How to not park your car

Photo by Peter Parker.

The late comedian George Carlin had a shtick about how confusing things should be when a judge instructs a witness to describe what happened “using your own words.”

Really. 

Who besides tiny babies use their own words?  

What good would answering “in your own words” be if nobody else understands?”

Friday past, it occurred to me I know somebody who used her own words a lot. 

My mom. 

The late Huena Carter went through life employing a wholly invented purpose-built vocabulary.

Take, for example, “peeyohseeohdee.”

Peeohseeohdee is how Huena — a registered nurse — referred to private parts.  Funny though I’ve never written the word before and I think in our heads she was saying the letters P.O.C.O.D. Why we thought that, nobody will ever know.

She also sometimes called those parts “your doins’” which she frequently made plural so it came out “doins’s.”

Huena gave birth to 10 kids so she knew a thing about what doins’s did.

So why you ask, did I take time out of my otherwise busy day Friday to recollect Huena’s “own words?”

The answer is, because Friday evening I did a real non-bang-up job of parallel parking my 2011 Chevy Malibu.

As regular readers (as if ) of Pete’s Blog&Grille know, I  think parallel parking should be an Olympic event as long as they keep the technology out of it. Back-up cameras are to competitive parkers what steroids are to real sports.

      

And while I’ll concede that my next-door neighbor Delanie is the Kawhi Leonard of parallel parking, I am fairly certain I am the second-best parallel parker on our mid-town Toronto street.  

If you’d been here Friday night, you’d have watched me slip my aging Malibu into a slot tighter than where the money comes out at the ATM. But nobody was on hand, so I documented the event myself, and it was while doing that that I laughed out loud (really did! Standing there on the street!) because I thought of Huena’s “own words” again. 

For some reason Huena — and I’m warning you, this next part is pretty graphic — called having a bowel movement — “parking.”

True fact.

If  I — at five years old — was with my mom in, say,  the A&P store and announced that I had to “go to the bathroom,” Huena might ask “do you have to go number one” or “do you have to park?”

Ask any of my siblings. They know what parking means. 

I Googled “parking as a synonym for b-m’s” and Google was like, “the hell you say!”

A few years ago, I went and got scoped as men over 50 ought to do every once in a while. Everything was fine but for reason that I won’t go into here, the affects of the anesthetic weren’t quite as strong as I might have liked.

After I got home I was a little sore.

My brother Alex asked me how I felt.

I answered: “Like I just parked dad's Buick.”

I’ve changed my mind. 

You know what's a really bad idea for the next Olympics? Parallel parking.