The Battle for 5th Avenue

College is back in session at the quaint Christian college in my neighborhood. The air is alive with youthful voices overflowing from dorms adjacent to my street announcing summer's waning end. Exuberance echos through the alleys in the form of long-legged joggers, roaming collegiate raconteurs, and caffeine addled sophomores. As I watch these callow youth cavort beneath my second story window I am overcome with the knowledge of the last wisps of my own slowly passing youth, the coming of another Autumn and then winter, and - more than anything else - I know that for the next 8 months parking is going to be bitch.

All summer long I have been spoiled with the the ability to park more or less wherever I want on my street. Most of the time the area directly in front of my building was available. At the very worse, I would be forced to walk a whole 15 extra feet. I hardly even had to employ my - very meager - parallel parking expertise. I could coast nose-in with absolute ease. I could even place my car to receive the maximum summer shade available. There are no parking worries in the summer sun of Beaver Falls. It was a veritable street parking Xanadu, the Garden of Automobile Eden.

But then comes the Fall. A mongrel horde of hand-me down Cavaliers and ancient rusting collegiate junkers, sweep out from their native lots and infest the surrounding avenues. The barbarians are at my curb. Now, parking as become as precious as oil in the 'Road Warrior'. Every household is a rival gang desperate to protect it's turf from both its neighbor and the marauding foreign invaders with plates from such far flung godless lands as Ohio and Michigan. Out of the chaos a class system emerges, a loose caste system. At the top are the Owners: those people on my street who own their homes. They look down from their ivory tower of mortgage payments with utter distaste for having to share the road with those beneath. On the second tier resides the Renters: those who do not own their homes, but are still paying to live here. This is my social parking class. On the bottom is the Student: hated and spit upon - particularly by the owners. They have a right to park, but not here on 'Our' street. They should have their own parking - separate but equal - somewhere else.

As a Renter I feel my loyalties split between the Owners and the Students. On one hand I do not want to take sides against the Students. I don't want to be one of the old fogies standing in the way of the kids' good times (parking). The last slivers of my youth demand that I take up arms with my college brethren. After all it was not so long ago that I too was a college student. I know the stresses they go through: Reading books, sitting through classes, playing X-Box, drinking beer, skipping your eleven o'clock to watch the "The Price is Right". It's hard enough being a college student without having to walk all the way across campus to your car when you go somewhere once every other week. I don't want the college kids to think I'm not cool. As a matter of fact, I am desperate for the college kids to think I'm cool. But I also don't feel like walking two blocks to my apartment when I get home from the bar at 2 AM. So, screw them.

Then again, I can't align myself with the owners either. At least the students - to the best of my knowledge - don't obsess over parking the way the owners do. The student simply parks wherever he can and goes about his life. The Owners on the other hand live and breath parking. They peer out their windows cursing the filling streets under their breaths. They fashion war rooms in attics and basements, strategizing around raised maps of 5th Avenue, pushing scale model cars with long sticks to demonstrate their next fiendish counter-offensive. They draft endless petitions for permit parking to accost their renting neighbors with when they are running to their cars late for work. There is one neighbor I only see when she demands I sign a new petition. In short, Owners are jerks.

The cardinal offense of the Owner - the one action for which I shall never forgive them - is erection of saw horses: the insidious velvet rope of the parking game. They mark their perceived parking territory with saw horses - lower ranking owners use lawn furniture - to hold their place while they are away. I hate the saw horses. I hate their faux official nature. I hate the nerve of people who put them up. It's cheating. Like it or not, if you live on a street with shared public parking, you have to play the parking game. You can't get around it with a few well placed folding chairs. One of the more pompous owners on my street even keeps his saw horses up on either side of his van after he is parked. He basically demands that his car - early 21st century minivan - is worth two or three total spaces. Well, I don't stand for it. I know the dirty secret of the saw horse: like their evil velvet rope cousin, they are ultimately powerless. Saw horses are not legally binding. They are also relatively light. Last night, I moved a saw horse and parked right on a particular vans bumper. I slept the sleep of the just.

Not being one to strategize or openly antagonize - prefer the covert under the cover of darkness - I have little recourse in this parking war but to simply stay low and make it through. It cannot last forever. Winter break is on the horizon.

Shalom.