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April, 2017
21I'm driving my car. My wife, Frances, is in the passenger seat. It is dusk or night. Sprinkling drops of rain are falling on the windshield, so I have the windshield wipers on at a low setting. I park close to a restaurant we had decided to go to, though my heart is not into eating, and I think maybe I'll just get a cup of coffee. Frances is not particularly keen on it either, but here we are. (It is not a restaurant that we know in waking life.) I am concerned I may not have parked just right and we (when) I look more carefully it appears I've somehow gotten the car crossways to the normal direction of parking and have straddled the lines instead of parking between them. I try to correct this, but by now there are goes (cars) parked the right way that have kind of boxed me in, so maneuvering is difficult, with danger I'll hit one vehicle or the other. It occurs to me too that the one behind (or to the left if I had parked between the lines in the usual way) may be a police car, though I've been so intent on trying to maneuver without hitting a car that I haven't looked carefully. Finally, I give up and more or less convey to Fran that we'll sort out this problem after we are finished in the restaurant. She hands me a traffic ticket, which a cop must have written and handed to her, while I was so occupied with trying to maneuver the car without hitting either nearby vehicle that I'd not noticed they were giving one to us. I remarked on how odd that was, and she said yes, that the policeman had been bothered about how we were parked, how I was nearly hitting his vehicle, and even that I was somehow wasting energy or water, though they had been in a drought, by using my windshield wipers (which made a weird kind of sense in the dream). I feel so badly about not even particularly wanting to go to the restaurant and now having gotten a ticket that, before going in to eat and now that we are (suddenly, surprisingly) free of the parking predicament and I am driving across a free, open expanse of shopping center asphalt, I say to Fran, sort of in sadness and frustration, "Well, let's just forget about the restaurant and go on home." It is not clear if we do that or not, but I really have no desire to go in and to pretend everything is fine when the same policemen are likely among the eatery's patrons.
