If I had stayed there, I would have had to be at the car and looking for a spot at 9 A.M. anyway. And the spot I eventually found was good till 11:30 on Thursday: perfect.

I felt a little sorry for Mayor Bloomberg, though, whose legacy now, it turns out, will be only for eliminating smoking in bars. But it is not as if this were the last chance for congestion pricing. What I think the problem was was this deadline for receiving federal funds. I know it was a lot of money, but there is nothing that makes me more suspicious than a deadline. It's like when you're at a resort in Mexico and they are selling time shares and tell you that a certain price is good only until breakfast tomorrow. Do they really expect you to rush into a lifelong financial commitment with that kind of threat? If congestion pricing is going to come to Manhattan, it should be considered with no pressure, on its merits.

While I was going down the F.D.R. I had a kind of aural hallucination of the money being totted up on the civic cash register as the cars piled in--ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching . . . It would have been an obscene amount. And I was going against traffic.

[Typed on Friday in Vernazza, Cinque Terre.]

Early Signs

In my madness, rather than double park today, I left the block where I had an 8:30-10 spot and drove to a secret place where you have to move your car only once a week. Sadly, this tactic failed to produce a miracle, so I parked temporarily in a 9:30-11 spot, took a walk by the river, bought coffee on the street for 65 cents (all I had on me was 70 cents), and miscalculated how long it would take me to return to the car and get in position for a legal 10 o’clock spot. I got back at 9:20; the Broom had passed, and on the first block I cruised, there was nothing. As I turned the corner to the next block, I found myself touching the evil-eye worrybeads that hang from my rearview mirror. There is nothing like needing a parking spot to make me fall back on religion.

This block had filled up, too, but there was a space I thought I could fit into between a pickup truck and a Nissan Maxima. I hopped out to ask the driver of the pickup truck, east of a fire hydrant, if he would mind moving back a little. “I’m already at the yellow line,” he said. I checked and reported to him that he had two feet. Then I approached the Nissan, hoping it didn’t belong to that young woman whose license plate I accidentally crumpled last week. No, this was an older woman, on her cell phone, who fumbled to roll down her window—she had to turn the key in the ignition first; damn those automatic windows—and who was very agreeable.

However, as I am extremely careful, for the moment, not to bump the cars of my fellow-parkers, I got wedged halfway into the spot and couldn’t complete the maneuver. I left the car there, half in, half out, and ran ahead to the two cars in front of the Nissan and asked their drivers to please pull up a little. After what seemed like an eternity, all three cars complied, and I slipped into my spot. It was 9:23.

The rearview mirror offered the best view today: the familiar neighborhood storefronts, their signs reversed, receding into the distance: copy shop, TV repair, Chinese laundry, barbershop, parking lot with concertina wire. A black Mitsubishi Eclipse passed, went around the block and reappeared in the rearview, its driver entreating the person on the other side of the fire hydrant to give him an inch. I recognized the Eclipse owner as one of the waiters at the Greek diner on the corner. He was in that spot so snug that you couldn’t have dropped a slice of toast between the two cars.

There was a front-page article in today’s Times following up on the Mayor’s plan to rescind parking placards for employees of various city agencies (here). I was not surprised to see it, because I seem to recall that something was going to happen in March. I did not find much new in the article, except that some of the placards out there belong to ex-Mayors Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani (it must be hard, once you’ve enjoyed full mayoral parking privileges, to go back to being an ordinary citizen). The biggest whiners are auxiliary police, who volunteer and don’t think it’s fair that they should have to pay to park if they are not getting paid to patrol. Plus, they have to buy their own doughnuts.

So far, the only sign of parking reform in my neighborhood is the appearance of pedestals for Muni Meters. The Muni Meters, which are electrified (they dug up the sidewalk to lay wire for them), have yet to be installed, but when they are, they will make street parking more expensive and more sophisticated. They will also make the old parking meters obsolete.

I wonder what will become of the old parking meters. Will they chop them off at street level and dump them in the ocean? Create an artificial reef? Or donate them to some country where the parking technology is a generation or two behind—say, Cuba? And what will happen to the people who collect the quarters from the parking meters? I have seen them on the street, mostly black guys, trundling buckets with special cylindrical spouts that clamp on to the meters to receive the quarters. Actually, it doesn't look like a bad job for someone who likes to be outside and not have anyone looking over his shoulder. Wouldn't hurt to have a fetish for small change. The Muni Meters will take coins, and issue little slips to lay on your dashboard. So perhaps we needn't worry yet about the decline of the parking meter revenue collector.

