Parking Meters, Dr. Spock and the Proletariat

I had to pay for parking today on 57th street while teaching music class, something I manage to avoid (thankfully) 99% of the time. I didn't use to mind paying the old meters as much---they were cheaper, to begin with, and if you knew you were running out of time, you could just run down and plunk more quarters in whenever you had a free moment. When the city privatized the meters, though, and installed new machines, parking became a real aggravation. You have to leave your car, walk down the street to the machine (not so fun in the cold carting a preschooler, might I add), estimate how long you will need to be there, pay for a ticket, return to your car, and put the ticket in the window. The machines break down a lot (again, the cold), and your only recourse if the nearest one has been wind-chilled to death is to haul yourself to a neighboring machine, usually another half-block away. If you pay for 2 hours, but realize after one hour that you will need more time, you can't just go add quarters any time you are free. No, no, no! You have to wait until the specific time on your ticket is about to expire (or as near to it as you can make it), then go get another ticket, so as to not pay twice for the same time.

The new parking meters = epic fail.

Today, wanting to make sure that I had enough time to talk with parents, clean-up, etc., I paid for too much time, and even though it was a scant 20 minutes extra, I was going to find something to do before pulling out of that space because I will not give Morgan Stanley the satisfaction.

I used the time to walk down to Powell's Books, one of the many great bookstores in Hyde Park. Yes, I am a kindle-nut, but a great bookstore is a great bookstore, and in Hyde Park, we have an embarrassment of riches in that regard, despite the current economic pressures on bookstores everywhere. I chuckled immediately when I walked in and saw this book, which I must admit made me laugh out loud hard enough to cause a bit of a scene.

The bookstore, itself, gave me a better laugh, though. In three adjoining bookcases---giant bookcases that were at least six feet wide and 10-12 feet high), there were the following sections: Family/Health, Marxism, and Art History. Take a minute, drink that in---one bookcase had everything on family and on health in the entire store, splitting the space, the next bookcase was filled to the brim JUST ON MARXISM, the next was art history. You know, for communist parents who are interested in sleep tips for children and have a love of post-modern art. I saw a book by Dr. Spock within a foot of a biography of Marx. After those two reads, something about Botticelli must feel like a breather.

So, to review, if you are interested in perusing roughly 800+ titles just on Marxism, right in the middle of Family/Health and Art History, you know where to go. Just one more interesting reflection of the intellectual, granola, sometimes conservative, sometimes progressive, arts-loving, president-claiming, grad-student impoverished, tenure-securing, south side, super-smarty-pants, family-centric, casual, elite, think-out-of-the box mix that is Hyde Park.

When we first moved here, I wasn't sure I would fit in. I mean, I consider myself an intellectual as much as the next Hyde Parker, but my worries all came down to this: as I was struggling to get our cable set up in our almost 100-year old building, I asked around for tips, and I couldn't find anyone with cable. No one. All I could think was, "How can I belong in a place that doesn't watch Bravo?" I mean, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was must-see TV. The longer I live here, the more I find my way, and meet many, many more people who, like me, can appreciate a book about bad news delivered by baby animals, and have solidarity against the one thing that no Hyde Parker (or Chicagoan, for that matter) seems to like: the parking meters.