Fancy Meeting You Here

“Things change, people change, hairstyles change, interest rates fluctuate.”

From the movie Top Secret.

I know things change. I also know that the older I get, the less I like it, but I’m trying. It’s easy to accept changes when those changes make sense, for instance requiring first and third base coaches in baseball to wear helmets. It didn’t have an effect on the game or my enjoyment of it, and it protected those men from possible serious injury should a frozen rope catch them unawares.

But when those changes don’t make sense, accepting and participating in them proves a challenge. Right now there is a fundamental change taking place in the very root of the social fabric of our great state. California, perhaps more than any other state, is bound and forever associated with the automobile. We have freeways built for no other reason than to get to other freeways, which then lead to more freeways. We have drive through lanes for everything from burgers to coffee. Lately, I’ve been using the drive through at the Sonic around the corner to get a bag of ice. (Yes drive-in movies are gone, but that is really just a prelude to the inevitable disappearance of movie theaters of all kinds). Businesses that provide an affordable service or product can still go under for no other reason than they didn’t have adequate parking, and nothing is considered more evil to the God given right to go where I want, when I want, in my car than the parking meter. The car is king in the state where the oldest road is called El Camino Real (the King’s Highway).

The change I’m talking about is called Fancy Parking. Unlike Fancy Catsup, you can actually see a difference between Fancy Parking and regular parking. Fancy Parking is simply parking backwards, or nose out if you will. What makes it “fancy” is beyond my understanding even though there are dozens of websites devoted to it. The idea behind putting your car, truck, or whatever in butt first is that it makes it easier to pull out when it’s time to leave. Apparently, there has been this consortium of parkers who have had so much trouble using their mirrors and the act of looking over their shoulder to get out of a parking spot, that Fancy Parking became necessary. Now they can get into their car after a visit to the doctor, the movies (while they’re still around), or the mall and just drive away. No more pinning their hopes on that unreliable mirror technology and no more craning and twisting their necks to determine whether or not a flaming gasoline truck is careening through the parking lot.

But aren’t we ignoring the Lincoln Navigator in the room? If these folks are having trouble backing their car from the small parking spot, into the relatively large parking lot, are they not going to have more trouble when doing the opposite? If you can’t use mirrors or turning your head to maneuver from a small space to a large one, how adept are you going to be using those same tools to move from a large space into a small one? To put it another way, being a foot or two off when you slide your car out into the lane is nearly meaningless, but do the opposite and now someone has your blue car’s paint on his white car’s door and vice versa.

I fear I’m tilting at windmills here in my effort to remove, “…so foul a brood from off the face of the earth” as Mr. Cervantes said so eloquently in Don Quixote. Visit any large parking lot today and think about what it looked like 5 years ago and you get a good idea about how many have partaken of the Kool-Aid. At work, we are required to park company vehicles in the Fancy manner. We are also required to put at orange cone at the front and rear bumper. The cones makes sense, they are to force the driver to walk around his van or truck before driving off, so as to make sure there are not pets, children or priceless Fabergé eggs that might get crushed upon his departure. But parking backwards? It has no benefits that I can see as I suggested above.

I will fight the change. I will spit out the foul Black Cherry punch, but I can foresee a day when a cop will leave a ticket under my windshield wiper for parking incorrectly. At least he’ll have to walk a little further to do it since my windshield will be at the deep end of the parking spot.

P.S. Maybe someday I’ll write a piece on another change that took place years ago. As it turns out, you’re not supposed to put two spaces between sentences anymore. Who knew?