Let It Snow

Today is George Washington’s real birthday, and Mother Nature has intervened, along with Mayor Bloomberg, to arrange a snow day and make me feel both patriotic and prescient for sticking with my Tuesday-Friday spot earlier in the week. The news flash came last night, during the debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in Austin, Texas: “Alternate Side Parking Rules Suspended on Friday, February 22, 2008 for Snow Removal.” I did not watch the debate (for some reason, I couldn’t find it in the TV listings), but I did my civic duty by reading all about it in today’s Times, from seven-thirty to eight this morning, in the comfort of my living room instead of in the front seat of the unheated Eclair.

Already the Times reporters are filing stories from Cleveland, where next Tuesday’s climactic debate is scheduled to take place. There was a story today by Sean D. Hamill about a “peace palace” (here), where people can be trained in transcendental meditation, being built in Parma, a suburb of Cleveland. Building peace palaces all over the world was a project of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose death, earlier this month, I failed to register. As it happens, my family has its ancestral roots in Parma: my great-grandfather’s farm was there, on land that has long since been subdivided into a classic blue-collar suburb. (An official of Parma was quoted in the Times as saying, "What do you mean a 'Maharishi Peace Palace?' We're Parma, Ohio. We eat pirogis and drink draft beer.") Parmatown was my first mall, and in its parking lot I learned to drive, twice (once an automatic, with my father beside me in the Plymouth Fury II; later a stick shift, thanks to a very tolerant friend, in a crash course before auditioning for a job driving a milk truck—which I got!).

In another curious convergence of family and politics, my sibling Baby Dee is playing Austin tonight, in the wake of the Democratic debate. This is slightly better timing than her gig in Boston on the night of the Super Bowl. She is playing Cleveland a week from today, on February 29th—Leap Year Day—after the debate but before the all-important Ohio primary. Too bad Dennis Kucinich did not exploit the fact that he’s related to Baby Dee and lock up her celebrity endorsement. He might still be in the running. The peace candidate could have gone straight from a demonstration of yogic flying in Parma (also his ancestral land, of course) to Dee’s show in the Tavern of the Beachland Ballroom, in Cleveland Heights, where he could have requested Dee’s only overtly political song, “My Very Own Police Force,” about Rudy Giuliani. I think to myself (with apologies to Louis Armstrong), What a wonderful flaky world that would be.

Giants vs. Kucinich

I can’t believe alternate side parking wasn’t suspended today in honor of the New York Giants' win in the Super Bowl. It’s also primary day, and Mardi Gras—three reasons to grant dispensation to the parking public. As for cleaning the streets, surely all the trucks will be deployed to sweep up downtown after the ticker-tape parade today. I can only conclude from this that Mayor Bloomberg has decided not to make a rogue's run for President. What a groundswell of support he would have had for his campaign, from football fans to car owners and Catholics, if not for this gross political miscalculation.

Speaking of which, it was with great sadness that I went to the polls today to cast my vote in the Democratic Primary. Yes, it’s true: in recent years I have freely admitted that Dennis Kucinich is my cousin. Well, he is my father’s cousin. My father’s cousin’s son, to be precise, and, to be a little hazier, the cousin was a double cousin: her father was my father’s father’s brother, and her mother was my father’s mother’s sister. Follow? I don’t think it was incest, but perhaps if the families had made a wider search for mates, Dennis would have had a bigger family and therefore more votes. Then again he wouldn’t have been born.

How often do you get to vote for your cousin for President? I thought the answer was "Every four years for as long as he lives." Imagine my consternation when, on January 25th, the news that he was withdrawing from the race, in order to concentrate on being reelected to Congress from his district in Ohio, was reported in the New York Times. Yes, the New York Times was finally covering the Kucinich campaign! It gave him a full half column, with a tiny photograph, on page A23. It was as if they had condescended to review Baby Dee’s new CD, “Safe Inside the Day,” or sent a critic to her recent show at Joe’s Pub. Astonishing! A breakthrough!

Family loyalty aside, what other candidate has his whole own category of jokes? Dennis Kucinich is right up there with light bulbs and Polish jokes. I thought for a while of collecting Kucinich jokes, but was overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. Here is David Letterman, on December 12, 2006: “Dennis Kucinich announced he was a candidate for President in 2008.” Beat. “In a related story, a tree fell in the forest.”

I’ve never met this distant cousin, and he doesn't look like any relative I know. When he appeared on Letterman last summer, I stared and stared, trying, if that's the right word, to detect some family resemblance. Was that nose a little like my grandmother’s, his great-aunt's? Did those ears look slightly familiar? The hair and eyebrows are way off—he must have gotten those from his father's side. My own joke was that he is the black sheep of the family: a teetotalling vegan in a clan of beefeating beer-drinkers.

