Tuesday, October 06, 2009

What did I do/ can you save me
Walking up the road, a smooth and inconspicuous walk, always keeping an eye out for some hackneyed acquaintance behind every street corner—someone I met in a bar the other night, or an ancient figure I attended high school with, who vigorously wants to sell me a life insurance policy, “Ground Hog’s Day”-style.

Down Hamilton and across Dove, a small black car is sizing up an impossibly small parking space, between two cars. I know this dilemma, live in this neighborhood, and experience it routinely (although, actually, I don’t have a job and am at leisure, like my seventy year-old neighbors, to move my car to either side of the street at twelve pm, when the parking limitations dissolve, giving a cordial wave to the geriatric set for effect). I realize this car has no chance of fitting into the tiny parking space, and offer to the driver my very choice parking spot which I will be momentarily leaving from, ten feet up the road. “Oh, really??” the driver of this compact automobile asks me, his face a veritable cherry of jubilee. I get into my car, and as I do, he issues one more demonstration of gratitude, as if I’m giving him thirty dollars and guiding him to the nearest liquor store. “Thanks again, sir!” he shouts from his window, as I hold up my hand in the air, which could be a gesture that says, 'you’re welcome' or may very well mean 'fuck you.'

It is not long before I am wondering about the implications of this nice gesture of giver-of-parking-spaces that I have just added to my cosmic resume and issued to the universe. Will something awesome happen to me in return for offering up my choice parking spot? I am only driving across town to go to a doctors appointment and realize that I probably will not find a similar parking space when I return, beating out new york state employees, who are charged at the most basic levels of DNA, veritably programmed to find parking spaces in my neighborhood, like Darwinistic champs. But I also realize, simultaneously, that self-conscious acts of altruism may not get you anywhere, trying to switch off this impulse of self-reflection, as though some giver of favorable karma is monitoring my thoughts. But ah, well, I realize: It’s probably too late. I’ve probably already been caught, which the very existence of a doctor’s appointment may go the distance to prove.

Into the doctor’s office, the mundane interior of the hallway giving way, through the coarse glass of the waiting room door, to the mundanity of the waiting room itself. A small, mousy-looking woman looks fearfully at me as I approach the reception desk and tell her my name. She flips through a pile of  folders before finding a billowy manila folder which contains my chart and tells me to sit. There’s always some weird vibe in here, I realize, pervading the waiting area like a pestilent gas, noxiously filling the whole entire doctor’s office, and prolonging your wait into some obnoxious infinitum of time. I have some weird skin rash, but some of these people, I conjecture, are here for less benign-seeming things.

At the edge of the waiting room, a flannel-shirted man sits, tapping his work boot nervously, not reading a magazine, and just staring straight ahead. I wonder what he’s here for? I think to myself. He has knocked off at the construction sight for the morning, maybe, and instead of pounding nails or moving large pieces of steel which will one day comprise portions of a state employee parking garage, he has ended up here, instead (which, in a point of fact kind of way, would pretty much objectively sign him up for a lifetime of good karma, disproving my whole theory-of-parking spaces completely. But he has obviously not been building favorable things, it would seem, among which the doler of karma has included state employee parking garages). He was shaving one week ago, maybe, and discovered a patch of coarse and bumpy skin. And now he has ended up here, at the Terminus Point, waiting the wait, sans Time Magazine.

A woman exits the physician’s room before turning back to ask the doctor a question, and as she does the flannelled man issues to no one in particular, still staring ahead. “Sometimes I’d just rather not know,” he says into the air, as people look up at him from magazines, and then straight back down again, into TV Guide articles about the latest reality TV series which they will take in later tonight. “Maybe it’s just easier that way.”

Momentarily, I am called in to see the physician, tossing aside my own magazine, and simultaneously prolonging the flannelled guy’s wait for another few moments of not knowing. The doctor comes in shortly, and then I am pardoned, back out into the world. “Have a nice day,” she says cheerfully to me. “Okay,” I tell her, “you, too.”

Back in the car, driving ten minutes back to my neighborhood, I can’t help but think of the flannel guy, and hope everything turns out OK for him (as per the dictates of parking spaces created and cosmic influence). Maybe he is doing cartwheels in the doctor’s office right now, post-diagnosis. Maybe this is part of some grand scheme-of-things plan which doesn’t exist, and he will receive a new ‘lease’ on life, which he will forget about after ten minutes of formulating how he is going to live life differently, from that moment on. Who could say what is going to happen?

Back down the block, in the car. I know I will have to drive for twenty-five minutes, looking for a parking space. Up the block at a crawl, everybody is parked on the odd side of the street, because of the Monday parking restriction, which allows for the stoic street sweep, cleaning up the detritus of another week's-worth of life. Inching forward, and nearing my own apartment dwelling, where there, directly in front of the building appears, with rays of shine—astonishing even myself—a parking space directly in front of my door, which I lick my lips before nestling my car into.

Things are looking up, it seems. It’s a small recompense, I guess, but sometimes you have to take what is given, like a kiss on the mouth; pennies on a dollar, grit-encrusted copper coins which you will later deposit into a candy machine before blithely making off into the day with a sugary gumball to pop into your mouth, chewing contentedly as you avoid all ninety degree angles.

3 comments:

Blogger of La Mancha said...

Glad to see you blogging again. I really enjoyed this post, particularly the observation about the street sweep. It reminds of a Jim Carrol line.

Sare said...

mooooore!

tora said...

thank you !
great blog !