…Motel/Sorry…

Those two words: the only ones still lit in buzzing, flickering neon in front of the antique “motor court.” They struggle, and fail, to announce SOME-NAME MOTEL and then SORRY NO VACANCY. We have (thank God) a reservation. We have been driving for nine hours—interstates to county roads to a tiny, struggling college town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. We pull in, with a storm advancing through the pines. 

Across summer’s night,

electricity sizzles

error messages.

We joke about the aptness of it: Motel Sorry. Our teenage children are especially affronted by the sorriness. Their experience of travel lodging has not included such low-slung strips of units: single room, single bath, single parking space. It’s the sort of place where at check-in you’re handed skimpy towels and an old-school brass key. Where the neon’s flicker intrudes all night at the front window. The carpets are worn down to their jute backing; the sink has separate taps for hot and cold. Cable television is the grudging concession to modernity. We collapse in front of the SciFi channel, teenagers still grumbling.

On screen: an old man

in rags, leaning on a staff.

The young do not bow.

This is my fault, my fundamental error. I didn’t grasp that every hotel room for miles would have been snapped up months in advance of college move-in day, and that we’d be lucky to get the dregs of a bygone era, the “tourist camp.” We are here to install our freshman son, our oldest, in his dormitory. To begin to say goodbye to a chapter of life. Mentally, involuntarily, we might be rehashing parental wins and mistakes, except that the remarkable ugliness of the Motel Sorry distracts us from that embarrassment. Sorry, I keep saying, as we make do.

Through my fault, the prayer

whines like a mosquito: Through 

my most grievous fault.

How to explain motor court, tourist camp, the era before the interstate? How to explain the thirties, the forties? How to declare Your grandparents would have loved this in its heyday, would have found it cozy, a welcome summer escape. My dead parents. My penny-pinching, children-of-immigrants parents, who probably honeymooned in a place like this. I regret believing I had outgrown their opinions. I never do explain. 

Purgatory: it’s

where you weep apologies

to your patient dead.

Years later, I fail again at travel: Seasonal storms keep us from flying home after our youngest’s graduation in upstate New York. The only hotel I know to call is the Statler in Ithaca, its huge lobby gleaming in marble and glass, floral arrangements four feet wide. In the closets are thick terrycloth robes; we shower and gaze from the ninth floor to the manicured campus. The bill will be staggering. I think of my parents’ straitened lives, and my head churns the old mantra: I am not worthy, sorry, so sorry.

That we, in our sins,

receive the outpoured summer

is just possible.