Cher and Cher-alike

On the street where we live, it was once lined with adorable little bungalows. There are still a few left. We don’t live in one of those. As the area has been gentrified, builders and developers have bought the bungalows, leveled them, and replaced them with multi-story townhomes in their place. Usually, they can fit two townhomes per lot. We live in one of the townhomes. In my homage to Madeline, I like to think of it as the fairly-new house in Houston that is covered with vines.

One of the problems with this situation is the lack of parking. It’s simple. You tear down a single-family home with one driveway and replace it with two homes in the same space with two driveways, street parking disappears. Shlomo and I learned this firsthand over the weekend.

Next door to our townhouse, a home we affectionately termed the Alamo was recently destroyed and replaced with the usual pair. Between our driveway and theirs is a small flower bed. Well, on Sunday, some brilliant individual decided that it was enough room for a parking place on the street. It was not. They took up half our driveway.

Shlomo and I were off to run a couple of errands. He was driving my car. With my bad back, it was easier for me to climb up into my SUV than to squat into his car. I hate to drive anyway, so the stage was set.

We are backing out of the garage. It’s a tight squeeze, but success. Shlomo rolled down the window, folded out the rear-view mirror (that’s how tight the squeeze is), and resumed the backing motion. Carefully, he avoided the parked car. We’re backing. We’re backing. We’re in the street. We’re backing. We’re backing. Crunch.

In our attempt to avoid the car parked on our side of the street, Shlomo bumped the car parked on the other side of the street. Shlomo gets out to survey the damage. He reports that there is none. I find this hard to believe. I get out. Their car looked fine. Then, on mine, I found a scratch on the corner of the back bumper. I will say, however, that the layer of protective dirt I keep on my car seemed to have served me well.

Once again, I examined their car. There it was. Right by their driver’s door was a similar scratch. Shlomo felt terrible. He was mad at the person who had poorly parked their car by our driveway, but most of all he was mad at himself. Shockingly, I really was not upset at all.

We ran our errands and at my suggestion, took my car to be washed to see how bad the damage truly was. It was indeed very minor. However, while waiting at the car wash, I was enjoying one of my favorite intellectual publications. You might have heard of it…it’s called In Touch. Lo and behold, Cher had found herself in a similar situation not to long ago. Like Shlomo, she backed into a parked car. Again like Shlomo, she left a note so she could take care of the damage. That is when it hit me. Shlomo earned his new nickname, Cher-alike.

It is funny to me how I did not really get upset over this. Lord knows, I have had plenty of parking mistakes in my day. I swear the car I drove in college was a magnet for shopping carts in the Wal-Mart parking lot. However, it could be that I was not upset because I realized what was really important. I can use this to my advantage for months. “Yeah, Shlomo, remember when you wrecked my car that I had had for five months? I want Indian for dinner. Deal with it.” Oh, collision. How sweet it is going to be.