Lessons About Life From An Aging Motel

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

A brief moment of sunshine today

Some things and people age well. Some don’t

Today is my last day of a week on the Coast. The morning dawned grey-green, the Pacific moody and receding. The bent tree just outside my motel window is full of birds. The view is spectacular; there are jagged rocks just off the coast, and the angle of the building sets the viewer up for perfect sunsets every single night.

At one point, this motel was primo. The setting alone is magnificent.

The owners, Ester and Lee, named the place the Esterlee. The cottages and motel rooms have provided a playground for kids and families and their pets since 1949.

Five years ago my friend JC clued me in to this place, and I began coming for five to seven days at a time. Fell in love with the staff, didn’t mind the aging wood, the creaking floors or the fireplaces that groaned when you turned on the gas flames.

You could sit with your feet at the fire, your chair angled west, and you could just watch sunset after sunset. You could just think, surrounded by so much beauty. It was a solid 2. 5+ star place made spectacular by the location and the fact that there are fireplaces in all the rooms.

The warm reception, the nice housekeeping staff all went a long way towards making any blemishes or flaws in the place invisible. It was old, dated, but the views, well. The one thing you couldn’t screw up.

I spent a lot of time healing from surgeries here.

When I stay at a motel, I strip the beds, fold everything up, clear out the trash into bags and likely save the housekeeping staff a good bit of work. The last time I was here was over Christmas ‘22, so I did even more to make sure the staff could get to their families.

This is what we do when we love a place.

Then things changed. Ester and Lee wanted to retire. They sold to New Management, and just about everything about the place changed but the views.

You couldn’t book your favorite room. When I called, asking for a particular room that cost more for the view, I was told that I would have to accept “whatever room was available at the time.”

Huh? The whole point of calling ahead to get your favorite room….never mind.

I decided to give the place one more shot, as I had some plans change. I chose the Coast instead of a longer trip, and thought, why not?

I found out why not.

Much of the front-facing staff, who had made the place welcoming and wonderful, had scattered, at least the ones I’d come to know and love.

Some of the fireplaces were replaced. The replacements aren’t an improvement.

Nobody tends the gardens. That means weeds choke out the flowers and have overtaken the flower beds which once hugged the cottages with hydrangeas.

And the service?

I had the audacity to arrive half an hour before check in. When I walked into the reception area, what a reception. A hatchet-faced woman met me, holding her vacuum like a Valkyrie holds a sword at the ready, unsmiling, and demanded,

What the hell are you doing here? Her unsmiling look said.

What she actually said with zero warmth, was

What can we do for you? clearly not meaning a word.

Well, how about allowing me to check in, you angry fishwife, since I’m about to spend $1200 here for a week, although I sure as hell would prefer to cancel it and go somewhere else after THAT greeting .

Didn’t say it. Wish I had. Thought it. Was told to come back in half an hour.

I worked for Walt Disney World. Grew up in Florida, hospitality central. I know something about the industry. I’ve taught sales and customer service for years. This was appalling. I don’t care what this woman is so angry about. She has no business being in a customer-facing position.

That wasn’t hospitality. All she had to do was check me in and I’d head out for a few minutes. Long drive to get there, melting groceries in the car, GET OUT OF HERE UNTIL WE’RE READY TO LET YOU IN.

All you had to do was smile for Christ’s sake. Like the place was happy to see a customer about to drop $1200 for staying with them.

I very seriously considered cancelling and going home.

Didn’t. Again, long drive, groceries, melting frozen stuff.

And just to be clear, had the frowning, angry woman I am referring to as “hatchet face” smiled, every bit of that impression would have immediately dissipated. Such is the power of something very simple that is completely free.

So I read for a while in a nearby parking lot, checked in and set up the place.

The views almost make up for it.

You’re handed a piece of paper that says WELCOME and then gives you a long laundry list of all the things you can’t do, that they aren’t going to provide you, which further underscores that anyone spending money at this place probably needs to have their head examined.

Like a warning about how much more you’re going to be charged if (these are my words, but the message is strongly implied) YOU DON’T GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE BY 11 AM.

My goodness. How nice to have you here.

DON’T YOU BLOODY DARE SHOW UP MINUTES EARLY AND GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE ON TIME OR ELSE.

Of course that wasn’t all. The hot water didn’t work in the kitchen. The sink in the toilet didn’t drain. There are lots of burned-out bulbs in the overhead lights.

The shower head was one of those awful cheap things that sprays in all directions so that it wastes water and you can’t wash your hair properly.

You’re supplied with a tiny bottle of Dawn which has been so diluted with water that it hardly bubbles. It’s so thinned out with water it IS water. I actually used the bar soap from the toilet to get the dishes clean.

And if you call in about the plumbing?

Four phone calls over the course of two days (because nobody would call me back), a very irritated operator who never bothered to report the issue to management). That will annoy you for sure.

