Parking in a Parallel Universe

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 25, 2010.

Parking is a problem in West Chester.

All right, all right, I hear you. You scoff, make that "pffft" sound with your mouth, and say to yourself aloud, "Tell me something I don't know!"

Well, OK, I will. I'll bet you did not know that that the medieval military leader Ivan the Russian defended Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria once conquered by Alexander the Great, in a four-month siege by the East Roman Empire, or Byzantine, army, only to find out that the, apparently, clueless citizens of Plovdiv let the Byzantines traipse right on into the city while he was away on other business without so much as a "how do you do."

So now that we have that out of the way, I will explain that the problem with parking in West Chester is not so much a quantity problem as a quality problem. Parking spaces are a dime a dozen in West Chester if you look for them, which those of us who live in the borough spend most of our waking hours doing, that is when we are not complaining about the imminent loss of another historic building. (At last count the borough was down to 5,678 historic buildings, which means if we lose one a year we'll be right out of historic buildings about the same time they unwrap all those cryogenically frozen folks in that lab out in New Mexico. Unless, of course, the world has been incinerated by a stray asteroid, in which case no one will care, except A. Roy Smith.)

No, there are always places to park in the borough, and believe me I have found them -- although some of the places I have found to park are not what you would technically call legal parking spaces, which I why I lead the National League in visits to District Court 15-1-01 at the Chester County Justice Center.

The question is not where you park, but how you park.

This became evident to me one evening last summer as I sat on the front porch at Central Headquarters on West Miner Street. (We call it that in honor of Ol' Gimlet Eye, Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler, the Fighting Quaker, who used to live across the street.) Kathleen, our Electic Landlady, noticed that someone had parked their car so badly that the passenger side tires were virtually in the neighbor's front living room. "If these folks tried to pull that kind of parking job in Manhattan, they'd be towed to the East River," she exclaimed.

It struck me that we in West Chester judge those who visit our hometown on the basis of how well they park. Can you swing that sedan into a spot on the street in one swift, sure move that doesn't slow traffic down for more than a few seconds? Then you have what we like. Do you attempt the parallel moves required to squeeze that SUV into a space the size of an ice chest without a care in the world? Come right on in and stay awhile. Put those tires exactly four inches from the curb and leave no more, no less, than three feet between you and the cars parked to your front and rear? Please, sir or madam, you go first.

But spend half an hour going back and forth, trying again and again to fit your SmartCar into a parking space the size of the Queen Elizabeth II, bumping into the fellow in back so many times that the car alarm shrieks on high, and you will have earned our everlasting enmity. "Go back to Exton where they have acres of open fields of diagonal parking space, you rube," we sneer to ourselves (knowing that you outlanders could be packing serious weaponry.) "Time to go back to driving school and learn what the words 'final reverse turn' mean here in the real world," we say, shaking our heads in disgust.

I have long advocated that those of us who park well should be given some recognition by the borough for our efforts and skill. Every perfect parking job on the street would be rewarded by the Borough Department of Parking with a colorful token, like those 12-step chips that have become the accessory of choice for members of the rock band Aerosmith. Collect a certain number of tokens and you could exchange them for the fines and costs accrued when parking too close to an intersection or for more time than allotted on the meter. It's a simple act that could result in such good will, I don't see how it could miss.

I also don't see how you would know that since they changed their mascot from the Huron to the Eagle in 1991, the Eastern Michigan Eagles Football Team has won less than 28 percent of their games. But I'm telling you, just so you know.

Feeling The Inner Wa

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 18, 2010

You gotta love the Wa.

No, I am not speaking of the Japanese word, “wa,” which loosely translated -- and frankly that is the only way I am capable of translating Japanese -- means something like “the experience of calmness or reflection”, or “a spirit of tranquility and peace.” Those are nice thoughts and all, but it’s not what I am referring to.

Nor am I referring to Wa, the city in northern Ghana that has been settled by the Lobi and Dagaare people for many a year now. I am certain that I would find something to like if I happened to find myself visiting Wa, perhaps even the local foodstuff known in Ghana as sao and in English as T-Zed, even though I have not normally been known to ask for a fresh hot steaming bowl of corn flour porridge at mealtime.

You probably already guess that I am also not proposing that you, and by that I mean I, gotta love the Thai unit of measurement, the wa, equal to about two meters or one fathom, if you are counting, although I wholeheartedly embrace the verb form of the word, which in Thai means to stretch out one’s arm to both sides.

Although frankly, looking at the above I wonder if what I mean when I say “you gotta love the Wa” actually does take into account a lot of what is involved in those above concepts – tranquility, food, and open arms.

I am talking specifically about the Wawa convenience store chain that many of us have come to rely on for so many of our daily needs and desires. Normally, the editors here at the Daily Local News like to caution me against taking stands one way or another on corporate interests, and I generally agree with them. But when it comes to the Wa, sometimes the normal rules just don’t apply.

