SMALL CHANGE
I must have wronged the meter maid somehow, at some point. That time I threw a dying mouse out the window, maybe it landed in her baby carriage. Maybe that would explain all the parking tickets. On several occasions she gave me four in one day, all for my infractions in the same space – my space. I claimed it for my own – and still maintain my claim – because of its location: ten steps from my front door. For some reason, parkers used to come from miles around to park in front of my building, so I treasured that space whenever I was lucky enough to get it. I cared about it and sometimes I imagined it cared about me too, though I knew a parking space couldn’t really care about anything.
The meter maid didn’t care either, about me or for me. I once offered to discuss the parking tickets with her over lunch – just trying to be polite, maybe reason with her. She told me I had something in my hair.
“You’re looking all…matted,” she said, screwing up her face. “Why don’t you clean yourself up and move that car of yours once in a while?”
Then she stalked off down the rainy sidewalk to ruin someone else’s day, leaving me with another wet ticket tucked under my windshield wiper. The dye they use in ticket envelopes is not weatherproof, I can tell you. It bleeds out as if the tickets were marking their territory. Whenever my wipers smeared streaks of orange across the windshield, I saw it as a symbol of her contempt.
I wished some Good Samaritan would put extra minutes on the meter if I were running late. The Good Samaritan never came. I couldn’t wake up in time to put money in the meter; I wasn’t sleeping enough back then and my doctor said I should take whatever rest I could get, even if it interfered with my morning routine. When I got home from work in the evenings, I couldn’t wait the meter out until 7:00 because I usually had to go to the bathroom after the commute. My physical needs came before the rules of parking. I never had the opportunity to state these arguments in court, but I like to think they would’ve held weight. I feared legal action over these tickets, sure – SWAT teams, searchlights, truncheons. I wanted to be on the right side of the law, but I knew if I started paying the tickets, even in monthly installments, it would run me into the poor house. I was afraid if I paid one, they’d make me pay all of them. So I just couldn’t pay. Don’t get me wrong, I was never a stingy person. Whenever I saw a take-a-penny leave-a-penny tray, I left as many pennies as I could. I was a leave-a-penny kind of guy.
But one day, in a convenience store, I had to take one. The penny I happened to take was in abominable shape; someone had ground it down to Abe’s hairline. I considered putting it back in the penny trough, thinking the cashier wouldn’t even accept it. But I wondered how it got ground down like that. So I kept it.
I took the penny on a Monday and it lived in my pocket for five business days. I’d pinch and rub the little shelf coming down on Abe. The shelf reminded me of a guillotine. I speculated about the penny’s origins for long stretches of the workday and savored those daydreaming hours. I now like to think it was a motorcycle accident: some hotshot kid taking a spill, asphalt eating through his jeans, his wallet, my penny.
That Friday when I got home from work, I decided to give it a try. I put my penny in the meter. I knew the meter tolerated the existence of pennies, but didn’t accept them as currency. Well, I knew this penny would be different somehow. It had a history. I dropped the penny right in. I looked at the readout: no time added, twelve minutes left. I looked at my watch. Two minutes later, there were still twelve minutes left. That’s how I stopped time.
What I didn’t count on was the fact that I could never move my car. I examined the position of the tires, knowing that if they ever rolled again the space would be lost. The tires were flattening already, if only imperceptibly. As the gravity of this hit me, the permanence of the situation, a memory overpowered me. I thought of Gilley’s.
In the little city where I grew up there was a vehicle a lot like my own, a hotdog stand called Gilley’s. Gilley served dogs to tourists in the daytime and to drunken locals once the bars closed. He parked his stand, this hulking train caboose, on Market Street. Gilley had the nerve to just leave it there, taking up two and a half spaces. He got tickets every day for twenty some-odd years, eventually racking up an enormous debt to the city. But the citizenry couldn’t allow their hotdog stand to be boarded up because there was nowhere else to get a late night snack on the stumble home. So they collected donations to pay off Gilley’s tickets. Then they had a parade. They bore his caboose down Market Street on a float done up with bunting, Gilley waving intermittently from the throne they had fashioned for him. After the parade, a crane hoisted the caboose off the float and set it down in an unassuming lot behind the then-new public parking facility where, to my knowledge, it still stands.
I don’t know why I didn’t remember Gilley when I was in the thick of my ticket problem. I guess the heat of battle can blind you to the lessons of history. Even so, I couldn’t glean a clear kernel of wisdom from Gilley’s story. All I got was the realization that I would never have a parade. I quickly consoled myself with the fact that my little victory was a personal one: cheering crowd preferable, but ultimately unnecessary.
My car’s stagnation has rewarded me in other ways. I ride a bicycle to work now and I’m becoming leaner, fitter. I store my briefcase and other business papers in the trunk – it’s nice to keep work separate from home. I end up storing other things in there too, like non-perishable snacks and a toothbrush. Sometimes I find myself in the backseat for a nap. It’s more comfortable than you might think. If I lost it all…could I live in there? Maybe.
There is the issue of trash. Wads of rotten leaves skirt my bumpers. And in winter my car becomes encased in a great mogul of snow. I holler at the children who use my car as a sledding hill. Sometimes the car alarm goes off from their sledding, but the snow muffles it very effectively. I can still hear it though, especially if I’m snoozing in the backseat when it goes off.
But never mind these inconveniences; it’s still worth it to me to see the meter maid pass by day after day and note the remaining twelve minutes on the meter. I watch her closely as she walks. All the punitive gadgets on her belt give her a sluggish gait. Or maybe it’s just her hips. They’re so wide that sometimes I imagine they house machinery, some gears inside that propel her along inexorably from meter to meter. Every once in a while the machinery goes haywire and she’ll show up on a Sunday. In such instances I want to tell her, “Go home! It’s your day off, and the meter’s too!” But seeing her locked in a staring contest with my meter – it satisfies me beyond words. So usually I just wave. And sometimes I picture that half-dead mouse twitching around on her baby’s lap.
Well, let me come clean. I don’t think I hit anyone, let alone the meter maid’s child, when I threw a mouse out the window. I don’t actually know if she has a baby. But from those hips I can only assume she has borne children and it irks me that her child might someday become a little meter maiden, a new foe someone else will have to vanquish. Where’s the next ground-down penny going to come from?
I’m nervous about the supply of ground-down pennies, regular pennies too. By the time the meter maiden is old enough to start giving out tickets, pennies might not even exist anymore. I think about them melting in a foundry somewhere. You know they’ll round up all the imperfect pennies first: the shaved ones, the chipped ones, the ones blackened and oxidized by the years, the unreadable ones. Those pennies don’t count anymore. You let them linger under your bureau when they roll out of reach. Then, when it comes time to vacuum, you suck them up into the dust bag without a moment’s hesitation. But save the flawed ones next time. They too make change.
