Alternate Side

A detail of my car's dashboard. Very 90s.

We have a car in Manhattan and we park it on the streets.

And that's every bit as insane as it sounds, but we have our reasons. ($400 a month garage fees being chief among the street-park decision.)

I never set out to be an auto-bearing Manhattanite, but rather had this thrust upon me when my very elderly parents moved back to New York and under my care about seven years ago, and their car came up from Florida with them.

It was full of dings and scratches, patches of other car colors that had been acquired by... violent proximity. Apparently at the end of his driving years, nearly every time he took the car out, my father would return with dents of unknown origin.

If my parents had just moved to Manhattan, I would have sold their car and been done with it. But no, they chose a senior residence in the northern reaches of Riverdale. (Technically in Yonkers even, though literally it was just a toehold over the line, on the north side of the dotted-line dividing street, rather than the south.)

I was their chauffeur, ferrying them to doctor appointments, shopping trips, Dad's one-man show at the Yonkers Library (his last big professional hurrah).

Now, other than weekend road trips and family vacations, I mostly drive Ethan to school on alternate side parking days, when the car must be ritually moved and re-parked.* Twice a week. More if we've used it and been unlucky in our parking choices upon return.

And after dropping Ethan off, I have about an hour to kill before it's time to re-park. The perfect excuse for morning coffee with the mom-friends.

This morning our conversation spanned hysterectomies, Gay Day at the Mall of America, rating of local pediatricians, concern for a friend having a hospitalization-worthy manic episode, homework, Sacha Baron Cohen, Simon Baron Cohen, the horrors of the middle school application process, Freddy Mercury, a theatrical parent's reaction to numerous boyfriends over the years until her loudly sung declaration of the husband to be: "Keeeeeeper!"

Once again I was filled with that warm snugly feeling that I have the best friends in the world.

A particularly supportive non-judgmental group; when I hear of women complaining about the competitiveness, vindictiveness and shallowness of women's relationships I can't help but think: "Who the Hell are YOU befriending?" because that so does not describe anyone I know or choose to spend time with. Then again we're not the "perfect" moms in designer clothes (unless they came from Filene's or Loehmann's) with the "perfect" children. Far from it.

Giving a friend a ride home after coffee today, she hopped into the passenger seat and seemed delighted to find I had a cassette deck in my dashboard, with actual cassettes in the cubby. (I did mention it's a 1997 sedan that had been previously owned by old people - i.e. my parents -  right?)

She grabbed Special Beat Service and popped it in and we started loudly caterwauling together, singing along to "Sugar and Stress" as we barreled up Amsterdam Avenue.

By the time I dropped her at her door "End of the Party" was playing. A hauntingly beautiful song. We had spent much of the car ride talking about how important music has been to us at various times in our lives.

I mentioned how one of my blog friends had included a song in her post that sent me on a wild nostalgia ride: Kate Bush singing "This Woman's Work."

And then, a few moments later, just as I'd found a parking spot, the heavens opened up and a torrential downpour ensued, the kind that laughs at your puny little umbrellas as it soaks you with sideways rain and from the ground up in great splashing puddles.

There was thunder and lightning involved, and the blaring of alarms, as cars close to the strikes rocked in the violence of the electrically discharging blasts.

Me? I sat toasty in my bubble, listening to my old music on the cassette deck; enjoying the spectacle outside my windows.

Windows, from a rainy window

Trees above, through windshield raindrops

So I will leave you with a few words from and a video of this English Beat song I Confess: "I know I'm shouting, I like to shout!" Enjoy:

*Note: this is a post from my "Zombie Files" - written months ago, and just finished up and posted today (being reminded of it by the rain). Right NOW I am actually using the car a LOT driving back and forth to Long Island where my mother is in a nursing home.

Surfacing

Uncle Walter stopped by to see Mom, too, today

I have been under the weather for so long I had almost forgotten how it feels to be functionally human. Today, finally, I caught a glimpse. Although I am now fully spent, having made up for lost time by filling my day to the gills:

Taking Ethan and the neighbor's kids to school (because their little sister puked just as they were getting ready to head out).

A quick coffee with school-mom-friends (need caffeine!)

Picking up the car from the repair shop (poor old thing).

Driving out to visit Mom, and all that that entailed (heart wrenched in a thousand different ways). Yet another conference with nurse manager on how to get and keep her on track, moving forward.

Driving back to pick Ethan up at school, and oh holy hell the check-engine light comes back on again (our car's resident poltergeist not fully exorcised), so back to the shop and then flagging down a cab to get to Ethan on time.

Dragging Ethan off to an appointment way East in midtown (1 bus, 1 subway, and a 4 block walk away). And if you know the U.N. is in session right now, you know this means closed streets and roadblocks and checkpoints and police everywhere.

