Window Seat

I would enjoy coming to this spot to sit even if I didn’t have to be with the car. Two cars ahead of me is a car very similar to mine, a gray Nissan Sentra, with Florida vanity plates and a stethoscope hanging from the rearview mirror. (Can this be the car belonging to the guy with the recumbent bicycle?) Up ahead of him is a lady with a red Honda who parks here all the time. She looks to be retired and carries a big old library book.

Well. That was rude. At 8:48, the Sanitation Police came and made us move. Florida Man got a ticket because there was no one in his car. He seems to have a long scratch or a hairline fracture on his windshield. (In the reshuffling following the street sweeper, I moved up to the spot right behind him.) I, too, have acquired a crack in my windshield. I figure it happened during the ice storm in Rockaway—some freak ice pellet must have bounced off the windshield in such a way as to leave a tiny divot, and a boomerang-shaped crack sprang out of it. And this while parked in a driveway in a lovely low-crime neighborhood. Clearly it was an Act of God, or Mother Nature, not vandalism. Woe is me, as my mother would say. Woe, woe is me. I wonder if I can get the insurance company to pay for it.

Here is my window seat at the Alhambra (but for now you may have to view it sideways):