Another day with way too much to do… but to be perfectly honest with you, that’s the way I tend to like it. Better to spend the entire day rushing from one crisis to another rather than dragging it out, trying to find stuff to keep you from falling asleep at your desk.

Today, my friends, I’m going to teach you a practical skill I learned from wise woman alumna Kristy Graf—how to parallel park. After squeezing into a spot barely larger than the ‘Stang itself this afternoon, I once again thanked my lucky stars for the Halloween night when Kristy showed me the great secret to parallel parking. To commemorate her contribution to my practical education, today I’m going to share this story with you.

I was in Boston with the World Tour, and I had agreed to take a group of friends to a Halloween party that night (in one of those random alignments of the cosmos, our group included four former PC(USA) Young Adult Interns and Kristy, a former CoCo member and current liaison to Presbyterian Women. Guess what we went as? Nuns). Cars lined the tiny city street like twelve year olds queuing up for Britney Spears tickets in a grocery store. The only spot we could find was literally no bigger than the little rental car I was driving.

So Kristy soothed my fear and trepidation by offering to help me park it. And it was in that moment that she gave me the golden secret to parallel parking—crank the wheel all the way around, before you release the brake. As you slip into the spot, you can then start to straighten out the wheel. I found that I was failing to crank the wheel far enough to begin with. I then wondered why I seemed to only move back and forth, with increasing panic, in the same little spot. But under Kristy’s guidance, I managed to get into that tiny spot. And I only tapped the car in front of me once.

The lesson? When you’re parallel parking, cut the wheel as far around as it will go before letting your foot off the break. We can all be great parallel parkers, if we only remember this piece of advice.

And if you need more counseling on this subject, I refer all inquiries to Kristy Graf.

“A wise child loves discipline, but a scoffer does not listen to rebuke.” --Proverbs 13:1

Kelsey