A Dime

I hate parallel parking.  I'm not good at it.  I dread doing it.  I have successfully parallel parked only a few times...generally when no one is watching, I'm alone in the car, and all I have to do is pull straight forward into the spot.  I think one of the reasons I'm so bad at parallel parking is that when I learned, my dad had me practice with imaginary cars.  I did really well then.  Unfortunately, it did not translate to real life.


Tonight I was driving to craft night with the girls, and to park in Hillcrest where my friend Juli lives, involves my archenemy, parallel parking.  On previous trips to her place, I have lucked out and found parallel parking spots that fit the description above (no one with me, no one watching, pulling straight forward).  This was not to be tonight.  After circling several times, hoping against hope every single time I circled that someone would pull out and leave their very large spot open for me.  No one did.  I finally found a spot on the street with metered parking.  I sighed and prepared myself to navigate into the spot.  Luckily I got into the spot with relative ease (all I had to do was back up into it).  So, that was good.  


Now, I very rarely have cash or change on my person.  I always put any spare change I have in my bear bank that I've had since I was very small.  My car does however accumulate forgotten change (generally in the form of pennies), so I hoped that I would have enough for the meter.  I pulled out all of my coins, put them into the meter, and it totaled to 27 minutes.  This was clearly not enough time for craft night.  It would barely get me through the first 30 minutes of Glee (which we watching during craft night, obviously).  I was wondering what to do and searching the bottom of my bag at the same time.


A homeless man came up and very politely asked me if I had any change or food.  I had to respond, "No, I'm sorry, I don't."  (And then for some reason I felt the need to add...), "If I did, I would be able to pay the meter for this spot!"  


The nice homeless man then said, "I have ten cents.  Would that help?"


That's right.  I got offered money by a homeless man.