Yesterday
morning, my parents and I were in a not-so-great city, at a hotel that
apparently had many guests who were in town for a strongman competition
(some of whom got angry very intensely and quickly about things not
going their way). The night before, as we pulled into the hotel parking
lot, the pot-bellied, tank-top-wearing, Tom-Selleck-mustached, muscled
guy who got out of the pickup truck next to us started cursing
unintelligibly about something or other, condemning the residents of the
city (and pretty much anything else upon which his thoughts alighted)
to eternal damnation. Then at the check-in desk, the guy in front of us
got upset because breakfast didn't start early enough for him given the
time he had to start pumping iron... and as he was grumbling at the
front desk guy, Cursing Pickup-truck Guy walked by, still muttering
angrily to no one in particular, casting angry glances at all who dared
look his way.
After leaving the overly tense lobby behind,
when we got to the rooms I commented to my parents that their room
smelled funny... and after a few beats of debating whether or not to say
what was on her mind, my mom said she was pretty sure (from her experience in a hospital once) that it smelled like a
dead body.... Given how much anger the guests of the hotel seemed to be
harboring, this didn't seem like much of a stretch. Fortunately, my
room did not have a dead body smell. My room just had a little
bullet-sized hole in the wall above the bed. This was probably a
screw-created hole.... I'm almost certain it was a screw-created
hole.... That's what I told myself before going to sleep, anyway.
The
morning didn't seem to soften the strongman competition folks too much,
though the outward hostility of the night before seemed to be replaced
by stoic, smoldering posturing. At breakfast, the wife and surprisingly
muscled kids (seriously, I would not
want to go up against that
12-year-old girl) of one of the competitors (I knew this because they
were all decked out in shirts supporting their husband/dad) sat in stony
cold silence at the table across from ours, saying not one word all
through breakfast. Given how muscled they all were, I have to assume
this is because if the kids got in a fight with each other, what would
be a normal sibling argument in most families would result in a pile of
broken bones for this one.... And as my mom and I exited the breakfast
room with our hands full of coffee and bagels, a long line of
iron-pumping men used the fact we opened the door for a man in a
wheelchair as an invitation for them to go through as we just stood and
held the door for iron-pumping-man after iron-pumping-man who wouldn't
let us through, none of them saying "thank you," all clearly assuming that
we just felt like standing there with no hands free holding the door
open for them like it was our job. 'Cause sure, who doesn't want to do
that?
But
then as my mom and I came back to the elevator to go up to our rooms,
the elevator doors opened, and a little boy around seven or eight
emerged. He looked up right at my mom and me and said in a Southern
drawl, "Well, hello there. Y'all ladies are lookin' mighty fine this
morning" with a big warm smile and nod before turning the corner.
So my observations from this:
1. A little boy can have far more mature politeness than adults
2. This
super-smooth little kid must have a master charming, Southern Don Juan for a
dad.
3. Dead body smells in hotel rooms are bad. So are bullet holes. Try to avoid hotels with dead body smells and bullet holes.