Dennis Kucinich was still on the ballot today, and I was strongly tempted. I bent down the little lever in his favor. But then I bent it up again. Giants win.

Year's First Suspension

My favorite block did not yield any spots when I got back from Rockaway last night, so I stopped at home to unload some things and was tempted to leave the car right on my block, where I would have had to move it at 7:30 this morning. But then I remembered the weather report and realized that if I went back out and found a spot, and alternate side was later suspended, I wouldn't have to fool with the car at all today. I found a spot on my street, four blocks away (the long east/west kind), behind an elderly couple who had also just found their spot and were endlessly fussing over their car—opening the trunk, closing the trunk, opening the passenger's-side door, opening the trunk again—before tucking it in for the night. It seemed very unusual for two such generous spots to be available on the same block as the car-rental agency. It is a Monday-Thursday 9:30-11 A.M. spot, which I would have to leave by 9 if I hoped to find a spot that would be good at 10.

I recently subscribed to the city's Alternate Side Parking Transportation Update, which I heartily recommend, because when I happened to check my e-mail at 7 Sunday night, there was a bulletin from the DOT (Department of Transportation): alternate side would be suspended Monday for snow removal. All night I waited for the pitter-patter of raindrops to shush into snow. I am still waiting. The six inches of snow failed to materialize, but the Mayor did not go back on his promise.

Maybe it's global warming.

Cold Snap

Quick before it thaws, I have to complain about the cold. It was freezing in the car yesterday morning. My breath and the steam from my coffee fogged up the windshield, and I finally turned on the defrost (but not the engine). When I arrived, there was a delivery of MX 19 Uprights in progress. MX 19 Uprights are not pianos or military ordnance but construction equipment: mobile scaffolds the size of fork-lift trucks, with a platform on an accordion-like riser. They were bright blue, and a man was backing them down the street one at a time into a garage-size elevator across the street.

Amazingly, there was a spot available behind me, and it was still available at 7:35, after the broom came. Just goes to show that you should always check your favorite spots, because you never know. Across the street, on the Tuesday-Friday side, was a black pickup truck whose owner, like me, had found his spot on New Year’s Day. I know because as I was waiting sedately in the right-hand lane for the light to change so that I could make a right turn and look for a spot on this highly desirable block, the black pickup, coming from the opposite direction, made a squealing left-hand turn before the light had changed and, in a maneuver worthy of a stunt-car driver, zipped into a spot that I hadn't even seen yet. I felt like an amateur.

After the broom passed, I relocated to be last in line, leaving the free spot in front of me. (It's an advantage to be first or last in line, because you can't get parked in.) Now this huge candy-apple-red Dodge van with New Jersey license plates lucks onto the spot, but the guy (and it does turn out to be a guy) can’t parallel park to save his life. He begins his approach from way out in the middle of the street, instead of the standard foot or so away from the car in front of the spot. It’s torture to watch, and I repent my end-space strategy, but now there’s a garbage truck double-parked next to me and I can’t move until he leaves. As soon as the garbageman has squeezed back into his cab and driven away, I pull up into the space I started out in, leaving myself a little room in front, because this van is gigantic and this guy from New Jersey is clearly challenged, and he manages to back into the space behind me.

'Tis the season of Christmas trees in the garbage. The guy in front of me, in a black Chevy pickup, leaves his vehicle, but only to get coffee. For a minute, I thought he knew something I didn’t know—something about the new, “simplified” Alternate Side Parking rules. Could it be? Would they have the sense? Surely it’s clear that after the street sweeper has gone by, there’s no further need for us to be sitting in our cars, freezing our asses off. It would just be a matter of the cops' knowing that the sweepers had gone by. I suppose this would be difficult to coordinate, block by block, but if the cop can’t tell that the street is cleaner, maybe there was no point in the sweeper’s having come anyway.

Meanwhile, the Mayor and the Department of Transportation have bigger things on their minds. The Times reported today that as part of the congestion-pricing plan some city employees will be losing their parking permits. These permits, regarded as a perk of the job, have been fairly easy to obtain since the advent of the color Xerox machine—I even had one once (it expired, and anyway I was afraid to use it). If the Mayor thinks that the police are going to give up the privilege of parking their private cars near the precinct house (and anywhere they damn well please, because who is going to issue a ticket to a fellow police officer?), he is in for a surprise. The cops are probably chuckling over their doughnuts even as I write. The Times quotes Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, sounding not so benevolent: "I think we're going to get into all kinds of issues if they start saying cops can't have parking places."

