Undies in a Bunch and Other Matters
Just to be clear: the underpants flung across the hotel room weren't ours. (See Sunday's post Fun at the Fancy Pants Hotel.)We're not that kind of hotel guests,; we’re the other kind: when we first walk into a hotel room we pick up the bedspread with a set of tongs practically to drop it in the closet so there'll be no chance of accidentally touching it.It's David really. He's the kind of hotel guest who'll hardly even walk barefoot to the bathroom. 'Who knows how much beer, or Pepsi, or nacho sauce is worked into that rug?' is his reasoning.We're also the kind of guests who leave money for the person making up the room of course but I often leave a note as well.The other night when I pushed open the drapes and found some guy's bunched-up undies I knew I couldn’t call Housekeeping; that would bring trouble to whatever people had cleaned our room because they had missed seeing them. They clearly didn’t pull the drapes back enough to find then there lurking like a dark family secret.The only time I was ever in Palo Alto was to visit Stanford with our oldest girl when she was looking at colleges. She had packed in a kind of quilted laundry bag that she flung over her shoulder. I, on the other hand, was in a stage where I was madly overpacking all the time, and when the day time came to leave, I just couldn't jam everything back in that suitcase.I had this bright-pink wool jacket that just would NOT squeeze in there. As it happens, it was part of the 'going away' outfit my mother wore on the day of her wedding, and all those years later it was still great-looking, and had about it somewhat the same party-hat air as those gaily-flung boxer-briefs.Dope that I was, I left it behind with a note to the chambermaid, suggesting maybe she could find a use for it.I think of that bad decision every time I leave a hotel room.Sigh.In the end Carrie didn't go to Stanford; she went to Wellesley.And I have never been back to Palo Alto nor do I expect to go there again - unless Mark Zuckerberg decides to call me on the carpet for filling his site with a million links to a blog whose posts are just all over the place, funny and sad and crazy all at the same time and seldom casting their author in a flattering light.What can I say though? We write, as we talk, to ease our burdened hearts. How did this guy know that, at only 19, when he founded what was then called "the Facebook"?
