This morning was such a morning. I didn’t wake up from a nightmare, exactly, as it wasn’t scary — it was a sort of sad-mare, or perhaps guilt-mare that left me feeling sorry about the human condition.
It’s boring to force others to listen to the stories of your dreams, so I do apologize to be telling one here, but, to keep it as brief as I can manage in my semi-depressed, post-dream state, this one was a typical Hamptons stress-mare. A large folk-pop concert (Mumford and Sons or the Lumineers) was being hosted at a venue next door to my house and, looking out my living room windows one summer evening, I saw fleets of strangers’ cars rolling onto my lawn to park. Big, black Escalades, little BMWs, all sorts.
(So far, this dream imagery isn’t surreal: This actually happened to me once, when a neighboring couple with, of course, megabucks but questionable manners — who have since moved away, to my relief, as I fully was prepared to continue resenting them over this episode for another 10 years — threw a major catered soirée and employed a valet parking service and the valets, who arrived in white polo shirts and canopied golf carts, parked actual dozens of actual cars on my actual lawn. The hosts hadn’t even invited me to the party or warned me it was coming. At least I got a good parking–outrage anecdote out of it.)
Anyway, in the dream, naturally, I trotted out the front door in a state of indignation to ask the concertgoers to get their cars off the grass, but — as always happens in dreams when a tidal wave of trouble is rushing towards you, gaining height over your head — the drivers had taken their keys and rushed off down the lane to the show by the time I got to their car, tapping on the blackened windows. I couldn’t stop the flood.
Now comes the sad part.
I was attempting to prevent a beat-up old, beige Buick from rolling up the wooden ramp, a sort of loading-dock ramp, to find a parking space in the barn beside our house, standing before the oncoming headlights of the Buick with both arms stretched out like a traffic-cop Karen to get it to stop, when — maneuvering to avoid driving right into indignant me — its driver’s side wheels slipped off the track and the Buick tumbled onto its side and crashed to the ground. The driver climbed out of the beat-up old Buick holding his concert ticket. He was an old, white-haired guy with a ball cap who, although he was physically unharmed, looked near tears. “Whenever I try to do something nice, something bad happens,” he said, sadly, looking at the wreck in the ditch. The Buick would have to be towed, and it was all my fault for trying to keep him off my property.
The average Star reader may recognize the iconography of this less-than-subtle dream after all, come to think of it. It makes sense that a parking-the-car theme would seep into your night thoughts, not just mine. Parking is an obvious flashpoint for so much of what annoys us in the Hamptons: our infrastructure inadequate to the population, our us-versus-them id-driven tribal inclinations, our judgements passed on strangers for having the audacity not to know in advance that the small side parking zone in the Reutershan lot is for sedans, economy vehicles, convertibles, and other small cars only, not G-Wagons or wheelmaxxed Ram pickups. The late-model Escalades park with impunity; the sad, 1990s-vintage American-made Buicks and Oldsmobiles fall off ramps and roll onto their sides, making senior citizens — refugees from a kinder country — cry.
Cooking breakfast for my 16-year-old son, Teddy, who is back for the summer from Dublin School in New Hampshire, I tried to convey the sadness of the parking dream, but he had zero empathy for the old man in the Buick. “It’s his fault!” Teddy railed. “He knew he shouldn’t park on our property but he did it anyway!” No, I argued back, taking the side of the dream victim, “The old man didn’t know! Everyone was parking on our property. He just wanted to enjoy the concert.” We actually managed to mini-bicker for a few minutes about my stupid parking dream while I pan-fried the good turkey-sausage patties from North Sea Farms on Noyac Road.
Heaven is an empty parking lot beside the ocean beach, on a sunny day in August, with no more than three other cars. There is an inherent moral problem with this desire to be left alone in the parking lots of paradise. Do these feelings make me, in essence, a nativist? Wanting “everyone else” — whoever that may be — to go away? Probably, yes. My subconscious, apparently, is troubled by the ethical conundrum, anyway, if not my more cranky or egocentric waking self. Morning comes, and I want the human population of East Hampton to revert back to the total numbers of residents recorded in the 1970 U.S. census. Get off the grass!