9/11

Twenty years ago I was a weekly newspaper columnist for the Racine Journal Times. One year during the holiday season, I wrote four weekly columns interviewing the main characters of the traditional Christmas story: a shepherd, an innkeeper, a traveler, and a mother. Of course, since this is Wisconsin, these are our times, and I’m not a very traditionally religious person - these characters arrived at an angle. 

But today is 9/11 and this interview with an Innkeeper still works. 

…

December 10, 2005 / What's Up at the Inn?                              

This week I met "innkeeper" Monica H. Monica, who is manager at the local Microtel Inn and Suites, is slight, has warm brown eyes, and smiles when I address her as an innkeeper. She's just Lutheran enough to get the joke.

I ask her why she picked this career. 

"I really like spending my day with people and in this job we serve people who are either on vacation, or at least, when they are here they aren't at work. We have guests who've stayed here off and on for years. We get to know them; we ask about their kids and they ask about ours. It's enjoyable to work with people from so many different places.

"The other day, for example, the printer at our front desk stopped working. The guest waiting for her receipt, instead of having a fit that we were delaying her, said she worked with a similar printer at her job so she came around to our side of the counter and fixed ours!"

I ask about memorable guests.

"Well, we had one woman with a delightful voice who called the front desk every day for something or another. The thing was, she'd lived here years without ever coming out of her room! When she finally moved, many of us who had talked to her sort of came by the front area as she was leaving, just to see what she'd looked like. She was very small and, obviously, very pale."

Innkeepers are the ones on premises when we are away from our home. They get to observe how we act when our mothers aren't watching. 

Ms. Hanson laughs. "I worked several years at a classy hotel in Madison. The place had a beautiful, dimly lit bar on one of its top floors where successful business people and politicians would relax at the end of their long working days. I tell you, that was the place where I saw people act in, um, tacky ways. You can tell a lot about people by how they behave when they are not at home."

I was curious about Monica's experience on 9/11, thinking it might have been a powerful day to work in a place that caters to travelers. "I wasn't working in hospitality then. I was a sales rep for a big company and my husband was an investment banker. We were living in Manhattan."

The lightheartedness has gone out of the room.

"I traveled constantly for that job and that day I was in Detroit. When I came out of a meeting you could feel that something had happened. Someone told me a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. My husband worked for Lehman Brothers, an investment firm across the street from the WTC. 

"I tried to call him on my cell but service was out. 

"It took four hours to learn, via my mother in Minnesota, that Paul had contacted her through his Blackberry. He was all right but he'd been evacuating his building when the second plane flew into the second tower. He saw things that are too terrible to say.

"I didn't know what to do since I was in Detroit with a rental car. I thought maybe I should just go to my next meeting in Columbus, Ohio. I started driving south.

"In northern Ohio I realized I couldn't see the road because I was crying so hard. I pulled off and found a motel.

"I called my parents. They asked what I needed. I said I didn't want to be alone. They got in their car right then and started driving. They arrived at my motel the next morning.

"My husband found a friend in New Jersey who lent him a car. He drove through the night and got to the motel a few hours after my parents.

"I had been falling apart when I was alone. Then the people I love came to me. None of us have been the same since. We realized what we had."

Within months Monica and her husband quit their high-pressure jobs and moved back to the Midwest. They now have a daughter and a life they are spending together.

Innkeepers have always been witnesses to two strong human stories.

When people are far from home they can cheat if they want. Many do. 

But others, away from home, understand that what they need most is to get back to the ones they love.