I usually think of parking the car to go into a store as a minor, somewhat mundane and boring thing. On the local university campus, parking is a big deal. Many students live off-campus and need to drive to class, especially in Wisconsin winters. We used to live within easy walking distance of campus but I found that quite often, I needed the car to deliver things in one direction or the other.
Members of the learning-in-retirement organization on campus fret parking and fight parking difficulties. One member steadily calls for the organization to somehow obtain free parking for all those with paid-up membership. To put enough coins in a parking meter to have legal parking that lasts long enough for most presentations often amounts to more than the organization's membership fees. Beyond that, the city government has installed parking meters on streets adjacent to the campus, in many places removing the chance to park reasonably near the classrooms without paying a fee.
But it dawned on me that the classes and conversations are the backbone of both the college experience for the 7,000 students and the organization's mostly senior citizens. The seats in the classrooms are valuable. At the same time, the cars are also valuable. It won't work out well to simply stop the car in the middle of some street nearby and leave it there for 100 minutes.
The evidence is piling up that ideas, social contacts and conversations are more than helpful - they are tangibly life-enhancing, life-extending. Look it up. "Do good social contacts extend life?" You'll be impressed. So, even though we are a small city, the places to leave a car in the vicinity of the university are valuable and sought-after. The school has an ardent parking patrol that will find your car sitting where it should not and give you a ticket that enables you to pay a fee for exercising poor judgment and underestimating the efficiency of the parking officers.
I have heard several times that while we care about classes and grades and dates and sports, we REALLY care about parking. Put an extra coin in the meter just to be safe and to honor the importance of proximity to friendly discussions of important knowledge.
