the perfect space

M arrives from Boston around three.  I go out to help her unload.  As I approach her car, she suddenly screeches, “There’s a space.”  Three cars down from the front of my building she finds, without looking, the perfect parking spot.

Now she doesn’t want to move her car.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem of having a car in the city without paying for a garage.  Once you find a spot, you never want to leave it.

The rest of the afternoon and evening is planned around moving or not moving the car.

M needs to go to her son Sam’s new apartment.  She's brought him a carload full of stuff. Big stuff in big boxes.  But what will happen to the space?  She thinks she can bribe a doorman.  She doesn’t know NYC well enough to know that he’d be risking his life if he said to a would-be parker,  “No, sorry, you can’t park here; this space is taken.”

We even contemplate taking a cab, or calling Uber, though we doubt all the stuff can fit in a normal-sized trunk.  Not to mention the fact that a cab/Uber would cost about the same as  overnight parking in a garage.

But we are lucky; the parking gods are on our side.  My doorman hears us talking and says, “Hey, I’m leaving at 8 and I have a spot right across the street.”  So now our plans revolve around being back from Sam's to claim the new space at 8.

This presents a new set of challenges.

Do we go to Sam’s first and have dinner later?  No, that would be too late.  

So we find ourselves eating a very early dinner.  We go to Maya, an upscale Mexican place.  It is packed.  At least the bar area is.  And that makes the restaurant unpleasantly loud. It's impossible to have a conversation.  

While there, M gets a text from Sam; he  can't be home before 9 to let us in.  

At some point, we consider and dismiss the idea of borrowing an orange cone we see on the street and using it to reserve our space.  Not neighborly.  And not legal.

We leave around 9 for Sam’s apartment in the East Village. We make a few trips to unload M's double-parked car, and have an ice-cream after at the Big Gay Ice-Cream Shop, deserving of its line.

We get back to the UES around 11:30.  “What do you think we should do?” M asks.  “Well, let’s try my block first,” I respond. 

And there, exactly two cars in front of our original perfect space, is yet another perfect space.  Thank-you parking gods, wherever you are.