MONDAY DIARY: ALMOST EXCRUSIATINGLY TRUE STORIES: PARKING IN THE DRIVEWAY

There is something magical about a priest’s garage door. It attracts people like bees are attracted to flowers, like moths to light bulbs, like altar servers to matches. Every parish with which I have been associated, every priest I speak with has the same story: for some unfathomable reason people like to park RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR GARAGE DOORS.

 

  Just recently I asked a guy, “What on earth made you think parking here was a good idea?” He said, “I wasn’t going to be here long.” Of course, this was after I had spent 20 minutes trying to find him on our 8 acre campus because I had to get to an appointment and was now going to be late. It’s like people who like to talk in doorways. “Here is a constricted area where people need to get through. I think I’ll stop someone here and carry on a conversation.” I don’t understand.

 

The apron to the rectory driveway is in ridiculously horrible condition. Even the 80 year old priest who lived here begged me, “Please, Father, let Fr. Ted fix this for you.” (He always spoke of himself in the third person, which for him was oddly endearing.)

I have standing orders to leave it permanently in third world status just to dissuade people from using the driveway as a convenient place to dump their cars.  There is tons of parking on our block, but I will admit that this spot is very convenient.  But not when it becomes a used car lot.

 

ANYWAY . . .  you may remember that I recently got a new-to-me car.  The windows are incredibly small and it is a difficult car to see out of.  I thought it was just me, but my cousin drove it other day and made a similar comment so now I don't just simply feel old.

 

It does not have a back up camera (though it really probably should) but it does make a "BEEP BEEP BEEP" sound if you get close to anything while backing up.  The closer you get to an object, the more quickly it beeps.

"Brilliant" you might think.  But no amount of genius can best my profound incompetency.  As I back out of my garage, the car always starts beeping because I am heading for a bush so I have learned to ignore it much to the chagrin of a seminarian who was living with us this summer and took to parking his car behind the garages.

I must say he was a really good Joe about it.  "Wow," he said, "The car is symmetrical again."

Another way in which my capacity for stupidity outstrips technology's ability to compensate is when I am initially backing up out of the garage.  The bay doors are EXTREMELY small and so the alarms go off right away and until the trunk makes it out of the garage.

So I've learned to ignore that part too.

Yes, someone with a pickup truck parked right up against the garages.  Just the bed of the truck was behind my bay and so I could not see it through the tiny rear window and ignoring the beeping because I thought it was telling me about the door opening, I smashed into the truck.

 

What goes around come around.  Apparently there were signs in the driveway telling people not to park there but they were taken down because they seemed pastorally insensitive and put offish (as opposed to having your car destroyed.)  But maybe the forepastors knew what they were doing.