I had a situation in a busy parking lot today, and it inspired a question:
Does it matter if I’m sorry?
I realize that’s a super vague and very loaded question. But I think it’s an important one for me. I’m still not sure I know how to answer that question for myself just yet, but I hope by the time this post is written, I’ll at least have a clue that will lead to an answer. But please allow me to set the stage for how I first came to ponder such a query.
As you may or may not know, Lou and I drive an enormous Chevy Silverado King Cab pick-up truck that we’ve unofficially named “Pat.” I personally like to name my cars — whereas Lou sort of thinks I’m silly. But when I asked him what we should call the truck, he played along. He came up with Pat because Lou can’t picture himself driving a big old truck with a “girly name,” and I kind of feel like with hips as big as hers, our truck has to be a bold and bossy lady! So Pat totally works for both of us, I guess.
[Aside: We also figure since we live in Northern California, having a huge truck that’s “gender fluid” makes us “politically correct” — at least in one tiny regard! Plus, Pat consumes a lot of “fluid” in the form of gas, so the name seems to work on several different levels.]
Anyway. I’m very thankful for Pat. I really am. But I don’t like driving our truck at all because it’s so darn big! To be more specific, I guess it’s less about the driving and more of the parking that gets me the most stressed out about wheeling around town in Pat. It’s so difficult to put that long-ass beast-of-a-mobile into one of our “eco-friendly” California parking spaces!!
But where I had to park Pat today is worse than most of the places I usually have to go. I had to venture into our bank parking lot, which shares a parking lot with our local grocery store. So distracted people in their “energy-efficient tiny cars” buzz in and buzz out of that lot exactly they way worker bees buzz in and out of a hive.
I specifically hate doing any kind of banking or grocery shopping in the middle of the day because the parking lot is so busy. But today, my banking needs were unavoidable and at the worst possible time of day. So I felt kind of relieved to find a sort of “pull-in” spot for Pat that didn’t require too much angling or any kind of extra dramatic wheel-whipping maneuvers on my part to accommodate for Pat’s non-existent turning radius. The open spot also had the added benefit of being next to an empty handicap space on my side of the truck — which felt like a good parking omen at the time.
So I slowly chugged old Pat into the spot, threw the tranny into park, and went in to do my banking.
When I came out of the bank, I happened to notice this very angry woman looking at the front of my truck. Right then, my phone rang and my latest girl crush (Meredith) was checking in, and so a lot was happening for me all at once. But after I answered the call, I saw the woman starting to swear out into the open to no one in particular, and that’s when I noticed how crookedly I had parked Pat.
I quickly asked my girl crush if I could call her back, and then I approached the angry lady. She was already inside of her SUV by the time I reached her, so I lightly tapped on her window to get her attention. She jerked her head to look at me, and her face was tight and very, very angry. I quickly pulled back, totally regretting my decision to tap on her window — while secretly wishing that Pat wasn’t my truck!! But it was too late — I could see she understood I was the terrible parker who was screwing up her day.
So I flashed her the universal face sign for, “I’m so sorry.” You know the face where you pull your eyebrows up and in at the middle, and then pull your bottom lip down and to the left, to show a little bit of your lower gums? (This look can also be used as the universal face sign for “please help me” in a pinch.) And, I also mouthed the words, “I’m so sorry for my parking!” while putting my hands together in the universal praying position.
The woman fired up her engine and then rolled down her window. She started shouting something to me in Spanish while giving me the universal glare for “I hate your kind!” I have no idea what she was saying, but I’m pretty sure she wasn’t saying, “No problem — it happens, Amiga!”
No, her words seemed quite angry in fact, and so I made a few gestures to let her know I would move my truck immediately so she could get her SUV out more easily. My gestures did no good, tho. By the time I was in the driver’s seat, this woman had already started nudging her way out of her spot using a 50-point-turn technique that kind of made me admire her backing-up skills.
As soon as she freed herself from the spot to my right, the angry lady peeled out of the parking lot in a huge huff. (Whew…) I felt a little better once she was gone, but then it only took me a good four minutes of waiting as six or seven “eco-friendly” cars kept buzzing into the lot. I just need one of those cars to give me a second or two to back my enormous vehicle out of the crooked spot I was “consuming.”
Finally, someone did take a beat — but only because I was blocking this driver out of two possible spots — which made me look totally selfish on top of being a terrible parker, I suppose!! (Ugh…) But eventually, Pat was safely out of the lot, and I was merging into the flow of my life again. The dust-up with this angry stranger was behind me…
But it’s been a couple of hours now since the incident, and I’m still thinking about that unfolding of events. I really was so sorry for my horrible parking job, and she had every right to be upset. But what gets me is how it just didn’t matter that I was sorry.
I made a mistake, and I was owning it!
And…I wanted to do whatever I could to sort it out for her!
But it just didn’t matter.
She was never going to forgive me or overlook my mistake, and it will forever live in the universe as one of the things that screwed up that lady’s day today.
As I ponder that statement, I wonder what else was going on with this woman to set her off so easily because it had to be more than just my jenky parking job. In addition to the grocery store, my bank shares a parking lot with a pet store, too. Did the woman just find out her beloved dog is dying, or her 18-year-old cat has leukemia? That would be enough to set anyone off into a bad mood filled with feelings and emotions that would make a jacked up parking job next to you a real pain in the ass. And just thinking of those as possibilities immediately makes me forgive her for being so irritable and over-the-top angry with me, and, it also makes me feel even more sorry for the inconvenience I created for her.
Or… Was this woman just a bitch on wheels who hates people like me who can’t handle a simple task like parking a damn truck between the two white lines of a designated parking space?
I’m sure I’ll never know.
But whenever I have testy exchanges like this one with a stranger who merely shares a brief moment in time in the same evil parking lot as me, I don’t get to know what’s happening in their lives, and they don’t get to know what’s happening in mine. And if I’m being completely honest, what’s happening to others typically doesn’t really matter all that much to me either! I can be just as self-involved as the next guy, yet today, I really did feel disappointed in myself, and, I really did want this lady to know how sorry I was for my mistake — no matter what was happening in her life.
Now that all of this is behind me, and I’m sitting here with my laptop, and Pat is safely (and perfectly) parked outside in my private driveway, I know that incident really doesn’t matter anymore. It happened, someone got mad at me, I recovered, hopefully she recovered, too, and now…I’m here.
The End.
But when I think about it, all of life’s little irritations do stack up over time, and they don’t always just “end” for some people. Sometimes, they add to an unbearable pressure a person is already dealing with in his or her life, and that can make them snap. And if I never stop for one second to see things in a way where I recognize that everything I do does in fact matter in the world around me, then tensions in my midst will only get more dramatic and ugly — even though I know I will always be powerless to actually change the real issues that are unfolding in the life of someone else — even if I get to know what those issues are.
I already see the ugly build-up happening all around me. In fact, when I still lived in Miami, there was a story in my newsfeed about a guy who stabbed a stranger while she was shopping because he claimed she “took” his parking spot at the busiest Costco in the state of Florida. (Sheesh. I need to get my parking mojo sorted with Pat sooner than later if I drive her down to Miami and make a trip to Costco!)
But all of these thoughts do make me wonder if things would improve just a little bit (if I perfected my parking, and) if I always tried to display the universal face sign for kindness: a smile.
