HOTEL

Today you’ll have to forgive us for today’s audio “special effects.” Tony made two tries at recording, and at the very end of the second “take,” Molly decided that SHE had something important to say. Alas.

When was the first time I ever stayed in a hotel — our Word of the Week? I think I was 15, and the place was Kingston, Ontario. My family was on vacation with my Aunt Diane and Uncle Joe and their kids. If that was in fact the first time, I can fix the date as August 19, 1974, because the day after that we drove on over to Montreal, and mostly at my own instigating, we caught a ballgame at old Jarry Park, between the last-place Expos and the last-place Padres. Why you’d bother to do that when you were in Montreal, I can’t say, but I remember the ballgame because Willie McCovey hit a home run that night, and the Padres won. So I find, from my go-to baseball website, that it was August 20, 1974. Anyway, people who grew up when I did, and where I did, in northeastern Pennsylvania, didn’t go on big vacations all the time. There were three reasons for that. The first is that people couldn’t afford it. The second is that when you did drive to places, you went to visit your aunts and uncles and cousins, and you had a lot of them. We went to Seaside Heights in New Jersey, but that was because my other Uncle Joe was at Fort Dix with his wife and four kids, and we stayed with them. Debra used to go to upstate New York all the time, to visit her Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Willard and their five kids on the farm, and from there they went now and again to Kingston or the Thousand Islands.

The third reason was that you didn’t have to go so far to find amusement. There were Mom-and-Pop amusement parks, miniature golf courses, bowling alleys, movie theaters, lakesides with arcades and big concession stands, and suchlike. Most of these are gone. In Carbondale, a few miles from my town, there was the old Irving Theater, with a stage, a balcony, box seats in the loge, fancy woodwork, and, of course, popcorn and candy and soda. Closer to us in the other direction was the Favini Theater, after the immigrant Favini family that owned and operated it. I find that there was a Wurlitzer organ there in 1926, for vaudeville shows perhaps, or for theater music to accompany silent films — I can’t say. When I was a small boy, my mother or one of my aunts would drive me and my cousins Bobby and Frankie to the Favini to catch the latest Jerry Lewis movie. We’d call her up when the movie was over and we were ready to come home. No surveillance, no cell phones, no worry. In our county we had a great amusement park called Rocky Glen — nothing of it remains but a broken portion of one sign on a disused road. Nearby in the next county there was a big lake that had several carnival-style rides — Newton Lake. It’s now just private residences; no park. My mother and father met for the first time at a place the like of which doesn’t exist anymore. It was Chapman Lake, and when we used that name, we weren’t talking only about the water. We were talking about the beach, the concession stand with great pizza, the Skee-ball in the arcade, and so on. People do like to have fun, and in those days they had a lot of it nearby, in public places, outdoors, and at little cost.

On that vacation we stayed at places like the Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson’s, back when those were places for families. Of course they had outdoor swimming pools, and you couldn’t keep me out of them before breakfast. On one of those days, my Uncle Joe, who is a very tall and big-boned man, gaped in wonder at a sort of triple breakfast I was having (I think I grew nine inches that year), and said, “How is it possible!” But I do remember once when we were in southern Pennsylvania, just having gone to Hershey Park, which I don’t think we actually enjoyed, because it was too noisy, too big, too expensive, with lines too long, we were driving east on Route 30 towards where Aunt Diane and Uncle Joe lived, and we went past a place called Fogelsanger’s Hotel. Everybody was tired and a bit grumpy, and we were ready to stay somewhere, anywhere, but my mother said, “Fogelsanger’s Hotel?” So we kept going — and found no place to stay until we got to Aunt Diane’s house in the middle of the night, all the way to one of the suburbs of Philadelphia. We’d tease Mom about Fogelsanger’s for a long time after that.

There’s a method to my madness here. In times before our own, you took some risk going out on the road. What if the wagon wheel breaks on a stone? What if a storm comes up and you’re stranded in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to eat or drink? What if you lose your way? What if you’re traveling far off to meet your family, and your money starts to run out? What if you lose your wallet? Or what if you are like Abraham and his kin and their flocks, and you are sojourning from Ur of the Chaldees far upriver to Haran and your kinfolk there, but then west and south from Haran into Canaan and even into Egypt? Everywhere you go, there are people with their own flocks, and that’s often going to require some sensitive negotiation. What if you are Odysseus, without even a scrap of clothing, washed up on the coast of Phaeacia, and you need help to get home? Or if you are Beowulf, traveling to Denmark to win fame and honor by defeating the monster Grendel, and the coast guard eyes you and your troops and their weapons with quite understandable suspicion?

You see, the guest is sacred because he is vulnerable. That’s the law of xenia in ancient Greece: the beggar and the stranger, who are often one and the same, come from Zeus, and they must be treated well. If they are not, who would dare to go anywhere? All trade must grind to a halt — and yes, there was plenty of trade in the ancient world. Greece couldn’t produce enough grain to feed the people, so they traded in olive oil, wine, and fancy pottery. The men of Tyre and Sidon, and then their colony Carthage (which means New Town, so that the Roman city Nova Carthago, modern Cartagena, in Spain, meant New New Town), sailed to Britain for tin and caravanned over the Sahara for gold. Now we have hotels, and hostels — which is just the same word, from when the French hadn’t yet ceased to pronounce the s coming before t (see Latin stella, but French étoile, star), and other places of hospitality, from Latin hospitalis, a compound of hostis, guest, and potis, capable.

Here’s an important consideration, though. The relationship of host and guest entails mutual duties. For the host is at some expense, and he leaves himself vulnerable too, because, after all, he doesn’t know who his guest is. So when the young Paris absconded from Sparta with Menelaus’ wife Helen, he was violating the sacred law, just as well as if a host had robbed his guest. Dante has four forms of treachery punished in the ninth and lowest circle of Hell: treachery against kin, against nation or party, against host or guest, and against master or benefactor. That’s in order of gravity, as he saw it. To betray a guest or a host is so wicked, Dante imagines that the soul of the traitor is sent immediately to that continent of ice below, while the body, animated by a demon, still seems alive above.

And what do you know, but the words guest and host are cousins! So is the word hostile — and host as in army. The sense is that somebody you don’t know who suddenly shows up on your frontier may be there as an enemy. In one branch of our Indo-European family, the prehistoric consonant gh- became g; in another, it became h (see Latin hortis, but German Garten; see Latin haedus, but English goat). So our word host comes to us through French and the Latin side; but guest comes from Anglo-Saxon and the Germanic side. It’s good, isn’t it, that the words are cousins? So should the persons they name also be, in spirit. I’m guessing that the old Mom-and-Pop Fogelsanger’s Hotel was in that way more of a hotel than the big impersonal hotels are now.