Lurking in the Parking Lot

Yesterday, after a wonderful lunch and a movie date, Amie and I said goodbye to Kelly (who was off to see a bunch of girls on skates fight to the death or whatever), and we got into my car.

"Wait a minute!" Amie said. "Where are we?"

I paused, and for a split second, I forgot where we were. I hadn't slept at all the night before. (If you're a regular reader, you already knew that.) My mind started to work a second later, and I was thinking of all of the possible answers, Columbus, Ohio, Easton, by Abuelo's, in my car.

Instead, I said, "What?"

"Are we near a..." Amie started to rifle through her purse, "a... a..."

I started to fill in the blanks with nearby stores.

All of them were wrong.

"A book store?" she said.

"Barnes and Noble?"

"YES!" she said.

"YES!" I said.

"Can we go there?"

"YES!"

All this time the car was in reverse, and I had my foot on the clutch and the brake, all ready to back out. I was giving all of the right signals to a parking lot lurker, and yet, I wasn't backing out until I said that final YES.

I backed out, and saw in the rear view mirror that there was a man in a silver Mazda behind me making some exaggerated hand motions and mouthing words I couldn't understand, no doubt, about the fact that I had taken my sweet time to vacate my parking spot.

A few minutes later, we were entering the Barnes and Noble parking lot, one of the most maddening parking lots to have ever existed. There's a new gate system that allows you to take a ticket and put it in your window to keep people from parking there longer than 3 hours.

We took a ticket, and assumed that because the machine gave us one, there must be parking spaces. After all, we just saw five different vehicles exit the gate at the same time as we came in.

From the moment we were inside we began parking lot lurking, however, because there were no spaces to be found. This was because all of the spaces were either taken, or covered in snow piles larger than cars. And it was nice out. I mean, we had our windows down.

We were coming around the last row as a van that was parked illegally acquired passengers and made all of the signs that it was about to vacate it's spot.

"That bastard is going to take that spot," Amie said of the car ahead of us.

The car ahead of us drove away.

"Oh, I guess not."

We were at a full stop. We were waiting for the van to leave. We were going to take the spot.

A moment later, Amie was screaming and waving her hands in the air, and I was trying to figure out what to do while bracing myself against the steering wheel waiting for an explosion of some kind (my reaction time was slow- I was tired), and a car driven by a foreign looking man had stopped 10 feet from hitting us.

As my mind registered that Amie was overreacting, and that danger was not imminent, Amie stopped waving her hands in the air and screaming, and the passenger in the other car did the same. The driver laughed and waved me by.

I drove by not even noticing that I was not going to get the illegal spot. We lurked a little longer, having additional crazy moments of almost collision (it wasn't me I swear- everyone else was driving around at break-neck speed!). Finally, a young woman rolled down her window as we passed her and said, "Back there! Last row!"

We parked successfully.

As we were walking into Barnes and Noble, Amie noted that an in car video system would be illustrative to my blog posts- especially in this instance.

As we got into the car an hour later, however, she expressed her thanks that I didn't have anything like that as she straddled a very large puddle of muddy water and hopped into the passenger seat.