Put up a Parking Lot

Posted on April 16, 2004 in Encounters The Orange

We went to the Irvine Spectrum Center to celebrate our anniversary at a well-polished, granitic Japanese restaurant. They closed off part of the lot because they are building a new parking structure and another department store to add to the glut of conspicuous pre-yard-sale-goods-retailers that you can find in the shops there. (If you’re looking for a lava lamp, a swimmingly preppie landscape scene, or a foam-rubber brain that you can squeeze or bounce off the wall, Irvine Spectrum Center is the place to look.). At the far end of the lot, nearly into the freeway, we found a lot full of parking spaces. When I pulled in, however, a boy wearing an orange vest ran over and told me that this was for valet parking only. So, out of pity for the poor yuppies who couldn’t march the two hundred and fifty yards to the entrance of Robinsons-May, I moved in a little closer and found a spot fifty yards nearer the gates to credit card hell.

As soon as we got out of the truck, a fellow riding a taxi bike asked if we needed a ride to the entrance. I declined, thinking it odd that on this night we’d been transported into a Saigon without the mortar rounds and the shrapnel. We hoofed it to the department store, then cut through it to get to where the restaurants were. We ate, then doubled back to the Barnes and Noble, where I searched for the poetry section and Lynn found herself a book about married women who love women.

Here I saw a boy, of about five or six years of age, half asleep in an all-terrain, “sports-utility stroller” — the SUVs of babydom. I couldn’t see any braces around the legs or a younger brother or sister tottering about. He lay there, his hands covering his crotch, while his father looked at travel books. Was this overprotective parenting or was I missing something?