In the beginning, Karen Bates had three parking tickets, which should have cost her a total of $111. But she never got around to paying them. Now, with penalties piled upon penalties, the fee tops a thousand bucks. And nobody in charge of such matters wants to listen to any plea for mercy.
Bates has tried lots of important people. She tried people at the city of Baltimore’s Parking Fines Division, explaining that she was preoccupied with important family matters. Can’t help, said the parking people. They don’t waive any fees.
She tried her U.S. congressman’s office, and the city comptroller’s office, and got no response from either.
She’s even gone to a higher authority. She hands over her business card, which reads “First Lady Karen E. Bates.” She’s the “first lady” of Mount Hope Baptist Church, on Gwynns Falls Parkway, whose pastor is Bates’ husband, the Rev. H. Donald Bates.
On the business card is a line from Scripture: “For I know the plans I have for you, says the lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
So far, though, even prayer hasn’t helped.
Bates, 61, a window clerk at the U.S. post office on Fayette Street since 1985, has now lost her driving privileges until all accounts are settled.
She says she never even knew she had the tickets until a few months ago, when she applied to get her license stickers renewed. The Motor Vehicle Administration turned her down. No license stickers, they said, until she paid off her outstanding tickets.
“What tickets?” Bates asked.
People at the MVA rolled their eyes at such talk. They hear it all the time. We are a nation of drivers who instinctively make excuses for our petty traffic offenses.
But Bates has some pretty poignant excuses, which make you wonder: Aren’t there times when the bureaucracies should cut somebody a break?
“It was just a terrible time,” says Bates, “and I wasn’t all there mentally. Everything was just too much to handle.”
Who could blame her?
When she was ticketed, and then the penalties started arriving, she was in the midst of losing her mother, her stepmother, and two grandsons who never made it home from the hospital after they were born.
She’s tried explaining this to all who will listen.
And gotten nowhere.
One grandson, Dante, was a month old when he died. A few months later, Bates’ mother, Lillian Hall, died after her legs were amputated and she went through colon cancer.
“Taking her to the hospital, picking her up out of bed, putting her in her wheelchair, washing her,” says Bates. “It was very traumatic.”
A month after her mother’s death, her stepmother, Lucille Hall, died after a bout with cancer. In fact, that’s when Bates met her future husband, who arrived “to pray for my family.”
They needed prayers. A week after the stepmother’s death, Bates’ grandson, Omonte, 6 months old, died from an intestinal infection. He never made it home from the hospital.
“I was lost, totally,” Bates says.
When all this was going on, Bates was unmarried. She’d been widowed in 1973. She and the Rev. Bates married a year ago.
“And I didn’t want to lay all of this in his lap,” Bates says. “I had all of this before I got into the marriage. Because of all the troubles I had with my mother, my husband took care of a lot of stuff that I couldn’t handle. I feel like the parking tickets – I’ve got to handle those myself.
“But the truth is, when they told me I had these tickets, I thought it was a mistake.” By then, it was too late to go to court. “When the penalties started coming in, I was too wrapped up in this other stuff, and it all got away from me.”
With so much family tragedy, other bills piled up. Bates says she’s still catching up with expenses. The parking tickets? She says there’s no way she can pay the bill, which now exceeds a thousand dollars.
She says her husband drives her to work each morning and picks her up each afternoon.
“I’m willing to pay the tickets,” Bates says, “even though I don’t remember getting them to begin with. But how am I going to pay those penalties?”
The easy answer is: Somewhere along the line, she should have realized the fees were piling up. But sometimes life’s not so easy. This is a woman who went through a remarkably traumatic time, and her life was coming undone.
She’s played by the rules her whole life. Once in a while, the bureaucrats ought to be able to compromise a few rules to help out a troubled soul.
