Street Smarts

Boston's Channel 7 news is nearly always good for a laugh. Today's dose of unintended comedy came when they interviewed an earnest young urban dweller of the female persuasion. She was upset that she had parked in an East Boston street space someone else had cleared, and came back the next morning to find all four of her tyres slashed. This young person seems to be a slow learner. Some months earlier, she said, she had parked in what may have been someone's personal space, was double-parked in, called the cops, and found her windscreen smashed soon after.

Rewind about 30 years, to days when I worked in the pre-gentry North End. Despite having a job with certain local privileges, I learned early to shrug and go to a parking lot when there was snow on the ground. There's a good deal of hard work that goes with those spaces, and the possessiveness is understandable. As for the tyres and windscreen, working-class Bostonians have a refreshing directness about their objections to inappropriate conduct. The young person in question is merely being told to shovel her own fricken parking space, which will then be left alone.

Before Channel 7 was done with its story, they were politely (I'm sure) told that they too were parked in someone else's space. They moved.