Parking Lot Memories

I enjoyed a nice dinner with my friends in the suburbs earlier this week. One of them was kind enough to pick me up at the train station where I used to park while I was commuting. 

The town has undergone dramatic changes over the last few years. I was quite surprised; I barely recognized the place.

The big parking lot where I used to park every morning is gone. A bunch of high-rise apartment buildings occupy the space now. As my friend and I drove past, I reminisced about the crazy adventure that I’ve had on that lot over the years. 

One time, I came back from a trip in the aftermath of a big snowstorm. My car was accessible, but the cars parked along the side of the lot were buried to the roof by the snowplows. The storm dropped a lot of heavy, wet snow, but the plows compressed it and gave it a hard, concrete-like texture. 

This one poor guy was having a terrible time trying to get his car out the temporary igloo that the town had built for him. I worked with another passerby to help dig the guy out. Between the three of us, we had only one small shovel, so we spent a while digging and moving the brick-like snow by hand. Then we had to push the car with all of our might, as the guy made several attempts to get to get out of the space.

Another time, while I was vacationing in California, I heard that the East Coast was going to be hit by a late-season blizzard. I remembered what had happened to the guy whose car was buried by the plows. I didn’t want to come back to an ice-bound car, so I called the parking authority and ask them if anyone knew a neighborhood kid who would shovel me out out for fifty bucks. They said that there was a guy who would do it, so I made arrangements to pay for the shoveling service when I got back. 

I guess the guy shoveled my car out, but I couldn’t verify it, because this was April. The weather had change by the time I got back, and all of the snow had melted. I still paid the guy fifty bucks. A deal is a deal. It was worth it to have the peace of mind that I would actually be able to get home when I needed to.

The most bizarre incident of all was coming back one evening and finding that my car had been hit by another vehicle. This wasn’t just a fender bender. It was a major collision. Somehow, they managed to hit the side of my car with enough force to knock it most of the way into the next parking space. 

The car took a lot of damage. The doors on the driver’s were destroyed. One of the front axles was broken as were several windows and lights. I thought the cars was totalled, but the insurance company decided that it would cost less to fix it than replace it.

To this day, I have trouble imagining the circumstances that led to that collision. It’s hard to picture another vehicle hitting my car from that angle in the location where it was parked. It wasn’t parked near an entrance. They couldn’t have driven straight in from the street. They would have had to have made a turn or two, and they would have had less than a hundred feet to accelerate. 

Yet apparently, that’s what they did. It seems as though it must have been a deliberate act. I have no idea why anyone would want to hit my Honda. Maybe my car happened to look like someone else’s. Maybe it was just a case of mistaken i-DENT-ity.