By Mary Larsh, Columnist
My brother almost flunked out of kindergarten.
He could read at a third-grade level. He was a whiz at math. He never ate paste or terrorized his classmates, but he failed mazes.
He could find the end of the maze, but his pencil kept running over the boundaries—sometimes several of them at once. He failed the assignment because he had no concept of staying inside the lines.
If our parking lots here at OCU are any indication, it seems my brother is not the only person to have trouble staying inside the lines.
I’m amazed that our otherwise intelligent, kind and well-adjusted student body still has trouble staying between the two thick white lines that designate a parking spot.
Those lines are the only things separating us from automotive anarchy. Once one lazy driver parks haphazardly, the entire lot is askew.
For all but the largest of vehicles, there is plenty of room in a parking spot.
If you park awkwardly, you can give yourself a second chance by simply putting your car in reverse and trying again.
A truck double-parked next to me after I had already parked. It took me nearly 20 minutes to back out of my spot. It was a struggle to open my door. I inched back and forth to avoid side swiping the doors and scraping the truck’s exhaust.
We can all benefit from fewer dents in our cars and easy-to-navigate parking lots, but we all have to make it happen individually.
Turns out, my brother’s kindergarten teacher was right. There are aids for a lot of the skills we may not have mastered—calculators, spell-check software, and (yikes) Pull-Ups.
But there’s no substitute for staying inside the lines.
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