Mystery Solved! Kind of.

The case of the mysterious green Saab that is frequently parked in front of a fire hydrant but never has any tickets on it is closed, more or less.

A couple of months ago my brother and sister-in-law noticed a green Saab - the one pictured above with its license plate blurred out - that was, more often than not, parked on their street in front of a fire hydrant.

Why?, they asked, would the car be parked in front of the fire hydrant so often? And why are there never any tickets on it?

We speculated: undercover cop car, undercover diplomat, someone who has something on the chief of police.

In recent months the car started parking in legal spots, and we more or less forgot about it. Until yesterday, when I got a text message from my sister-in-law: Green Saab is back in front of the hydrant!

Today I paid the car a visit, wanting answers: whose car is this, and what was with it parking in front of the hydrant? The car, when I found it, was parked legally. Never mind - I left a note under the driver’s side door handle with my phone number, asking the car’s owner to call me. He called at 5:16pm, as I was looking at dresses in Filene’s Basement (lots to try on but nothing good - are trapeze dresses ever going away???).

I explained to the caller - his name is A., he said - that my brother and sister-in-law had noticed his car parked in front of the fire hydrant, and that we were wondering about it. He laughed, said he was just too lazy to find a legal spot a lot of the time. He’d park in front of the hydrant intending to come back and move the car, but then would forget, or get caught up in doing something else, and would end up leaving it there.

I suggested to him that it was odd that there were never any tickets on the car - that he was never towed - and he said that he did in fact get ticketed, we just didn’t see the tickets.

“This is all laziness?” I asked. “We thought there was something more mysterious going on.”

“Like what?” A. asked.

“Like you’re an undercover cop,” I said.

“I’m not a cop,” he said. But I suppose even if he were an undercover cop he would have said that.

Then he said he was driving as we spoke, and he didn’t want to get a ticket for talking on a cell phone while driving, so he’d better go.

So there you have it. Why is the green Saab parked in front of the fire hydrant in front of that place we think might be a cult on 15th Street? Laziness. Quite possibly, anyway.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Driving, Elites, Excuses, Games of Chance, Mysteries, Neighborhoods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.