Before & After

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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