Meanwhile, and threaded throughout: Emails and phone calls about Jacob's bussing situation. Which is bad. He's been getting to school AN HOUR late every day. Because the bus has twice as many kids on it as it should, with multiple schools to drop off at. Because the City of New York is trying to save money at the expense of Special Ed kids, the most disenfranchised citizens to start with. Don't. Get. Me. Started. (I will burn a hole in your computer screen with the white-hot lava of my wrath.)

Then back uptown and West to our 'hood for dinner at Shake Shack because it's near the...

Big meeting at Ethan's school about the middle school application process.

(If you don't live in New York City and send your kid to public school you have no idea of the hell that this means. Middle school is the bottleneck. There are many good elementary schools. There are a lot of good - and even great - high schools. There are very few decent middle schools, and NOT ENOUGH seats in them for all the kids who apply, thus making it a tough and very competitive process to get your kid into a one. Shoot. Me. Now.)

Finally HOME, a full twelve hours after having left.

(And then homework to go over with Ethan, but oh dear God he rushed through it, wanting to play his DS, so it all has to be redone, give me strength.)

Diving back under, not expecting much humanity tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.

If it's not one thing, it's a flat tire and 103 fever

This is going to be a fairly short one, if not a particularly sweet one...

When I went to pick Ethan up from camp on Friday morning, I was so happy. It was a beautiful day and I'd had the wonderful company of my friend Deb on the 2 hour drive hour out, as I was giving her boys a ride home, too. We have a lot in common, had a lot to talk about, and the drive-time just flew by.

I arrived to find Ethan looking tired and miserable, sitting on his duffel bag. I was expecting a happy-dance reunion, and I got a nine-mile stare instead. A mumble and a tearful hug.

I was more than a little miffed to find out that the message I had specifically asked to be delivered to him, that I would be doing the LATE pick-up time, as I wanted to take the camp tour, and thus to NOT worry that he was one of the last campers being picked up? Had NOT been communicated to him at all.

I assumed that an hour of anxiety was the source of his listlessness and clinginess, his resistance to going on the walking tour of the camp. That and the fact that he had slept poorly the night before. As he reported to me, he had woken up in the wee hours to pee, and had had trouble falling back asleep.

I really should know better. When Ethan is THAT out of sorts, something is up. My friend Amy even wrote a blog post about this phenomenon recently (called: those who cannot remember strep throat are doomed to repeat it) that I had read, and actually shaken my head thinking *I* certainly knew better. The more fool, I.

Because it wasn't until after the tour (which I dragged him on) and after lunch in town (which he only ate half of) while in the local penny candy store (that he was being surprisingly less than enthusiastic about) that I heard him complain of feeling cold. And it was actually rather warm in this store.

That's when the bells and whistles FINALLY went off in my head and I put my hand on the back of his neck... to find it burning up.

Feverish Ethan, with friends

A short trip to the local drug store for a thermometer revealed a temperature of nearly 103.

Yikes! No wonder he'd been feeling so punk. I had also picked up some tylenol (pretty sure he would need it) so boy properly dosed, we cut short our poke-about town walk and got into the car to head home.

The medicine kicked in and the ride home was going swimmingly. That is until a large chunk of debris - it looked like a piece of bumper, maybe - flew off a car diagonally in front of us and landed in the road: hard plastic, light blue and deadly to our right rear tire.

After the bump of rolling over it, I felt the sickeningly familiar chunkity-chunkity-chunk and pulled over fast, on a section of I-80 that fortunately had a decently wide breakdown lane. The boys were all thrilled, they had never been in a car that had sprouted a flat tire, let alone one on a major highway - quel excitement!

After some time on the phone with AAA and being told we'd have a long wait for a tow truck to come to our aid, we were pleasantly surprised by fast efficient service.

Of course the spare was in a well in the trunk, which had to be emptied of camp duffels, and of course it was completely flat. But I had warned the operator of this probability and the truck driver actually had a tank of air with him, and the spare, once inflated, thankfully, held.

I was nervous as a cat the whole long, long final hour of our ride home; every bump or slight shimmy making me fear my cranky old spare had given up the ghost. But it held true and got us back home to the city with narry but a good tale for the boys to tell their friends.

I might have kissed the sidewalk in relief when we finally stepped out of the car, home safe, but I know how many dogs have peed there. So I settled for a friendly pat of the old girl's roof, telling her "Good car, good car."

And I thanked the parking fairies for delivering us a spot nearly right in front of our house. Not quite rock-star, but proof they weren't pissed at us, either.

Hopefully Jake's return home tomorrow will involve less highway adventure, and no need for thermometers.