We glanced at our bare cupboards last night, and decided to drive to a nearby Pizza Hut to pick up some greasy dinner and bring it home. Pizza Hut is in a small shopping plaza (along with a CVS, a vet, and a bank) that has a huge parking lot – 60 spaces or more. Across the street from the lot sits several restaurants, a salon, and the most popular ice cream place in the city. There are usually a handful of spots open here, but tonight the lot was wide open. We pulled in and parked, then noticed Pizza Hut has shuttered its windows, so we decided to walk across the street to a lovely (and much more healthy) Thai place to get takeout there. As we were loading the children into our stroller, one of New Orleans’s finest started heading our way.
“You going to CVS?” she asked us. “What?” the Professor asked. “This lot is only for CVS. You must move unless you are going to CVS.” We blinked at her, surveyed the fifty empty spots in the lot, and then turned to look at her again. She retreated to her police car, which we now noticed was parked at the far end of the lot (across three empty spaces, I might add, and surrounded by about twent more), and leaned on the hood, looking embarrassed. What a crap assignment – to be a cop acting as a petty parking lot security guard.
There were probably at least three murders in the city last night, but no interlopers are parking in CVS’s precious lot, by god.