To See

Spent the weekend with my parents and the girls in Mystic Seaport, where my mother was participating in an enormous art show--to be the subject of another entry. What I want to write about tonight is the La Quinta chain hotel we stayed in, and Lily.

I had taken on the task of finding us all a place to stay, and I began with the inns and bed-and-breakfasts. Booked, booked, booked. I moved on to the nicer chain hotels, also booked. A woman at a Marriott informed me, when I wondered aloud why it was so impossible to find a place to stay in Mystic, that because of the art festival and a large number of local weddings, I was going to keep hitting dead ends with my calls. She suggested I try a La Quinta, a chain I didn't know, one town over, as it had only been open for a few weeks and was therefore apt to be under the radar. She was right.

My parents arrived the night before we did, and en route I called my dad to ask how the place was. Like me, my father enjoys a nice hotel, and I knew from his curt, "You know. It's fine," that La Quinta was substantially sub par. It turned out to be very generic, on a highway near nothing save a Dunkin' Donuts, overpriced for what it was and in serious lack of managerial talent. The cleaning staff was erratic, the so-called heated pool was icy, and the complimentary breakfast--save for yogurt, dry cereal and coffee--inedible.

But from the moment we pulled into the parking lot, Lily was in heaven. "It's just so beautiful, Mama," she breathed as she climbed down from her car seat. And then. The room (with slick, polyester bedspreads and ochre curtains) was so "spacious and glamorous." The bathroom (chain motel standard, missing shampoo and soap) was "gigantic." The aforementioned pool, which I forced myself into out of profound love for my firstborn, Arctic to me and my mother, who somehow escaped going in, "the funnest fun I've had in 22 years." Even the breakfast--with its bevy of (unappetizing) choices--"delicious."

I found myself enchanted by Lily's perspective, not in a way that made me (or my father) ever want to set foot in a La Quinta again, but in a way that made me realize how new and full of possibility the world is to a five-year-old, even one who's stayed at a four star hotel before but not one that she remembers or that gave away tiny boxes of cereal to anyone who wanted one, just because that's what they do. It is a real part of my job, I decided, to help her stay this way--not as a five-year-old, of course, but as a child, an adolescent, and an adult who continues to know that, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

And finally, on our drive back Sunday evening, we stopped in at IKEA on the highway to pick up a few things. As we pulled into the lot, Lily practically jumped out of her car seat. "Look! Look what's right next door to IKEA!" I looked. Although I've been to this IKEA a dozen times, I'd never noticed the La Quinta beside it right there on 95. "We've got to tell Sands and Grandpa Joel," she added.

"That we saw it?" I asked, confused.

"No," she said. "That we saw it, and that it wasn't nearly as beautiful as ours."