The Wa made headlines this past week because of a singular moment in its company history. I speak, of course, on the moment when the one-billionth-transaction fee free ATM withdrawal was completed. If they ever track down the date when that transaction was completed, I believe that it behooves us as a country to declare it a regional holiday, or at least commemorate it as we would the day that the Phils won the World’s Series in 2008. A moment of pure joy could not be as easily pinpointed.

The notion that a corporation of the size and complexity of Wawa – whose stores are ubiquitous in southeastern Pennsylvania but also found in New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, would offer a service for free that other entities have decided is worth charging ever increasing amounts for is nothing short of stunning. If you fly these days, the airlines will charge you extra is you have a mustache or beard, or have eaten a full meal in the last six hours. There is a popular satellite dish television network that apparently charges people who call their customer service line, at the tune of $5 a ring. Don’t get me started on companies that make you pay extra for completing your billing payments over the Internet.

I have never understood the concept of a service fee at ATMs, first encountering it in Brooklyn in the mid-1990s when my friend Sondra told me I would have to pay to get money from the machine. “What for?” I wondered. “Service fee,” she explained, being a law school graduate and having more of a handle on these things. “But there’s no person working here,” I complained. “I’m the one doing the work, pushing the buttons. It’s like a waitress charging me a fee for filling my tray at the serve yourself buffet!”

Some banks, local ones mostly, held out on charging fees to non-account holders, and then just chucked that idea like a baseball umpire chucking out a scuffed baseball. Soon, every ATM asked you whether you would accept the fee, which I suppose was polite enough, but frankly if you said no, you were left with no further options.

Except at the Wa. No fees, same money. I had a friend visit me from Minnesota last year and we stopped to get a copy of the newspaper at a Wawa on Route 202 south of West Chester. Never having heard of Wawa before, my friend made light of the name, saying it sounded like something a moody child would say. Then she stopped to get some cash at the ATM. I think I heard her say when she put those crisp bills in her pocketbook, “Ya gotta love it.”

Take Me Home Again

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 4, 2010

Some thoughts on old homes this Easter Sunday.

My mother spent the majority of her childhood in the house that her grandfather had built when he emigrated from Sweden. It was the sort of comfortable house with a screen-in porch on the second floor where you could take a pleasant nap on a summer day and smell the fresh cut grass from the lawns outside.

It had doors that looked like walls and led to dark closets that connected bedrooms from hallways, and which one could easily imagine as secret compartments when one was of an age to think of such things. It had a storage cellar where cans of vegetables and cans of fruit and other food were kept in a cool and dry place.

It was also a place that my mother returned to over and over again after she had grown up and moved away. Until a decade before her death, a member of her family lived in that house and she never had to ask permission to step inside. After everyone died, she never went back.

A woman I know in the Chester County Justice Center, Deb Randall, today will give her mother a special Easter present. She will take her mother to a house that her mother grew up in as a child, but which is now occupied by apartment dwellers on West Miner Street. The house happens to be a few doors from when I now live, and I would love to hear Deb's mother tell me what the neighborhood was like when she lived there. Were the neighbors friendly? Did the traffic jam up on weekday nights? It made me think how exciting and odd it can be to be returning to a place you called home but which had been taken away from you, in essence, by the presence of strangers.

One day a man who knew the baseball legend Dominic DiMaggio found himself in San Francisco with a mobile phone. By chance, he made his way to the home in the North Beach section of the city and found the address of the house where Dominic and his baseball playing brothers, including Hall of Famer Joe and not-so-Hall of Famer Vince, grew up, sharing bedrooms and cramped quarters.

The man, a Boston broadcaster named Dick Flavin, knocked on the door and invited himself in, then called Dominic at his home in Massachusetts and got a guided tour of the place. How strange it must have been for DiMaggio to describe a map of a home he had not lived in for decades to a friend who was walking through it. How odd for Flavin to have the immediacy of the home where his friend had grown up described over a telephone.

When I was 5, the Rellahan family spent a year in Dublin, Ireland, where my father had taken a fellowship to teach chemistry at Dublin College. The house we lived on was on a suburban street with the lovely name of Wasdale Grove, in the neighborhood of Terenure, near Bushy Park. The children had a little street gang that talked endlessly about righting other gangs from the streets nearby but which never did. My best friend and I would sometimes put our left arms inside our sweaters and knock on neighbors' doors, begging for coins because we had lost an arm in an accident.

When I was older, I visited the street and knocked on the front door of the house after finding the neighborhood on the Dublin bus route map. An older woman answered the door and looked at me quizzically for a moment as I handed her a business card and explained I was visiting from the United States and hoped to see the house where I celebrated my sixth birthday.

"Oh, you must be the American professor's son," the woman answered. She was the daughter of the couple who leased us the home as they travelled the world for the Irish diplomatic service. She lived there with her brother, and remembered our family. I was allowed to climb the stairs and see the bedroom where I awoke each day of our stay, to see the coal bin where we stored fuel that kept us warm, and to sit in the living room where I had my birthday party. She served me tea and biscuits.

I don't know if the folks who will hear a knock at their door today and see Deb Randall and her mother standing outside wanting a look at the place will do the same. But they should.