Parking Fines

When I get back to my car after our first session with our new couples’ therapist, I have a parking ticket.I have parked on the street, in downtown Fort Wayne, where there are actually quite a lot of car parks. There is not, however, a lot of clarity as to who has the right to park in said car parks, so I almost always opt to park on the street.This is not, I should add, my first parking ticket. When I lived in Dublin, I would run – nay, sprint – to my car to avoid going over on my paid parking. I’d fallen afoul of the clampers more than once, and paid the (literal) price; by the time I moved to the US, I had a healthy phobia of overstaying my parking. Anchor Baby is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.But in downtown Fort Wayne, where parking never costs more than $2, a parking ticket is $10. If I overstay my parking, I just think… oh well. I’d be paying that for 10 minutes in the Trinity Street Car Park in Dublin city centre. What’s a tenner for the convenience of parking right around the corner from where I’m going, and not having to go back to my car to feed the meter? (This, I know, is an incredibly privileged position to take, and possibly also a very stupid one, coming from someone who’s in an astonishing amount of debt. BUT LET’S NOT DWELL ON THAT.) The thing is, on this balmy, loud – you don’t know loud until you’ve walked around Fort Wayne in cicada season – August evening, I know I paid my parking, feeding the meter until it told me I’d reached the limit, not of payment but of paid-parking-time. That is to say, after 5pm in Fort Wayne, on-street parking is free. I should not have been fined; I did everything I was supposed to do! To add insult to injury, my parking fine is $20, not $10; I appear to have broken some kind of rule I don’t understand, at least judging by the ticket, which says “OPPOSITE SIDE VIOLATION”. What does this mean, I wonder, looking around to see if there are any signs on the opposite side of the road that tell me I shouldn’t be parking here. This “looking around” is a learned behaviour, not an innate one; on a previous occasion, I received a parking ticket (an affordable $10 that time) for parking opposite a work site, where there were, to be fair, multiple signs telling people that, while the work was going on, they couldn’t park on this street.Sometimes I feel as though I walk aound with blinkers on, seeing only the things I want to see (attractive men and my phone screen, mostly), ignoring everything that doesn’t suit or would inconvenience me, in even the most minor of ways. It is, let me tell you, quite a nice way to live.(This skill of mine will come back to haunt us shortly.)I wonder about why I got this parking ticket for approximately 7 seconds, then I tuck it away in my handbag, file it under “things to worry about later” (suddenly wondering if I should create a Note on my phone of “things to worry about later”, because filing them away in my mental filing cabinet is… less useful than you’d think), and drive home.In my defense, I have a lot to think about. I went into our first couples therapy appointment feeling cautiously optimistic about what we could achieve if we gained some better communication skills, but I’ve emerged feeling stressed and anxious, as though the divide between our modes of engaging with the world, and one another, is perhaps more of a chasm than a crack, and might never be bridged. So it’s fair to say that the parking ticket is, truly, the least of my worries. I tell Brandin about it when I get home. He – a man who has, to my knowledge, never got a parking ticket in his life – rolls his eyes, asks, “how does this keep happening you?” I tell him, honestly, that I have no idea. “I paid my parking up to 5pm!” I protest. I show him the ticket; he reads through it. “Did you park opposite a work site?” he asks – proof that I’m not the only one who had this question. “Not to my knowledge?!” I say, genuinely baffled. We move on to other things: dinner, bathtime, bedtime. The usual routine. The parking ticket is back in my handbag. I do not, in fact, worry about it later. I forget it exists.Until, of course, the following week, when I drive downtown for our therapy appointment and drive on to the same street I parked on last week (a creature of habit). I decide to turn on to another street this time, not trusting the space I occupied last week. It’s free, again, but who’s to say I wouldn’t get another ticket this week?! I still don’t know why I got last week’s ticket! As I exit my car and lock the door (with the key, because the fob ran out of battery about a year ago and – ADHD things, apparently – I haven’t got around to replacing it), I spot a police officer a few feet from me, in the direction I’m walking (so I have to stroll past him), and I decide to get over my general fear of the police and ask him, as he will surely know, why I incurred this extortionate parking fine.As I approach, I notice that he’s using some kind of brush to clean up his utility-slash-gun-belt thing. This action is comforting to me somehow. Look at him there, polishing up his little uniform. This does not seem like an intimidating man. (Is it misogynistic to feel comforted by the sight of a man doing a little in-public tidying up?!)“Excuse me?” I say. I can’t bring myself to say “sir” or “officer”; I’m too Irish for that. “Yes, ma’am?” he replies. (NOT Irish.) “Could you help me figure out why I got a parking ticket, please?” I ask him. “Absolutely!” he says. He is very enthusiastic about this project.I tell him about my situation. I parked over here – I point – last week. I paid up to 5pm. When I got back to my car (I do not tell him about couples therapy, although I feel like it, because maybe he’d feel sorry for me if I did), I had a parking ticket. I can’t figure out why! He looks confused. That is a valid parking space. It has a meter (I fed the meter). “Do you have the parking ticket on you?” he asks. I start to dig around in my ludicrously capacious handbag. “Maybe?” I tell him. He smiles indulgently at me, a silly woman with a too-big bag. I emerge, mere moments later, triumphant, with the ticket in hand. I feel like Grandpa Joe when he finds the golden ticket. Only short of doing a wee jig. “Let me see this,” he says, and begins to read through the ticket slowly, painstakingly, taking each line in turn. I bet he’s the kind of man who walks up and down every aisle in the supermarket, I think (but do not say). “Ah,” he says. (By jove, I think he’s got it!) “See here?” He points at the line – OPPOSITE SIDE VIOLATION – and nods. There. You see? I don’t see. I must look as flummoxed as I feel, because he then does me the courtesy of explaining it. “You parked facing the wrong way, on the opposite side of the road,” he says. The flummoxation does not clear from my visage, obviously, as he tries again. “You have to park facing the same direction as the traffic on that side of the road.”Anchor Baby is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.It’s as though the scene before us – cars, lots of them, parked up and down in rows – has gone from black and white to technicolour. I look around. I see that each and every car – bar one (ahem) – is parked in the exact same direction as the traffic would be going on that side of the road. How have I never noticed this before?! Is this… is this a trick? An early (or late) April Fool’s? Is this for real?! He hands me back the ticket. He’s done with me now. Mystery solved. I hesitate. “So are you telling me…” I start, slowly, then turn to point at my car, “that, if that was my car, parked right there” (the only car, you can imagine, facing the opposite direction to the traffic on the same side as it is parked) “I should probably flip it around?” He laughs again, then. “Yes,” he says. “You probably should.” When I get back to my car, I think about driving around the block, and coming back up in the opposite direction, rather than doing a painstaking six-point turn here and there, something that could, I worry, also be against the law.Then, despite the fact that he’s been very nice; he cares about his appearance; he helped solve my mystery (take that, Starlee Kine), I think to myself, ACAB, and also, I’ll be damned if I’m going to go out of my way to appease him, and I get into my car (unlock it with the key, which takes longer than I’d like it to), start the engine, leave my seatbelt off (ACAB! ACAB!) and turn it around right there in the middle of the street. It’s around about turn number four that I can see over to where he was standing, polishing, and that it dawns on me that he’s walked away, unconcerned with however many more traffic violations I’m about to indulge in. (This stings.) What also stings is that I’ve lived here for six years now, and never once have I noticed that all of the cars parked on the side of the road are facing the same direction. Furthermore, I’ve never ever thought to myself, oh, I should probably do the same. If nothing else, I’m no sheep. Except when it comes to fashion trends. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rosemarymaccabe.substack.com/subscribe