July 10, 2002

Traffic the pits during festive week

By GARRET LEIVA
Herald editor
       Admittedly, traffic can be the pits during this festive week in Traverse City. While my Jeep might overheat idling in line, I keep my cool knowing parking spot 9 awaits.
      While others wander the earth like Coleridge's ancient mariner searching for a parking spot, I steer right toward designated lot nirvana. With a half million people descending on the National Cherry Festival, a striped piece of paved terra firma becomes priceless. No meter feeding for this guy.
      However, this time of year you can't take saved parking spots for granted; even with chain-link and threatening tow-away signs. These deterrents are mere idle threats to the driver wearing his Goodyears bald circling the block with a minivan full of screaming kids. It is amazing the number of newspaper staffers in our lot these days commuting from Indiana and Ohio.
      As in most situations, one person's woe is another's windfall. Quick-thinking capitalists are cashing in on parking conundrums throughout the downtown area. Right now some guy has paid his child's college tuition to Harvard by squeezing SUVs five abreast in his back alley driveway. Of course, that guy's 10-year-old just sold enough bottled water to buy a Porsche.
      While some might scoff at a stranger's parking predicament, I feel pity. After all, I've walked a mile in those shoes - or at least several city blocks in Chicago. There is no worse feeling of despair than arriving at your destination but you can't find a place to pull over:
      "Look kids, it's the Grand Canyon ... next stop home. Who wants to play 'I Spy' again?"
      Complicating matters is the driver who insists on finding the primo parking spot. This type will circle the mall parking lot a half-hour searching for the yellow-striped Holy Grail. Never mind the painfully obvious hypocrisy of not wanting to walk 40 extra steps to the sporting goods store to buy a treadmill.
      Now I've been told my grandfather Leiva would burn up a tank of gas searching for the perfect parking spot. This mindset took some moxie considering he lived in New York. After all, this is the city where comedians make a living telling jokes like the following: "You see cars driving in New York all hours of the night. It's like musical chairs except everybody sat down around 1964."
      Of course, there might have been a few more chairs back in the 1940s.
      Growing up in a town with no stoplights, parking was never an issue. Put another way, there is no such thing as double parking in a gravel lot. Nor was there metered parking - luckily for the coffee clutch at Joe's Place. The only tough parking spots were bars on Saturday night and churches Sunday morning.
      Schmaltzy as it sounds, in order to practice parallel parking during student driver training, we had to travel 30 miles to another town. At least we only had to drive out to First Curve to go parking.
      Several years ago there was a "Seinfeld" episode devoted to problematic parking. George Costanza and a fellow New Yorker battled wills and bumpers over the age-old parking procedure: back in or head first. In the end, both men vowed not to give up his rightful space.
      Thankfully, I won't face any such parking quandaries this week. Pathetic as it sounds, I only have to take 98 steps from driver's seat to desk chair - or roughly 57 seconds without air conditioning. A thought that helps me stay cool as I wait behind a parade of flashing brake lights.
      Life isn't always a bowlful of cherries, but spot 9 insures it isn't the pits.
      Grand Traverse Herald editor Garret Leiva can be reached at 933-1416 or e-mail gleiva@gtherald.com