The Parking Lot Attendant – Part 3
It was not long when the soft days of spring arrived, full of bird song and rainy wind, and passed like a dream as he sat in the booth, took cash and read paperbacks. In May he bought a brand-new car and stopped taking the long bus ride to and from work. He parked the car in the spot directly behind the booth and posted a sign in the space next to his - reserved parking. When the lot was full, and weather permitted, he spent ten minutes each day wiping off the wind shield, the white walls of the tires and polishing the big chrome grill and bumpers.
All too quickly spring turned to summer. The cycle of hot dry days and cooling relief of an afternoon thunderstorm was a weekly event. When the thunder heads rose up in great pillars of darkness unseen to him in the west, he felt a sudden coolness fill the little booth and knew a storm was on the way. From the corner of his eye he saw a flash and the long pause later heard the rumble of thunder chasing after it. When the rain came it beat loudly on the roof, along with the thunder catching up to the lightning. Both filled the air simultaneously with a deafening roar and a brilliant flash.
When the storm passed, he wiped the drops of rain off his car while listening to the rhythmic sound of cool, clear water dripping off the eves of the booth.
After a particularly violent thunderstorm he went out to wipe his car down. In the middle of the hood, he found a large piece of gravel. When he removed it from the hood, he saw that it had left a small divot. The car was just two months old and the damage, even though it was minor, annoyed him. 'If I did not have to drive his car to work every day this would not have happened' he thought. As the day went on the association strengthened in his mind that the zoo was responsible for damaging his car. When he left work at five o'clock, he went to the coffee shop and called the first cab company he came to in the yellow pages.
About the time baseball season was underway in earnest, he bought a top-of-the-line barratry powered transistor radio from the electronics store next to the coffee shop. He had to tilt the long silver antenna out the window in order to clear away the static and hear the announcer call the plays and list off each player's stats in-between the action. When the reception was very clear he heard the crowd in the stadium cheer and boo. When there was no car at the window he joined in.
Instead of bringing hot coco into work, he brought lemonade which he kept cold in a small ice chest. When the game was over, he tuned the radio to the short-wave band and listened to a broadcast from Europe or South America. While the music played and the voices spoke, mostly in languages he did not understand, he imagined the cities that the radio stations were transmitting from.
The long hot days of summer were quickly forgotten when replaced by the falling leaves of autumn and the rush of squirrels burying acorns on the grassy margins of the lot. Big yellow school buses full of noisy grade schoolers rumbled into the lot almost daily at that time. He had to keep open a long double row of parking spaces in the center of the lot so the busses could park and let the kids out without getting in the way of the other vehicles. After watching them come and go for several days, he wondered how much revenue decreased by letting them park. He performed a few calculations, and he was surprised at the figure arrived at.
Now he questions what the 'necessary' expenses he had incurred would do to decrease revenue too. He subtracted out the three days a week of take-out food, ice for the ice chest in summer, kerosene for the heater in winter, the chair, the radio, batteries for the radio, landscaping services, snow plowing services, the newspaper and magazine subscriptions, the monthly paper backs and the taxi rides back and forth every day.
He was horrified.
It was clear to him that the fees had to be raised immediately. Bus prices went from seven dollars to ten dollars, care prices went from five dollars to six dollars.
Recently, he had read an article about inflation in the newspaper. Even though he struggled to understand it, he found it fascinating. It seemed to say that the prices of gasoline and property taxes were rising to keep ahead of this thing called inflation. If so, then it probably made sense for parking lot prices to do the same. If not, the amount of money it took in would shrink. He decided to raise the fees every October.
The years passed for him slowly and steadily, one strung to another by common activities. The days were counted out by the reading of newspapers and magazines, the weeks the reading of paperbacks, the years by watching the seasons come and go. Nothing in his daily work routine changed very much and for a long time he was fine with that.
However, one late September day, when he was walking the parameter of the parking lot picking up trash, he had a change of heart. The city was a whirl of activity around him. He was slowing down with age which made him keenly aware of the increased number of cars in the streets, the taller heights of the new buildings and the lager number of people rushing to and from. He felt swallowed up by its growing size, challenged by the increased intensity of activity. Suddenly, a cool gust of wind blew past him carrying yellowed leaves down the crowded sidewalk and across the busy street. They looked familiar to him but in more of a rush as if they were late for an appointment or running from some unseen pursuer. When he looked at the trees, he saw the first signs of the leaves changing from summer green to autumn fire as he had so many times before. He realized that he had far more years behind him then ahead of him. It was time he prepared for what lay ahead.
For the remainder of the day, he sat listening to a short-wave broadcast from Bremen and imagined himself walking through the city among the tourists and passing skyscrapers of steel and glass towering above medieval churches that were ringing their bells. That night when the zoo closed, he pulled the metal chain across the entrance and locked it, something he had never done before. He took the money from the cash box then tucked the transistor radio and a few paperbacks under his arm. Down the street he saw the black town car, which took him to and from work every day, lumbering toward him in the traffic. He weaved through the crowd of commuters scurrying past him and when the car pulled up to the curb, he disappeared into the back seat.
Prairie Beacon 