The March of Time As Seen From The NYC Tow Pound

This morning Steven went out to move a car that wasn't there. He was already frazzled, even before the car wasn't there, because he'd forgotten that it was Friday morning and that the car needed to be reparked until I reminded him, sending him wet-headed and groggy out of the shower and into the street.

"What do you mean it's not there?" I asked, heaving myself from one side of the bed to the other.

"Think, Hana. Where else might you have put it?"

I sat up in bed, suddenly panicked that I'd lost the car. I tried to mentally replay the last week of my life, but the entire week seemed sort of foggy. What on earth had I done all week? How long had it been since I'd last seen the car? I remembered taking it to Target sometime, but that could have been a month ago for all the clarity of the memory.

"Maybe it's on Third Street?" I managed.

I heard the front door slam as Steven raced out to Third Street. Two minutes later the phone rang.

"Any other ideas?" Steven asked.

"I have absolutely no idea," I said. This was clearly the nadir of pregnancy brain. I had lost the car.

By the time Steven came back in the apartment I'd come up with some other theories. Perhaps the car had been towed? Although, no, it hadn't been parked illegally. Stolen? I theorized. But who on earth would steal an 8 year old Acura?

"You know," I said. "I suppose it could have been towed. We did have those parking tickets..."

Ah, the parking tickets. About five months ago we'd gotten three tickets in the span of two days. Two were for an expired registration sticker. The same cop had come back twice in one day to ticket us for the offense, which had caused Steven to get red-faced and sputteringly angry at the injustice of it all. I'd suggested paying the tickets. Steven had insisted he was going to fight City Hall. Unfortunately he never got around to it. His desire to right humanity's wrongs had been usurped by his tremendous powers of procrastination.

The good news is that the city tow pound is now computerized and easily accessible on the web. The bad news is that our car has been towed to the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn and will now cost us over $600 to retrieve. As opposed to, say, the $120 it would have cost us to pay the parking tickets.

I've been to the city pound once before, although it was the one in Manhattan, it was 3 a.m. and I was drunk. Which was fine, because so were most of the other people at the pound. I remember being slightly hysterical about the fact that my brand new shiny car had been towed (back then I had a fancy schmancy Saab, the financial result of working a cushy corporate job while simultaneously living at home for a year) and I got into a fight with ... someone. I just remember there being yelling. I remember that my then-boyfriend had found the whole thing highly amusing and that he paid the fine for me in an effort to calm me down.

This afternoon I'm going to make another trip to the pound, this time nine months pregnant and with my husband in tow. The worst part? Last time I celebrated getting my car back by going out for a drink and having drunken raunchy sex. This time, when we get the car back, we're going to Babies 'R Us to exchange a Snap n' Go stroller frame for a Kick n' Play bouncy seat.

Whatever. The store is right near the tow pound, okay?