Today’s guest post comes from Jim in Clark’s Grove.

Willie was a classmate of mine at Austin Blair Elementary School in Jackson, Michigan. This school was located in an almost completely white working class neighborhood. Willie was one of a very small number of black kids that attended this school when I was enrolled there in the late forties and early fifties. He was not one of the neighborhood kids that I played with regularly. We did spend some time together in school and also after school. I remember one occasion when I went to his house and was surprised to see that there were beds used for sleeping in most of the rooms, including the kitchen. I guess it was a small house and there wasn’t enough bedrooms for everyone who lived there.

Willie and I were two of the tallest boys in our class. We decided we should work on developing our basketball skills. This included practicing shooting free throws together as well as getting help from a teacher on our shooting skills. I was a good student. Willie had trouble with his studies. I remember thinking that he was being treated as if he wasn’t very smart, but that wasn’t true. It seemed to me that he might have been able to do better in school if he had not been looked upon as someone who wasn’t capable of doing the work.

Racism was not a widely discussed topic in the late forties and early fifties. I had some sense that Willie was a victim of racial prejudice because of the way he was treated in school. I also recall a situation out side of school where racism came into play. Willie asked me if he could be my guest at the church I attended. I asked my parents if Willie could go to church with us. They didn’t seem to be in favor of this and said very little about it. There were no black members in our church and it was a church that many of the people from the best part of town attended. I think both my parents and I would have felt very uncomfortable taking Willie to church with us as a guest.

I let Willie’s request drop without telling him anything.

I don’t remember going to junior high with Willie. I think he went to the junior high in the center of town and I went to the one on the east side. I moved away from Jackson for two years before returning to attend Jackson High during my last two years of high school. It was a large high school and the only class that I think I had with Willie was gym class. One day in gym class Willie and I teamed up to beat another team of basketball players that included a member of the varsity team and some of his friends. Willie and I were not candidates for the varsity team, but we gave those guys a surprise on that day.

I have one last memory of Willie regarding something that happened during preparations for graduation. We were dressed in suit coats and ties. Willie noticed that the way he did his tie was different from the way I did mine. I did up my tie with a plain looking knot that I had learned from my Dad. Willie helped me undo my tie and tie it up again with the more elegant Windsor knot that he used.

Willie and I went our separate ways after graduation. I don’t know what became of him. I do very much appreciate having had the opportunity to become acquainted with him during my years in grade school and high school.

If you could re-connect with an old friend, who would it be and why?

Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

Twenty years ago (Can it be 20 years?) when my partner and I started working together, we got into a fun argument about how to find a spot in parking lots.

The Clyde Method: find the first empty spot that looks about as close to the door as you are likely to get.

The John Method: drive around to find a spot as close as possible to the entrance.

Do you use the Clyde Method or the John Method for parking?

Our debate was over which of us had a more efficient method, which of us wasted more time: my longer walk or his longer drive. After three of four years of this, I was driving across Massachusetts, the eastern half of which is a full parking lot, when I heard WGBH public radio doing a report right to the heart of the matter. A graduate student in math at MIT was looking for a thesis project. He and his wife had the exact same difference in their parking methods and same debate. He developed a sound method for measuring it and found a mathematically-sound answer to the question. As it happens his model has applications for measuring and improving traffic flow and parking.

Wonder what his study found? I’ll tell you at the end of the day—maybe.

Today my parking quandaries are focused more on handicapped parking. My wife has a tag, which is in its way more of a problem than a solution. It was wonderful when we went to visit our son in California, and maybe now when we go to Seattle. Before we had the tag, we were with him in San Diego years ago visiting all the wonderful sights of that city, all with huge parking lots, when he declared that his parents were at that awkward in-between stage, old and slow moving but not yet old enough for a handicapped parking tag.

My problems with handicapped parking are fourfold, all exacerbated by my bad back which makes it impossible for me to turn my head very far:

1. Handicapped parking is always at the busiest place in the parking lot, right by the entrance with heavy foot and vehicle traffic.
2. Handicapped spots almost always require you to back out; they have that post with the blue sign at the front of them.
3. Many of the other people who park in those spots simply should not be driving anymore. So you have to be ready to dodge them.
4. Many of those who park in the spots have large vehicles, some because they are wheelchair vans, but many are just large vehicles.

A neighbor of mine says that at the local car dealership where he works the most popular sale is for extended cab full-size pickups, often to those with handicapped parking rights. Because I drive a small Scion black box, I frequently have to back out blind into unseen busy foot and vehicular traffic. Scary.

I have a problem leaving parking spots almost anywhere in a busy lot because of the tunnel vision caused by so many Intimida-look-alikes, many of them in the winter with snow plows. I usually drop my wife and her walker at the door and then park far out in the lot with my car facing out. Sometimes my waif of a car still ends up hidden between two bullies.

There is another problem with handicapped parking only a few places have solved, which does not effect us. The cart corrals are out in the middle of the parking lot. So what is then the benefit of the handicapped parking? Some people just leave the cart right there, and it often rolls into a parking spot, blocking it from the next handicapped driver to come along. I have seen some non-handicapped people just leave their unloaded cart in an empty handicapped spot. Two new large busy parking lots have been built here, neither of which provided a cart corral by the handicapped parking. As usual in America it is the appearance of things that matters more than the actual results.

But I have a moral question for you to solve for me. You would be surprised how often this occurs. Some parking lots have very large numbers of handicapped parking spots, often many sitting unused on a busy day. I pull into a busy parking lot with several handicapped spots available. However, also right by those spots is a non-blue spot.

Which should I take?
To which community, the handicapped or the non-handicapped, should I try to be fair?