Hotel Memories

I am staying at the Westin in Cincinnati. Some hotels hold more memories than others. This one is full of them.

Tonight as I returned to my room after a delightful Thai dinner with a friend, the fire alarm went off. So I sat in the lobby while the front desk staff decided whether the hotel was burning or not. I hadn’t sat there in a long time. Two memories were particularly strong.

When I was seventeen, my Dad had just gotten out of rehab for alcoholism and was staying at a halfway house. It was Christmas Eve and my sisters and I picked him up to take a drive around the city to look at the holiday lights. It was a frigid night, close to zero. Our car didn’t like the cold and always enjoyed stalling at the most inopportune times. It chose to do so now⎯on Vine Street about a block from the Westin. After several futile attempts to restart the car, we hiked to the hotel to call a tow truck. While we waited, we sat in the lobby near the Christmas tree and opened the gifts we had brought for each other. I don’t remember what I gave my Dad, but I remember he was embarrassed about the gifts he brought us⎯some donated books he had found at the halfway house. He gave me a volume about St. Paul. I have never read it, but I keep it on my bookshelf. It reminds me of the sadness I felt that night. Sadness for my Dad that his life had deteriorated to a point where he had nothing to give his kids on Christmas, other than what he could scavenge from his sparse living quarters. I suppose the experience also had an impact on him. For this time, after several unsuccessful attempts, he finally stopped drinking.

Five years later, during a happier Christmas season, I sat with LaPriel in the Westin lobby listening to a pianist play holiday songs. It was our first date after having broken up six months earlier (I call it breaking up, she would say we were never going out⎯which was probably true. Men are renown for reading more into a relationship than is actually there). Which was why as a love-struck twenty-two year old sitting holding LaPriel’s hand, I was already planning out a wedding while she was probably wondering whether she should be there at all.