"Redeemed" from the Impound Lot

It is a place no one wants to go. It is a place where everyone is mad or at least unhappy. And even the workers there, being faced all day long with people who are at best resigned to their fate, don't look like they really want to be there. Who wants to face irate, cursing, angry "clients" all day long?

It is not quite hell, but could almost fit the description of "hell on earth." What is it?

The inside of New York City Police Department's impound lot, where they send vehicles towed off the streets of Manhattan. You don't want to go there. I had never been on any impound lot, only seen them in movies and TV shows. This one appeared as shady as their reputation. What "evidence" from someone's crime is hidden there? Which of these cars have been stolen? Abandoned with a dead body inside? Who knows?

So ok. You're stupid or brazen or optimistic enough to think that you might be given a minute's grace if you leave your car on the street a hair past the "4:00 p.m." deadline clearly stated on the parking sign. Or you simply procrastinate, or get caught in a conversation, or whatever. You get to your car to move it and it is gone. Vanished. No sign left behind. Not even a number to call on the parking sign. What do you do?

I go back to the building where my colleagues and I had spent the day taping interviews and asked just that of the concierge. Well, you call 311, a non-emergency phone tree that I could quickly tell was going to take me hours to wade through, plus, the lady at the desk was telling me, you will need your license tag number. Who knows the tag number of a company vehicle off the top of their head? Not me. I knew I had to call my office. The concierge (wise woman), however, knew the address of the impound lot off the top of her head and said it was not far away. I thought I might as well grab a taxi.

The taxi dumped me out near the river and the pier along the Hudson River (yeah, what evidence has been sunk in there?) and pointed me to the tin/metal warehouse that functioned as the impound lot. I followed a bunch of signs trying to steer me the right direction, and finally I found a room with the above-mentioned sullen clerks silently waving me with their heads to a window marked "Information. Start here."

Oh. This was to be one of those hoop-jumping places. Seated behind bulletproof plastic, the clerk tries to tell me three times what I needed to do. Finally I told her I'm hard of hearing (which I am) and she said it again. I had to surrender my driver's license and leave it with her while I walked to another building, marked NYPD. I felt like I was almost being arrested. There I had to wait for a van to drive me to our company van where I retrieved the car's registration card, to take back to the clerk.

Meanwhile, one of the other detainees is pounding his fist into the wall of the office and yelling "It's a scam" because the clerk had denied him the right to use his credit card to pay the hefty $185 towing fee, because his name didn't exactly match the name on the registration card. "And I suppose there's no ATM near here?" he shot back. "What am I supposed to do?" A mother and her adult daughter were in tears because the mother was just getting her daughter out of the hospital and she tarried too long in a parking area.

When the clerk finally stamped "Redeemed" on the top of what had quickly grown to be a whole pile of paperwork about my case, I was struck by the theological nature of not only the word, but the whole experience. I was no longer a crook, who had stolen seven minutes of street time from the parking meter. I was free to drive out of the impound lot; it was not only me that was saved, but the company vehicle: we hadn't abandoned her; we "bought" her salvation. She was "made good" (which is what redeemed really means) and was free to carry us on our merry way. I felt free as a bird, and grateful that this tab was being picked up by my company as just one of the risks you took when having to do work in the city. I vowed to never again try to squeak by when signs threaten to tow you.

Redeemed. What a good feeling the week after Easter.

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Contributed by Melodie Davis: MelodieD@MennoMedia.org Melodie is the author of eight books and writes a syndicated newspaper column, Another Way