A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

meter maid

"lovely rita, meter maid,
nothing can come between us."

You guessed wrong if you thought education was I-town's biggest industry.
It's parking.

Parking revenue contributes more to the City's coffers than Cornell does.
You can't park within a 10 block radius of the Commons without encountering one of those spiffy lolipop sentinels, sitting bolt upright, demanding coins of the realm. Why don't they come up with Ithaca Hours that work in parking meters?

Sometimes you're cruising downtown looking for a spot to park and it seems that you have to head out to Lansing to find all day, free parking. It's a shame. Like you'd want to spend more time in lovely downtown Ithaca, soaking up the ambience, the culture, the radiance of the boutiques, developing your weltanschauung but you only get 2 free hours parking on weekdays and they're tearing up half the parking spots and, at any given moment, your vehicle is being stalked by someone who looks like Smokey the Bear's human companion.

The meter maids in Ithaca look like park rangers. Cheap pun.

Yeah, they wear these cute little outfits with earthy colors and Canadian Mountie caps. Unfortunately some of the lovely madchen that flesh out the vast army of highly trained meter maids don't shave their legs. What a comedown when you're looking for romance. How Ithaca.

It's disconcerting on a hot Summer weekday when you have to trek 10 blocks to
pick up stamps or visit your parole officer or spend 50 minutes with your shrink combating the depression that appeared the last time you visited downtown. Why are there parking meters on North Geneva St? The only thing you find on North Genva St. are funeral homes and chiropractors. Isn't that a little like making people pay to suffer? You've just lost a parent, a relative, your best friend or suffer from excruciating back pain and you have to fumble in your pocket for a quarter? What's that all about?

When you finally step foot on the Commons after walking all the way from Newfield, your first thought is - wby did I bother? Half the stores are empty. You can't find anywhere in town to buy a postcard to send back to the folks who are babysitting your car in Newfield. You can't get a prescription filled or buy a pack of cigarettes or a newspaper unless you walk another three blocks. Sure you can pop into a used bookstore and find a copy of Sartre's No Exit or that other cheery novel, Nausea, but you can't buy a hamburger for less than $7.50. Not that you'd want to be seen eating a hamburger in downtown Ithaca for fear of being picketed by animal rights activists.

The one thing they should have downtown to make the trip worthwhile is a Parking Museum.

What a great idea! Ez can't believe that no one has thought of it yet.

The Tompkins County Museum of Parking History.

Home of the first parking meter. Neo-Gothic parking meters. Art deco parking meters. Parking meters that take wooden nickles. War-time parking meters with bellicose images of Uncle Sam hawking war bonds, kicking the crap out of Huns, Japs and Nazi's, International parking meters that accept yen, rubles and pesos. Futuristic parking meters for cars that land and take off vertically, no more parallel parking, hooray.

A rogues gallery of famous parking ticket scofflaws just like Madame T's wax museum. Medieval devices used to torture and punish scofflaws, a word, incidentally coined in the good ole' USA back in the 1920's. Parking meters used by Ted Bundy, Son of Sam and Jeffrey Dahmer while they were rounding up victims.

Now that would be worthwhile and interesting. You could lose yourself for a couple of hours in a place like that. Come out, find a parking ticket on your car and a pair of hairy legs sauntering off in the distance.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 10:42 AM