Terry Flanagan: Parking at Church Breaks a Golden Rule

Back in the late '60s, when I was going to college, we had an apartment off campus a few blocks from the university. One morning I went down to find a cryptic note left on my windshield. It read, “Dom parc airw.” I had no idea what it meant. That evening I mentioned the note to my roommate. He told me that I must have parked in the neighbor’s space. Being Lithuanian, the neighbor’s English was not that good, and he was trying to say, “Don’t park here”.

“But I was parked on the street,” I protested.

“Yeah, but he has this spot in front of his apartment where he always parks,” my roomate informed me.

Being a suburbanite, I was not acquainted with the customs of city dwellers when it comes to parking. Among the urban tribes, a parking spot is even more sacred than ancestral burial grounds. Wars have been fought over street parking and combatants have built fortresses of kitchen chairs, saw horses, and crates to protect their territory. They will defend their parking spaces to the death if necessary.

Here in the suburbs, we may think we’re too sophisticated and genteel to engage in battle over a parking space. But watch what happens when a parking space opens up in a crowded mall during the holidays and two drivers believe each has spotted it first.

As in a jousting tournament, the two rivals briefly size each other up before charging full speed toward each other and the prize. The first rule of combat is to avoid eye contact with the other driver. There are no other rules and other drivers and pedestrians who enter the arena do so at their own risk. The thin veneer of civilization vanishes in the quest for scarce parking resources in a hostile climate where walking an extra hundred paces to one’s destination might mean the difference in survival, or worse, missing out on a bargain.

A common, and sometimes unavoidable faux pas committed on suburban streets is the act of parking directly across the street from someone’s driveway. Most people are not that good at backing up and have difficulty judging distance when moving in reverse. Even if they have a rear camera system that rivals the television network system at football games. A friend of ours in a neighboring suburb has twice backed into her neighbor’s car parked across the street. Her neighbors now park on the next block if necessary, just to stay out of her way.

That brings me to parking at the church. One would think that church, of all places, ought to be the place where one would find the most considerate of parking etiquette practices. Since most people arrive and leave within a few minutes before and after the service, there is a great deal of congestion in the parking lot at these times. Ideally, people would park as quickly and efficiently as possible when arriving so others could get in. You’d also expect these same drivers to be courteous about allowing others to back out of spaces when leaving.

However, a number of people insist on backing into spaces when arriving. This would not be so bad if these drivers were able to do so in one fluid motion like the big rig drivers do in much tighter spaces. Instead, you’re more likely to witness some incompetent trying for 10 minutes to back a Mini Cooper into a space that could fit two RVs. Meanwhile, the line of traffic waiting to get in grows ever longer. And even with the delays, many of the drivers behind the Mini Cooper decide that they must also go through the arduous process of backing in when their turn comes. Many of these same people often zoom out after the service and do not even attempt to give someone backing out of a space a break.

Then there are the people who create their own parking spaces, often directly along the curb behind the marked parking places. This happens long before the marked spaces are even close to being filled. I don’t know if they think the church has valet parking or they just want to be closer to God. They park next to the sidewalk as close to the church doors as possible without actually parking on the steps, even though these are not parking spots. The people trying to get out of the legitimate, marked spaces after the service must then try to avoid hitting these cars on the way out.

But the driver who takes the prize for parking etiquette at church is the guy who parks on the grid part of one of the handicapped spaces. The grid is there, of course, to give disabled people enough room to enter and leave their vehicle. I assumed that whoever parked here must be handicapped, but that still didn’t excuse parking in that spot. However, I caught sight of him once as I entered church. He’s an older guy, but he has no obvious disability that I can discern and certainly no problem with walking or going up the steps to the church.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I think that people ought to show a little more consideration, especially at church. Or maybe this is just God's way of telling us we should really be walking to church instead.