No parking
Published Sep 13, 2025 12:05 am
|
Updated Sep 12, 2025 06:25 pm
MEDIUM RARE
How many? 18? 28? 40?
When you own more than one or two cars maximum, does it matter how many your neighbor owns?
There we were, a retired banker, a retired politician, a retired soldier, a lawyer, a visitor from Hawaii, and this fencesitter, digging into a Vietnamese-Thai lunch at a mall. Everyone was talking about everything except the lucky couple who own so many cars even they are not sure how many they have, including models you would only see in a Hollywood movie or a BBC TV soap.
My concern was, why are my friends so blasé that they’re not interested in picking up or sharing/spreading facts, information, or gossip about the Discayas, the newsmakers of the week? My pals were not interested in talking about the Discayas, which lack of concern left me all the more curious. (I’m hoping to learn more – like connect the dots — tomorrow night when Michael V’s “Bubble Gang” do what I hope will be a laff-a-line parody.)
That’s all we can do in the meantime. Laugh at somebody’s folly of owning so many cars and not being able to use them, now that the Bureau of Customs is watching, ready to pounce and demand supporting documents. But if you can afford a fleet of luxury vehicles, what’s to keep you from paying the appropriate taxes? As the elders in my family used to say, there’s no one cheaper than someone who won’t pay to be legit and proper.
Meanwhile, our streetsweeper — her work begins an hour before the sun is up! — complains about homeowners who own one garage and two or more cars, thereby forcing them to leave the extra cars out on the street for overnight parking. Hey, you, isn’t there a law against overnight parking? Either that law has died a natural death or police are too sleepy to look for the owners in the dark of night, hauling them off to the police station, etc.
Ours happens to be a residential street in what is called a hospital zone, but no matter, the streetsweeper complains that it makes her job harder, reaching her broom under so many cars. I invite you to see how our street looks like a parking lot at night!