The fact that parking spaces on Manhattan streets are as rare as empty seats on subway trains during rush hours has been long established. Motorists have been known to search high and low–oftentimes begged, borrowed and killed–for a chance to park within a reasonable distance from their destination. Even within the luxurious dream-within-a-dream realm of the city’s Upper West Side, it doesn’t come easy for those ritzy travelers wishing to exercise their God-given hopes to park their cars.
A startling instance of the trials and palpitations of parking on the streets of the aforementioned Upper West Side appears in the New York Times Metropolitan Diary . After a grueling day of visiting her mother in the hospital, a woman was returning to her Central Park West apartment. As if by magic, she caught sight of a space right in front of her apartment building. Just as she positioned herself and her car for the usually daunting task of parallel parking, she looked in the rearview mirror and saw something far too unsettling for the eyes of 21st century mortals to look upon: a horse and buggy directly behind her.
The standard gag when attempting to pull into a parking space in NYC is, that by an amazing stroke of coincidence, another car suddenly appears with designs on the very same spot. Rather than “opportunistic” car blocking her path, the woman found this quaint means of equine transport instead, hot and static on her tail. Naturally, since her car was stopped, she expected the buggy to go around her; this didn’t happen.
Both drivers, that of car and that of carriage, gazed at one another with that look of competitive incredulity we New Yorkers know so well; a look that seems to say “I’ll fight you for it.” To make matters worse, while this gazing refrain was in progress, the horse began taking an interest in the woman’s car. Horror of everlasting horrors, this quite distant ancestor of Seabiscuit and Mister Ed, began licking her car with horse-powered abandon. From trunk to back window, the woman’s car became a delectable morsel for the leisurely and unmovable horse, its saliva creating a film over her children’s college decals.
The woman did what any self-respecting motorist would do:
“I jammed the car into park, opened the car door and screamed at the driver, “What am I supposed to do now?”
The buggy’s driver response was typical to the busy streets of this crowded metropolis:
“It’s a green light, lady. Go!”
(That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.)
But there are 8 million stories in the Naked City, and this one, involving urbane motorist, smart aleck buggy driver and epicurean equine, was just another in an eternal list of punch lines.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=dfbb97d1-c382-4a14-90c4-82f6c202cea4)
Sphere: Related Content
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
