On a recent trip to the City of Brotherly Love (Hays, Kansas*), I had occasion to solidify the stereotypical view of tourists as well meaning but essentially inane. (When opportunity knocks…)
On my way to a work conference I had to navigate narrow streets in an unfamiliar city and locate a parking garage within walking distance of the convention center, and I had managed to do this with perfect ease, as if I spent every day making sure I was turning the right way down one-way streets and careening out of the way of crazed taxi-cab drivers.
But soon enough it came time to find my way back to the car, get out of the garage, and drive back to where I was staying out of the city. Somewhere between the time I left my car in the morning and returned to it later that afternoon, the car moved. It was not where I left it. At least, not on the level where I was sure I had left it. In the spot where it should have been, according to my razor-sharp spatial memory, was the garage exit. One needs one’s car to exit the garage, so clearly my car was not on this level.
Brilliantly deducing that my car must have somehow moved one level up, I started to backtrack to the stairs. This movement caught the attention of the security guard, who was in a lull between helping drivers make their way through the exit, and he called me over to see why I appeared to be vacillating between level 1a and level 2a. He asked to see my parking ticket. I guessed this was so he could see where I was parked and help me get there by saying, “SEE, IT SAYS 2E, YOU’RE PARKED IN 2E” in a loud voice, with upward hand gestures, to compensate for my fragility of mind.
This request to see my parking ticket prompted immediate evasive maneuvers on the part of the ticket in my purse, and it took me some moments to locate it. The guard was patient, but clearly already thinking about calling for backup, or perhaps considering skipping that step all together and calling the nearest mental facility directly to report an escaped patient. He even asked my name—this favored the reporting directly option—and told me his, probably to put me at ease in case I was suspicious of people who ask my name.
Finally, the ticket located and inspected by the guard, and making no move as of yet for his phone or walked talkie, he directed me up the ramp—so I could be hit by a car?—to the next level.
When I returned, in my car, I hoped fervently that the guard would have miraculously disappeared, but no miracle was forthcoming. I nodded to him, got in line, and just about when it was my turn to pay, the parking ticket, bent on mischief and feeling grumpy at having been thwarted by its earlier attempts to elude my grasp, now slipped from my hand and disappeared into the abyss between the seat and the console.
Now, had I been driving the Hero’s car, this charade would have ended right there, and the guard would have had no further reason to suspect me of any deficiency in mental functioning. In the Hero’s car, objects that fall into this abyss are easily retrieved by the driver. My car, for reasons known only to its creators, mysteriously allows passage down this crevasse for objects the size of Miami, but not a human hand.
I knew from experience that the only hope to coax the ticket to return was to get out of the car, crawl in the back seat, stuff myself under the driver's seat, and beg. But I would not do this while still in the pay lane. I have some dignity. So I pulled into the only spot at hand, marked Parking Garage Superintendent Only, hoped fervently that the esteemed parking garage superintendent did not work on weekends, and crawled in the back seat to commence my begging for the parking ticket to reveal itself.
I am sure that the guard, at this point, figured he had no choice but to call me in to somebody. “Yeah, Michael here. This driver can't find her car, then claims her ticket ‘disappeared.’ Says her name is ‘Holly’—sounds kind of suspicious, ya know? Can I get some backup here? All we need is another wacko driving the city streets.”
But once the ticket was safely handed over to the man ensconced in the ticket booth, this wacko did make it onto the streets. Had I known that my trials to that point were only the beginning of a long and tortuous journey home—the GPS insisted I go this way to the expressway but this way was closed because of construction, and it simply could not conceive of another way to get me onto the expressway, and I was forced to rely on my own wits to find another route, and it was well past dinnertime before my wits succeeded—I may not have minded had the parking garage officials caught up with me and taken me to a nice, warm place. Maybe they would have even offered me milk and chocolate chip cookies.
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* Not really.
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