Finally a kind person, a holdover from pre-New Management, tells me that maintenance isn’t available for another three days.

So if your toilet backs up, tough shit.

Initially I was in fact both kind and patient, I understand such issues. I had already started heating water up on the stove to use for dishes. I’m used to camping. Had someone simply bothered to tell me that I had to wait a few days it wouldn’t have been an issue.

What’s an issue is to call in repeatedly and then…nothing. Especially when that staffer is clearly annoyed at you for pointing out your plumbing issues.

Just not used to front desk people with the manners of a grizzly bear with hemorrhoids.

You’re supplied with a broom that unscrews as you use it. You have to sweep because you bring in sand, and my dog sheds. I like to keep ahead of all that so I sweep daily. Five or six times, daily, in fact.

You can’t use the dust pan because it’s broken at both ends of the flat part and of course is useless. Of course it is.

So I sweep all that sand and hair into the hallway.

Fuggit. Let vacuum lady take care of it.

The kitchen shears are so dull they might, might, cut butter at room temperature.

The maintenance man, also a holdover, is a nice, hardworking guy who can’t keep up with everything. He fixed the kitchen hot water, changed out the shower head and fixed the sink in the bathroom.

And reported that the operator who got irritated and never bothered to report the maintenance issues was a known problem on the property to all. She needs to be fired, along with hatchet face, who “greeted” me at the door.

When the help complain to the guest about another employee, that’s bad. That means that the guests take out their anger on the poor guy who shows up after the guests have been abused by the staff.

What’s funny is that some moke set up text messaging which made things worse. To wit: shortly after I checked in a text asked if I needed anything. I texted back that I had plumbing problems.

I immediately got a return text informing me, effectively, well, nobody’s available. What if the place was flooding?

Gee, sorry, wait until Wednesday.

A bad outfit will punish the employees for talking to the guest about a problem employee. A good outfit will get rid of the bad apple instead and fix the problem.

The maintenance man, a polite and happy guy determined to do the right thing, is a far better ambassador for this property than the vacuum-wielding witch who checked me in.

You are spending perhaps $100-150 a night for a cottage with a kitchen. The photos, like all real estate, don’t show you the appalling state of the wood, the crying need for repairs, the weedy grounds.

This is what things really look like.

Bathroom cabinets

The inside of the microwave which looks like, well. I’ll leave it there.

You get it. Most likely much of this was present the first many times I stayed here for a week at a time, but I didn’t notice or care.

Why? Because the staff made me feel welcome. When you are greeted warmly, you feel good. When you feel good, you ignore stuff that otherwise might annoy.

What matters is that million-dollar view, not the aging motel.

In such cases, the motel is quaint, not falling apart.

However, and this is my point:

Annoy the guest right up front and we will by god see EVERYTHING wrong with the place.

I’m going to be sharing this article with management, who likely doesn’t give a damn. Truth, the cliff this place sits on is being swiftly eroded way, so serious investments for its future are futile.

That said, hiring people with a modicum of decency would go a long way towards making it profitable for as long as the place clings to the cliff, until Nature takes its course.

What did I learn?

A lot. Not much about Ester Lee, which is just another perfect example of a place that got purchased by people who are, apparently, either clueless about what makes a person feel welcome, or the angry customers haven’t told them the truth.

What all this invited me to consider was how we inhabit our aging bodies.

Photo by Jeet Khatri on Unsplash

When we don’t take care of ourselves in ways which allow us to feel loved, confident, and cared for, we can get bitter and angry.

When we abuse our bodies, do terrible damage to ourselves with poor lifestyle choices and end up in pain, we can end up twisted and frantic.

We can, but just as with this aging motel, we don’t have to. As with most things, it’s a choice.

As we grow old, our gardens are tended less often, our innards get a little rusty and maybe our teeth end up in a cup at night.

Maybe we stoop a little, maybe the fat on our bodies hikes to places it didn’t used to reside, maybe our face becomes a road map of wrinkles.

Maybe all kinds of things have changed, and we are unrecognizable from our glorious youth.

How we inhabit the body we have through the years speaks to our character and our values.

So when the person inside that aging form is gracious, grateful, happy to still be alive, generous with their kindness and patience, we tend not to see any of the rest of it.

We see the million-dollar view of their humanity.

Photo by Laurin Grether on Unsplash

Which will you be?

Let’s not be the angry witch with the vacuum cleaner-as-weapon-of-destruction, keeping away those GD ANNOYING customers who had the hubris to show up thirty minutes early after a very long day on the road.

Let’s be the million-dollar view. It absolutely is a choice.

Let’s play.

***

With gratitude to those remaining fine employees of The Esterlee who continue to uphold the previous standard, and thanks for the memories. I’ll be finding another place to say on the Oregon Coast.

Thanks to my readers and subscribers for your support and your comments.