GETTING ON, PARKING OFF
Ageing has got your number, whether it’s breathing down your neck in your 30s or introducing you to a whole new set of indignities decades later. Cedric de Beer and four others share their stories
Ihad rushed out to our little local mall one Sunday morning needing croissants for the family breakfast — in a hurry to get home before the scrambled eggs hardened or the crispy bacon went soggy. I hauled into the underground parking, jumped out of the car and ran for Woolworths. I was the first customer, I paid cash for one item and was back at my car within three minutes — four, max.
There, on my windscreen was this pink sticky note covered with angry capital letters: “YOU PARK LIKE POEPHOL”
It was a masterful four-word provocation: bilingual alliteration, venomous and completely pointless. It’s true. I confess. In my hurry I had parked across two generous-sized parking bays. I scanned the garage wondering if the lunatic still lurked … but it was quite empty. Quick work all in all.
There are probably 150 bays in the garage, and maybe 20 of them were occupied. What kind of an angry, selfappointed traffic warden, at 8am on a Sunday morning, is moved (if you will pardon the term) to notice this parking “offence”, find a pink sticky note, haul out a pen, capitalise his poetry (must be a man), slam the note onto the middle of my windscreen and disappear, all in a matter of about 200 seconds. You have to admire that level of commitment.
It’s not something that would have happened 20 years ago. I always prided myself on my parking ability (I know. It’s pathetic, but it’s true.) Parallel parking — no problem. I could sweep up next to a car and reverse into the smallest possible space in one movement, ending up with wheels straight and 15cm from the pavement. It’s all about angles and timing. Alley docking: swinging the car backwards into a narrow space between two other cars, one hand on the steering wheel, the other nonchalantly slung over the back of the passenger car seat head and shoulders turned 180°. Careful — but quick and confident, maybe one minor change of direction while moving smoothly into place. A piece of cake.
These days, parking is more of a whiteknuckle experience — especially if you are my wife in the passenger seat. Stiffness of body, and fading peripheral vision make it a much more tentative affair. I can’t swing around to see behind me as I used to and doing it by rear-view mirror is a much more inch by inch process. I frequently leave too much distance between myself and the car in front or end up at a funny angle requiring quite some back and forth to get it good enough. I don’t know how many times I have been saved by the loud beeping of my car when I get too close to whatever is behind me.
So yes, I concede the point so elegantly made by the phantom of the garage: I park like a poephol.
But let me just say this. Of all the offences one might commit behind the wheel of a car in the streets of Johannesburg, parking a little bit off-centre rates as a victimless crime. And in any empty parking garage it’s no crime at all.
I don’t know why there is all this fuss about tech companies developing driverless cars. They are decades late. The deadly streets of Msanzi are full of them. There may be something akin to a warm, breathing body sitting somewhere on the front seat — but “driver”? That’s putting too fine a point on it. If you are stubbing out a cigarette, speaking on the phone, examining your hair in the mirror, screaming at the kids in the back who are not buckled in, and cursing at the car that cut off the learner driver just before you could, then you are many things, but none of them might be defined as “driver”. The streets are full of lunatics on wheels, some of them armed and dangerous.
So here’s a challenge to the brave poet of the parking garage. Why not venture a little further afield where the infractions are that much more serious and your prose for the ages much more needed. Take up a position next to the window washers on the corner of Queen Street and Albertina Sisulu (say) with your pen and a pile of sticky notes. When the light turns red you can dash among the cars in a whirling frenzy, palming accusations onto the windscreens: “You brake like a bastard”; “You drive like a dick”; “You tailgate like a tosser”. It doesn’t matter which cars you choose — the accusations will be almost inevitably accurate.
Bet you won’t. Because you’re a poephol.