ouch parking.

In America, we can’t really fit our cars into our cities. I mean, for a country that opted for extensive interstates over a truly useful public transportation system, we should at least be able to park. But sometimes we can’t.

I’m certain that this is at least half of why people here like suburbs. Because you can park. You can park at your house. You can (except during the 4-5 weeks surrounding Christmas) park at shopping venues, or at the doctor’s office.

Actually, I’m going to take back that part about the doctor’s office. Gradually, over the past decade and a half, most of our docs (whatever their specialty) have moved to the medical complex surrounding the local hospital, and you do have to allow an extra 15 minutes for one of those vertigo-inducing spiral climbs through a parking garage in order to reach one of the 2.5 remaining spots in the open air at the very top.

But the real fun comes when we either must drive or wish to drive ourselves into Baltimore, Annapolis, or Washington D.C. Each of which exemplifies the practical dissonance created when children of Eisenhower’s interstate system attempt to utilize colonial era towns. It’s like trying to link Newtonian mechanics to quantum theory. It doesn’t compute, and the String theory of transportation is decades from perfection.

Did I mention the time, years ago, that Jeff and I stopped in Frederick, MD in the rain and--anxious to avoid an excessive wetting--we scrounged the crevices of our minivan for any coins our children might have tossed about? We needed to feed the meter you see, but there was nothing to be found but a Chuck E Cheese token. Don’t tell anyone, but we discovered that (at least in about 1995) Frederick, Maryland parking meters accepted Chuck E Cheese tokens. Yes, apparently I have mentioned this before.

The thing is, having gobs of coins on hand for meters just rarely happens in 2011, and at least municipalities are trying to adapt. I kind of like the system where you go to one of those “Pay Here” automatons, feed it a credit card, and take the receipt it spits out to place on your dashboard. At least I like it if the boxes aren’t all broken.

Yesterday we encountered something new. Well, at least new to me. We were headed into D.C. for Jeff’s neurology appointment, about to exhaust every one of the 105 minutes I’d allotted to get there. I decided not to even try the parking garage at Georgetown University Hospital. It fills by 10 am, but you don’t know until you’ve reached the 7th level below the river Styx. So I went for neighborhood parallel parking and--amazingly--nabbed one right away. But I had only 2 quarters. Then I noticed the ad, right on the meter: Call a certain number from your mobile phone and pay by credit card! The trouble was, I had 4 minutes until appointment time, and about 37 numbers to input in order to give the dial-a-robot the license plate number, my phone number, my credit card number, and probably a couple other vitals which have slipped my mind in the angst. And then, in attempting to light my iPhone screen back up as it helpfully tried to spare its battery power, I hit enough erroneous keys that the whole process defaulted me to a human operator who had to talk me through the entire process again. So that was fun.

But we got inside where Dr. Turner confirmed that Jeff’s version of Alzheimer’s is in fact Posterior Cortical Atrophy. And, after discerning that Jeff could not put his right thumb on his left ear, or do anything else that involved crossing his midline, the doc exacted reassurance from me that Jeff no longer drives. No, I said. That was an easy call I made several years ago. Now all the parking fun is mine and mine alone.