Whatever ‘it’ is, I feel as if I have been sorting ‘it’ out for ever; from the all-encompassing entirety of my life, to it’s tiniest details, ‘it’ never-endingly needs to be sorted out.
I guess it started, as so many things inevitably do for us all, with my mother. I have no idea how old I was when I began, only very subliminally at this stage, to try to sort out my mother in my own head, or probably more correctly, in my own psyche. But I was very young; too young to come anywhere close to expressing anything in words, even to myself. This particular sorting-out was going on at a much more primitive, instinctive, gut level. In my teen years, when an aunt told me that my parents had had two other children who had died before I was born, I felt a huge step closer to sorting out my mother’s complexities of hidden emotion. But there I stuck, until much later I finally began to come somewhere close to understanding not only my mother, but the effect her own traumas had had upon me.
And attempting in turn to sort out my own heart and soul was, of course, another life-long challenge. I say life-long, but now I don’t actually think that’s right. I lost the first forty-plus years. During those decades I spent plenty of time sorting out many many things; anything rather than sort out myself and the real me I was born to be. But eventually I got there, and only then could I set about sorting out me – a task which still takes up a considerable part of my time and dwindling energy.
But I must admit there is something oh so satisfying about sorting ‘it’ out. In fact, I frequently feel a great desire to get my hands on something and sort it out. This is in fact just a passing fancy, or fantasy, you understand. I’m retired. I plan to stay retired. If someone offered me millions of dollars to sort out anything from the airline industry to Amtrak to our government to any and all homeowners associations, I would refuse. But I do like to complain instead.
My most recent ‘it’ I dream of sorting out is the mid-range hotel industry. I’m not talking about the low end old roadside motel. You get what you pay for and should not expect more. And I’m ignoring the high end because I cannot afford them and so cannot judge. I am talking about the average Best Western, La Quinta, Ramada, Holiday Inn, Microtel etc. usually somewhere in the $80 to $150 per night range. These are my most recent bugaboo because Betsy and I had stayed in very few hotels over the last twenty years as we always camped. Now we no longer have our camper we have been ‘enjoying’ – and I use the word very loosely – hotels. To start with, almost every one of them has something which doesn’t work, most frustratingly the coffee maker. One we stayed in on our recent Arizona trip, only had hot water; no cold. Most unusual. No matter how you manipulated the knobs you could not get cold, or even cool, water. In more than one hotel, the rooms seem to have been designed for, or at least by, people eight feet tall. In one there was an electrical outlet above the door, just under the ceiling where not even most basketball pro’s could reach it. In another, the microwave was similarly placed, requiring any normal person to stand on a chair to use it. Lawsuits waiting to happen! What are they thinking when they design these places?
In one hotel we had no TV remote – strange but not all bad. There’s something about those things that makes my skin crawl. I am compelled, it seems, to think of all the other hands which touched those buttons after being in God only knows what unthinkable place the moment before.
And I am clearly not the only one with that reaction. In some rooms they insist on proclaiming that their remote is clean. One sign read, ‘this instrument is completely sanitary’, which for some odd reason bothered me more than suspecting it was filthy. Oh well, just one more good reason not to turn on the TV.
Maybe the answer to all this is simply to patronize that old mom and pop 1960’s motel down on the old road, where there is no coffee-maker, no fridge to hum and cough all night, no microwave to malfunction, probably an ancient fat TV sans remote, and sometimes only cold water. She who expects little will not be disappointed. But really, Betsy and I are now becoming so expectant of complications that we move into our hotel room like itinerant tinkers with bags and boxes of miscellaneous equipment: spare light bulbs, a step-stool, extension cords because wherever we want to plug anything in there will beyond any doubt be no convenient outlet, a plug-in kettle in case of the anticipated malfunctioning coffee-maker, and movies on DVD that we can watch on our computers without forming any relationship with that ‘sanitary’ remote.
And last but certainly not least, we provide our own breakfast, which of course has to be something which can be eaten cold if necessary, in anticipation of the out-of-order microwave.
I must admit we have occasionally had an excellent hotel breakfast but too often they offer nothing even remotely edible. Fruit-loops, a day-old sticky bun, weak coffee and some glow-in-the-dark orange drink masquerading as juice just isn’t breakfast. We have also learned to be very wary of the much-touted ‘hot breakfast’. Well OK, toasted Wonder Bread is hot!
So I dream of how I would sort it all out if I were in charge. And it’s only a dream. But in all sincerity, I wish someone would. We have so many tourists these days, visiting from all over the world. Every time the light doesn’t work and the coffee maker spits scalding water on my hand and I’m invited to a delicious breakfast of a plastic packet of instant oatmeal which I can’t eat even if I want to because the ‘hot’ water is only tepid, I cringe with embarrassment for our country.
‘Do you suppose things work better in other countries?’ Betsy asks.
No, perhaps not. But how I wish those tourists and business people could leave here so impressed that here, they do.
But I’m not going to sort it out.
© May 2017
About the Author
I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.
