Of Laughter, Tears, and Parking

On the way home from work yesterday I flipped through radio stations and left it on the one that had started playing Lady in Red. Nostalgia of school dances filled me and I started to daydream a little. I always used to picture myself as the lady in red as, I assume, a lot of other girls used to do. From there the daydream took off on its own, without any conscious help from me. This is where the laughter and tears come in.

Imagine, if you will, a music video set to the music of Lady in Red. There I am in the formal red maternity dress I started sewing last year, but never finished. My husband and I are dancing sweetly together and--whoosh--my water breaks in a mighty gush of fluid like the smashing of a water balloon the size of a car. At this point the video changes location and speed. As the romantic music continues, there are slow-motion scenes of me in the hospital in labor. But it's not nice labor. It's the kind where the expectant mother throws things, screams at nurses, beats her husband, and shoots lightning from her eyes. Sadly, this part of the daydream brought me back to my senses and ended the pictures flooding my mind. The line in the song was "But I hardly know this beauty by my side/I'll never forget the way you look tonight." I thought it was appropriate and I went into gales of laughter.

Once I came back to myself I wasn't able to recover the funny, but the daydream did continue. The scene changed back to regular time, but the baby was born by then. The rest of the song was a love song sung to our daughter. She had a little red bow stuck to her head. When the song got to "I have never had such a feeling, such a feeling of complete and utter love as I do tonight" I was weeping tears of happy anticipation. The song ended just as I pulled up to the house. I walked in the door smiling and with red-rimmed eyes. Eric was initially concerned, but he joined me in my amusement after I explained.

The parking bit of the title has nothing to do with the laughter and tears aside from the fact that it happened the same evening. To preface, the parking situation on our block is terrible. The house next door has four apartments. There are at least five cars that belong to the tenants. Two park in one driveway, one in the other, and the other two are out front. One of the tenants also has large family get-togethers every few days. Then they park in front of our house and block of both driveways next door. Sometimes they park close enough that it causes us trouble getting into our driveway. It annoys us, but we don't know who to talk to about it. That story has no bearing on what happened, but lets you know that the parking situation gets under my skin. Anyway, last night Eric and I went grocery shopping. We came back just in time to find one of the more unique parking options we've seen in front of our house. The downstairs neighbors' truck was parked out front with plenty of room for another car to park in front of it. Perfectly fine. Rather than take the leftover spot, some entirely new driver in a convertible decided, instead, to park directly in front of our driveway and leave a huge space behind him. He was just getting out of his car when Eric tooted the horn at him and we pointed at our driveway. Thankfully, he very quickly got back in and drove away, but I still had to laugh at his choice of parking when there was actually a legal space available. I was also a little curious which house he was going to, but we never found out.