Can we all agree parallel parking, um, sucks? 

It’s not that I can’t parallel park. Parallel parking is one of the few skills I will crow about in these pages. 

See, I went to grad school in North Philadelphia.  

My university had student parking. Of course it did.  

What it did not have was capacious parking. Or parking in proximity to, well, any building whatsoever.  

So most of us parked on the street. 

By the time I graduated, I knew the Krebs cycle, that formidable is best pronounced with the emphasis on for, and those four digits after the hyphen in my zip code. 

And I knew how to park a 1994 Honda Accord stick shift on a Philadelphia side street, in a space exactly the size of that Honda, with every driver in Philly laying on their horn behind me. 

Without breaking a sweat.  

Or, you know, crying. 

Even now, if I have a choice between paying to park or parallel parking, I’ll parallel park.  

Please. Every car I own has a backup camera. Parallel parking with a backup camera is like rigging the Kobayashi Maru test à la Captain James T. Kirk. 

But I’m now teaching a second kid in my household to parallel park and, well, that’s a bit harder. 

How do you parallel park? I don’t know. You just do. Like, turn the wheel and get in there. 

For both of my kids, the first thing they did on their driver’s test was parallel park. 

Which means the second thing they did was schedule themselves to retake the driver’s test. 

Why is parallel parking such a priority for the Pennsylvania driver’s test? It’s an archaic skill in a world of backup cameras and parking assist. According to Wired, up to 16 states don’t have parallel parking as part of their driver’s tests. 

I’m not above establishing temporary residency to facilitate a driver’s license or two. 

“It’s an important skill,” my Olney-bred husband asserts. But I’m a suburban kid who never parallel parked until I had a boyfriend from Northeast Philadelphia.  

Who was significantly worse than parallel parking.  

Avoiding boyfriends unable to differentiate between William Faulkner and William Shatner should replace parallel parking as a skill on driver’s tests. 

Then there was this text my oldest sent from college last week. 

“Still have never parallel parked.” 

And she’s been driving for two years. 

That I have only parallel parked by choice since finishing grad school at, well, the turn of the century should indicate how low a priority the skill should be on the driving exam. 

When I taught my oldest to parallel park, we used Indy and Willie’s cars for practice.  

Indy was no longer driving. And his car had, you know, Fred Flintstone holes in its floor, liquids most definitely not vanilla extract in vanilla extract bottles, and more mercury than a prize tuna. 

So if my daughter hit Indy’s car, it really wasn’t a problem. 

Unless she hit it hard enough to break the mercury vials and vanilla extract bottles. Then we might have had an environmental disaster on our hands. 

Willie still had her car then. But let’s be honest. If my daughter hit Willie’s car, that would have been the most innocuous thing with which Willie’s car ever came in contact. 

Someday, guys. Someday, I have such a story for you about that car. For now, I’m like Rob Lowe’s autobiography — it’s a story I can only tell my friends now, you someday. 

I just have to wait for the statute of limitations to run out. 

My daughter practiced parallel parking at our local DMV with her driving instructor. They use orange construction barrels. 

The instructor taught her to line up handles on top of the barrels with something or other on her car, to facilitate parallel parking. 

She was dismayed to learn, when practicing on Willie and Indy’s vehicles, that actual cars don’t have handles on top to line up with something or others to facilitate parallel parking. 

Now that I’m teaching my son to drive, I don’t have the luxury of abusing Indy and Willie’s cars. 

Although, many of the Temple of Doom residents still driving use cones in their parking spots to help them park.  

So I’m, like, 98% sure they’d never notice a ding on their cars from an adolescent driver’s fledgling skills. 

All of this is to say we’re back to using the construction barrels at the DMV.  

Which is as dumb as parallel parking. 

And really. Isn’t parallel parking just the kids’ introduction to some of the more futile things we have to do as adults? Eating vegetables, avoiding screens at bedtime, paying taxes? 

Heck, look at Indy and Willie. They didn’t file a tax return for five years. The IRS didn’t catch up with them until Indy was dead for two years.  

Perfect crime. 

Maybe the DMV wants the kids to parallel park as a life lesson, rather than a driving skill. Maybe the DMV is preparing the kids for adulthood when, as Steve Martin says in Parenthood, their whole life is “has to.” 

Huh. Parallel parking as metaphor. 

Well. That’s what happens when you hang with a girl who knows her Faulkner from her Shatner.