Let me tell you about our neighborhood game that I call Parking Grab.
If ever it becomes a board game, Parker Brothers of Monopoly fame would be a natural to distribute it.
Until then, we must content ourselves with live-action Parking Grab.
There is no limit on players. The goal is to occupy the most on-street parking places with the fewest number of cars.
To spice up things, as in gymnastics or diving, a degree-of-difficulty factor can be introduced by factoring which households park the fewest percentage of their cars in driveways, garages or other off-street spaces.
For a long time I got my entertainment as a spectator. Now I’ve devolved into full-fledged participant.
This game was popular when I first moved into this neighborhood more than three decades back. Dedicated players included the people to my right, who were outraged if someone parked in “their” spot.
These are the same people who were put off when I asked them to move their car a tad so I could park a moving van and commence moving into my house.
Across the street at the time was a family with a wife I called Ann of a Thousand Parking Spaces. They had a garage, driveway and a pulloff spot in the alley behind the house. But Ann was particularly attracted to on-street parking, especially in the winter when someone had shoveled out their vehicle, left to run an errand and returned to find Ann’s car plunked in the spot.
But Ann and family moved, other players either died, moved away or lost interest and Parking Grab went on hiatus.
The game has experienced a rebirth in the past five years or so. I credit the people to my left.
The man of the house, at least that would be his assigned birth gender, accumulated vehicles through the years. A two-car garage was erected, but as far as I can tell, none of the family vehicles ever has been inside it.
A car could be parked along the side of the garage that faces the alley. A couple of cars could be parked in a gravel pulloff area beside it. But the family believes it has dibs on the street parking, too, of any number of spaces they should desire. Woe be to those who do not recognize this claim.
This became a problem one day a few years back when my son came to visit with his family and parked on the street. The neighbor raced out cursing at my son, a fact I was made aware of when one granddaughter burst into our house to get me.
My son’s sin? He’d parked on the street. IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE!!!!!!!!. It was raining fairly heavily at the time, so I went onto the porch to see what was up. The neighbor’s wife ran into my yard to scream at me.
I found it all amusing since she was getting drenched and I was under my porch roof.
The reaction of that family, when it was pointed out street parking was first-come, first-served, was to make sure to park all four of their vehicles (three cars and one sad blue truck) on the street for an extended period of time, often two of them in front of my house. When one vehicle left, others were pulled in ways to preserve the spot.
A side benefit of all this was convincing my wife that I was correct in long ago branding the folks as petty morons.
Fast forward to 2021/22 and I have accumulated five vehicles, although I’d never let one of my Mustangs parked unattended on the street. They spend most of their time in the garage, either the one at my house, or one I rent that is nearby.
But I do enjoy parking two of my wife’s cars in front of our house, using the old parking grab technique of letting half a car length between the front of Car No. 1 and a neighbor’s driveway and half a car length between Car No. 2 and Car No 1.
This creates great angst for the people two houses up, who have a rule that none of their visitors can park in front of their house.
It also plays havoc with the long list of poor drivers on this street who cannot parallel park and when their traditional resting spots required that rather simplistic skill, they were fond of seeking out the sometimes open spots in front of my house.
Those spots seldom are open these days.
Just yesterday, when I lent wife’s Car No. 2 to my son, a neighbor kid from across the street rushed out to plant his SUV in the vacated spot. It has not yet moved again. I think if I opened the door and listened, I could hear the victory celebration.
On my walk today, I saw one parking-impaired sort had pulled into a spot that the people two houses down consider their property. As I came back from the walk, that car had moved and the husband of the aggrieved family was rushing to clean off the wife’s car parked in an alley pulloff spot, which he promptly started and drove around the block to plant it in the vacated parking spot in front of his house.
The game has spread, like Omicron, to the people in the next block. Again while walking – last week — I saw a woman in a car pull up in front of a house and honk the horn vigorously. A half-dressed man rushed out, jumped into an SUV, and pulled out as she slid into the space.
He drove to the back of the property and pulled into a garage. Apparently he’d been a placeholder.
As mentioned earlier, I used to get my kicks just observing the Parking Grab phenomenon, recalling the saying of a high school friend to describe the players: Little things amuse little minds.
Alas, my mind now has shrunk, too, as I delight in playing the Parking Grab game my neighbors have taught me. Currently I’m indulging the idea of buying a couple of beater cars, just to have more pieces with which to play the game.
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