If I had such a permit—and I have a good friend, not a cop, who does—and it was taken away from me, I would be aghast. I would go on strike. I would be tempted to quit my job. I would definitely be part of the problem, not the solution. So I guess it's just as well that I don't.

Honk if you like Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s birthday is crowned with glory. I took the car to New England for the weekend, and went from there directly to Rockaway, avoiding traffic headed for a Mets game at Shea Stadium: the Throgs Neck Bridge to the Clearview Expressway to the Grand Central Parkway to the Van Wyck Expressway to the Belt Parkway (the only segment that was a little crowded) to Cross Bay Boulevard, and over Jamaica Bay and out to Fort Tilden for the first ever Literary Festival in Rockaway. It was a masterly display of foresight and map reading (south, east, south, west, south, west, south), if I do say so myself. I drove back into the city in the evening with several pounds of books (a temporary branch of Borders in Rockaway drove me slightly mad) and had just reset my odometer and checked my watch to measure my cruising time when I found a spot all the way at the end of my second-favorite parking block.

Come seven-thirty this morning, I am still on a good block but I have to admit that it is not the best spot. When you’re down at the end of the block like this and the street cleaner comes, you can’t pull over to the other side of the street, because you’ve run out of street to pull over to. You have to go around the block and will in all probability get squeezed out. At 7:41 he comes, honking. In an amazing stroke of luck, the car behind me doesn’t move, and I am able to turn the corner—a left turn, into the curb lane, against oncoming traffic (but only briefly!)—and then reverse into position after the street cleaner clears the corner. Yes! My father, while teaching me to drive, once said, “Women cannot drive in reverse.” So this is one of the uses of defiance.

I got back into position just as a police car pulled up and the officer started writing a ticket for the delinquent car in back of me. I was half afraid he was going to give me a ticket for going the wrong way on a one-way street (but only briefly!). Farther up the block, a black Mustang from Wyoming with a piece of sheet metal forming a flap on its hood—a real cowboy car—is not so much parked as abandoned, behind a big rental truck. Neither of them moved, and they both got tickets.

Over the weekend, the Mayor introduced his plan to institute congestion pricing in Manhattan, an expression that I had never heard until a few months ago. Here’s the quote from today’s Times: “Under the plan, the city would charge $8 for cars and $21 for commercial trucks that enter Manhattan below 86th Street from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays. The charge would be $4 for drivers within Manhattan, and several exemptions would apply. No one would be charged on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway. There would be no charge for moving cars to comply with alternate side parking, and there would be no charge for taxis.”

I have been waiting for the Mayor to lower the boom, but it seems as if he really does have a soft spot for alternate side parkers. I think I could work around congestion pricing.

Doomed

Uh-oh.

While I was enjoying my free parking spot yesterday, the Mayor’s aides were no doubt directing his attention to a piece on the Times Op-Ed page by Donald Shoup, the professor of parking studies at U.C.L.A. O Times, how could you? What Shoup says makes so much sense that I don’t dare repeat it here. Once the Mayor gets wind of Shoupism, it could put an end to alternate-side parking culture forever.

Let me say right up front that I feel guilty as hell for having a car in New York City. I don’t need it, it takes up valuable real estate, it pollutes the environment, and I squander hours a week either sitting in the car or plotting where to sit in the car next. But I can’t help it. I need the car to get out of the city; I adore occupying valuable real estate; I’m not the worst polluter around (the car is, after all, a Honda, and I don’t drive it to work in Times Square); and I’ve spent some very happy hours daydreaming in it.

Once, when I was still fresh in New York, my brother and I were in the back seat of a car driven by a man whom a friend of our older brother had met in a Learning Annex cooking class. In short, he was not our kind. The car was not a Cadillac, but neither was it a Hyundai. As we cruised down Macdougal Street, looking for a parking spot, he took a sudden right into a parking garage, and we lunged forward and screamed, “No! Not in there!” as if he were driving into the mouth of Hell. The horror!

Maybe it’s inbred. (Would a Gypsy pay for parking? I don’t think so.) Shoup cites George Constanza, of “Seinfeld,” who said, “My father never paid for parking, my mother, my brother, nobody. It’s like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?”

Makes sense to me.

Since the Mayor's terrible error in not suspending alternate-side parking when there was a winter storm, he has seemed really afraid of offending the parking public. He was suspending alternate-side right and left, east and west, if there was so much as a flurry. We can only hope that he didn't read the paper yesterday.