Where to begin…
I had such a great weekend. Went to a soiree at Holly’s on Friday, and I only stayed until nine. Got the dogs, went home, and went to bed (Just like a responsible adult )
Saturday, did something like four loads of laundry. Went to a birthday party at the hotel (partying in a hotel room, just like we don’t allow guests to do) and left after only a glass and a half of wine, a shot of champagne, much deep-fried food, and a little under two and a half hours (Just like a responsible adult)
Had a great Monday today (Perhaps not being hungover contributed)
Diane had returned from vacation. Completely wiped, and immediately overwhelmed. I loaded her up with chocolate (gift from my recently departed group) and some kind of their special herbal elixer that cracked me up because the label read, “Relaxation, in one shot.” Yeah, like this is even possible.
When I left tonight, she was wearing earphones for her Ipod and had the most vacuous stare on her face. “No vacation,” she announced, “goes unpunished.”
Casey wasn’t happy with her because she kept blowing off what happened on Friday, mainly because she hadn’t been there, so ‘it didn’t apply to her’. Wow. Case took offense to that, saying it applied to everyone, because basically, there but for the grace of God, we’re all dead.
It was Friday afternoon that the man in full military attire, carrying an assault rifle, was driven out of our hotel by a very wonderful security person (ex-street cop), and what the guy had been trying to do was to get to the roof. Obstensibly, if you consider the fact that he was more than a little bit armed and loaded for some very big bear with all the rounds he was wearing, because he wanted to check out the view, or – and it’s a very big ‘Or’ – he wanted to pick off a bit of humanity person by person. I finally got out about four-thirty. The cops had already shot him dead, right there on the bus turn around lot. I still cross myself (call me a die hard Lutheran convert, ex-wannabe serious Catholic or whatever, but it’s comforting, you know, to think you might not live to see tomorrow, but you crossed yourself so there, take me to the Which Other Side I’m Headed To) every day when I pull into the parking garage. I mean, somebody died there. Right there, by the new shrubbery we had put in last year.
Ew.
And scary as hell.
I guess I missed the bomb scare. That happened right afterward. I guess by that time, I was busy at the boutique market by my condo, picking up a couple of baquettes and some cheese dip and spinach dip for the soiree, and Holly said later, I brought the best food ever.
For some weird reason, that made me feel better.
Maybe it was just great to be one of eight women, not all of us really aquainted (but that’s the point of her monthly get togethers, you go there and you get to know new friends) and realize, wow, we didn’t get shot today. So it’s a good day.
Sanya…years back, I worked with her. She’s moved on, but that night she showed up with a couple of magnums of champagne, and although it was first expressed in Swedish (as most things are, at Holly’s house) it was later translated into English, about the time Sanya popped the cork on the first magnum, the force of the cork blowing off and richocheting off the ceiling nearly taking out a skylight, “Sanya has her own apartment!” and we all toasted her new beginning, because we’d all, in one form or another, been there. We’d all lost someone. Or given up on someone. And we’d started over. And the first and most important part of that was finding a place we could call home.
I thought about Owen, then. He was probably on the beach as I thought, toes buried in the sand. As it turned out, he called me later. He did make the beach, you know, in between rounds of golf, and had found my seashells. That’s all I ever ask that he brings me from the beach, and when I talked to him tonight he wasn’t yet satisfied with the ones he found. “They’re shells,” he said. “I want to find one with color.”
Well, OK. It gives him a mission.
I left him a huge bag of sugar and carb-laden chips, donuts, chocolate bars, and every variety of M and M’s known to man courtesy of my departed group on the dining room table, when I picked up the dogs tonight. Basil, because I always pick her up and bring her home. His dog, the pocket sized dog, the purse dog, because he’s had so much fun here, for the past weekend. Kind of like Doggy Disneyland, is how I put it. And I’ve enjoyed it, too. Having his mini-dog here, I’ve managed to put away all the laundry I did last week when I worked all week. For heaven’s sake, I couldn’t say that without him. I made no progress until he was here, his mini-Chewbacca Yorkie face staring at me from the foot of my bed, his stump of a tail wagging. So perhaps, in some entirely weird twist of fate, I owe this little dog that I can finally see the top of my dresser, and feel like I have an actual bedroom. Stranger things, I suppose, have happened. I’m just not entirely sure when.
Anyway, it’s been a great weekend, but back to this whole I’m Not Dead Yet thing.
