Story of the Day 3/ 5/ 2013

My nephew will be in town. He plays Lacrosse and apparently, his team will be playing here in Indianapolis.
He sent me a message asking me if a hotel located near the downtown would be okay or that he should be leery.
I told hm to come stay with us, we would feed him.
He is coming in 2 weeks. that will be just before Passover.
So, maybe we would not feed him.

If you are Jewish, when it gets that close to the holiday of Passover, and you are using up the chametz- the food you cannot own once Passover starts, meals start to look like something the dog would refuse to eat, or , in our case, the squirrels.
One year, my neighbor made a casserole. it contained noodles, a bag of frozen mixed vegetables and peanut butter. Quite a lot of peanut butter.
Okay, now that I think of it, maybe the squirrels would have eaten it. But the dog wouldn't.

At any rate, he was concerned because of where the hotel was in relationship to the downtown.
I gave him my standard advice:
As long as it is not a by-the-hour or by-the-week, it is probably okay.

Then I thought, " Who am I to give advice?"
There was the hotel Larry and I stayed at when we were driving from New York to Cincinnati. We were moving because of his fellowship.
We drove and drove and drove.
There were traffic jams and delays, and at 2:30 in the morning, we still weren't there. We were somewhere in Ohio west of West Virginia and east of Columbus.
I was too tired to go any farther. I pulled out the AAA directory. It said there was a 3 star hotel just at the next exit.
The next exit was for a town I had never heard of, and I grew up in Ohio.
I drove a bit.
The town seemed dark, and then we saw it, a hotel, a few stories tall, older, brick.

We stopped, and crawled out of the car and into the lobby.
The desk clek looked at us, two very fatigued 20 somethings, and told us to go down the road about 15 more miles.

"You don't' have any rooms?"

"This is a residential hotel. You really should just go down the road, it won't take you more than 20 minutes."
I almost cried.
I told the man, "I can't , I just can't get back in the car and drive anymore. Please let us rent a room."
So for whatever little bit of money it was...this was 1987, he gave us a key to a room that had air-conditioning provided by the window that was propped open with an empty beer can, and a bathroom down the hall that we shared with only G-d knows how many other rooms.

Then there was the hotel when we were married.

Not where we were married, which is another story , altogether, but, I will make it really brief and say it was a paper plate wedding at a synagogue on Long Island. We were married in one end of the room and had a spread of food at the other end, complete with paper plates on tables we had set up the night before ( and with flower arrangements we had stuck together the night before) with the help of my sister Kim and our good friends, the Harringtons.

No, this hotel was for our guests.
We had a small wedding.
68 people.
that includes me and my husband, the rabbi and his wife and three "crashers".
We also had , in that small number, several people coming in from out of town, and we had to find a hotel and reserve a block of rooms.
This was in 1985.
Neither Larry nor I had a car and this was before God created the internet.

Okay, there was an internet, but I didn't know about it yet, or not really. Not enough to know how to get an email address,none-the-less look up anything.
So, I got the yellow pages and started calling all of the hotels that were less than an hour's drive from the synagogue.
Most of them were $200 a night, or $190.
And this was in 1985.
And, most of our family and friends didn't have that kind of money.
Well, most of my relatives and friends.
Larry didn't have any.
I mean he did.
He had both relatives and friends.
But not coming to our wedding.

I mean his friends came, but they were locals- or had been locals and had places to stay.
And his family didn't come, except for his parents and his grandparents ( who had told us that they were not coming, but I am still not counting them as wedding-crashers), because they were so upset he was ruining his life by marrying me.
I mean, his family didn't feel that way, his parents did. And his grandparents, so they had forbidden him to invite any of the other relatives.
So, the people staying at the hotel were all from my rather lop-sided "side".

Finally, after calling every hotel in the phone book on that part of Long Island, I found one that was only $65 a night.
The hotel was an easy drive from the synagogue, and none of our guests got lost on the way to our wedding, or back to the hotel afterwards.

And it provided no end of family enjoyment for many years ,afterwards.
Because, as one of my cousins loves to tell the story, she had always wanted to be able to tell people that her husband had once taken her to one of those by-the-hour hotels.
And now he had.

So, I really should have said to my nephew, "Ask anyone but me."
But I didn't.
After all, he is young and he too deserves a couple of good stories to tell.