The Sweet Potato
Timmy T. Tater, Editor and Chief Spud
I was sitting in the parking lot of the big box store last night — and side note, whoever coined that phrase, “big box store,” I’d like to have a word. It’s a box. It’s big. We know which one you mean. Just say SammyLand and let’s move on with our lives.
Anyway, I was parked near the handicap spaces, minding my business, when the show started. Car after car pulled into those reserved spots like it was pit road at Daytona for four Goodyears and a full load of Sunoco, and out popped drivers with the spring-loaded knees and full-sprint hustle of someone who has never once needed a closer parking space in their life. Tag on the mirror going in. Tag back in the visor coming out. In and out slicker than a pickpocket at the fair.
Now look — I know good and well that not every disability wears a sign. Dizzy spells, heart trouble, bad lungs, joints that don’t work right even though the outside looks fine. I’m not talking about those folks. I see you, and that tag is yours, fair and square.
I’m talking about the other ones. The ones who borrowed Mamaw’s placard because Mamaw’s not in the car, but hey, it’s her tag, so it’s basically fine, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. That placard doesn’t work by proxy. It works when the person it’s registered to is sitting in the seat next to you — not sitting at home while you run in for a TV dinner and a pack of Marlboros.
Here’s what gets me. Somewhere in that parking lot, at that very moment, there’s a person who would give about anything just to walk into a store without it being a whole ordeal. Who’d trade a lot to move through the world as easy and thoughtlessly as you just did. And you looked at that reserved spot — closer, wider, made for someone who genuinely needs it — and decided your forty saved steps outweighed their necessity.
That’s not rudeness. That’s a sickness — the kind where the whole world gets reorganized around your convenience and nobody else’s need even registers. Did it once cross your mind that a person in an actual wheelchair van might be circling that same lot, watching you take the last accessible spot so you wouldn’t have to walk quite so far?
No. It didn’t. It never does.
So here’s my ask, plain and simple: if the tag’s not for you, and the person it belongs to isn’t riding shotgun, park in the regular lot like the rest of us. Walk the extra fifty feet. It won’t kill you — but it might just save a little dignity for somebody who needs that spot a whole lot more than you need your smokes.