Owen, five hundred miles away, was concerned. I was fine, I told him, but again, every the practical one, made him promise that…if the situation ever evolved (it won’t; this is once in a lifetime stuff) that I wasn’t OK, he had to promise to come and get Basil. And take her home. And love her forever, because the dog is…well, she’s everything to me. If you know me, you get that. If you don’t, just take my word on it.
“How’s this,” he said, “I’ll just come get both of you.”
That’s Owen. If it’s ever something he doesn’t want to happen, it just doesn’t.
Not an entirely bad way to go through life.
The guy…the Shooter, if you will…he was twenty eight years old, AWOL from the war, you know, and he’d actually made a reservation to stay at the hotel, but cancelled it. Well, gosh. First, I’m thinking, “why would we let him make a reservation?” and then it dawns on me, we are in the hotel business, he did have a Visa or whatever card, and that’s kind of what we do.
Then he cancels the reservation (for whatever reason for that, let me just say, “Yay!”)
He could have opened fire inside, and he waited until he was outside. So, OK. Thank you, God, and thank you to whatever was going through his mind. I mean, a shooting in your parking lot, you can recover from. A shooting INSIDE your establishment and you’re going to be looking at a very low occupancy rate for a while.
So you shrug it off. That’s what we do. That’s what we’re supposed to do. Still, it doesn’t make it feel much better. I mean, it still feels strange. Very strange. Very odd, and kind of like, “can’t we just come up with a new policy, and say, like, you’re welcome to the hotel, but if you’re wearing camouflage in public areas, we’re going to ask you to leave?”
Sure.
Effective.
And today the threat level is Orange.
(Hmm…I wonder if my purple twinset will go with that, or I ought to just throw on a go-with-everything-black-blazer)
You just don’t think about it.
A couple of guests saw him in the parking garage, at the elevator. They asked him what he was doing there and he replied, “I’m on a training mission.”
They thanked him for his service.
I would have done the same thing.
You just don’t know.
Odd and ironic twist, but today on the site visit, one of the people (contract signers) said she had two grandsons who had been in the war. “What they don’t tell you,” she said, dramatically hovering for emphasis over her chef’s salad, (note: I detest people who order a chef’s salad because it comes with no appetizer, therefore I can’t properly start on my appetizer until after her salad arrives, at which time my smoked tomato soup is beyond cold), “is that they medicate them. You know, to keep them hopped up and ready for whatever it is they do over there. Then they come home, and they’re not on these drugs, and…”
Thank God about this time we changed the subject to how fast I could come up with diagrams for their meeting space because they needed them, preferably, yesterday.
I thought about Trent.
I was just trying to figure it out, and I guess I whirled that around in my mind for maybe a minute or maybe ten, however long it took me to nod and smile and hide the grimace that wanted to come out that we could spend what was supposed to be a working lunch, you know, talking about our medicated troops…instead of looking at meeting space and figuring out the winter program, because at that moment, that’s all I really wanted to do. Because sometimes (all the time), figuring out how many people, if three per eight foot table, will fit in one third of a ballroom, is much more comforting than contemplating some AWOL twenty eight year old who came thisclose to ending my life and many others on Friday, and chose not to.
It never really made the news that he was in the hotel.
“It wasn’t germane,” Owen explained, in the calm, rational, facts-only tone reserved to those who once made their living in television news.
Yes, I knew that.
What was germane was that he shot at a cop, and the cops shot back (all twenty of them, did we mention that? I guess they hit him at least a half dozen times…) and that’s the story and the news is sticking to it.
And that’s all good at the end of the day, because I happen to work in that building, and that hotel is a huge part of my life.
I’m glad he didn’t fire off even one shot, inside.
Yet, I’m sorry for him. Because I think the same guy who died from one (or six?) gunshot wounds in the parking lot I’ll see every day when I go to work was as lost as the guy who once threw pasta at the ceiling of my rental house to see if it was done yet. Neither make sense to me, yet in an odd way, I respect them both for being where they had to be (Iraq/hell/Afghanistan/take your pick they’re all the same thing) so I could continue to do what I do: Worry about how many people, three per eight foot, I can fit into my ballroom, instead of gosh, does this Burka make my butt look big?
Both of them, if you want my humble opinion, would have been better served to have keeled over in old age, instead.
In a perfect world.
And that, as if we haven’t yet noticed, isn’t exactly what we’re living in.
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