"All except we didn't have a potty," the woman replied glumly. "I vanted a sun bath dis morning."
"My dahling, you mean a pahtio," her husband corrected her.
"Dat's vot I said--a potty!" she snapped.
If the potty incident made me feel a little foolish, I got over it quickly. Since we have been in the motel business we have learned to take everything in our stride. There is always something happening. During a typical one-hour period, for instance, a man--a suave, superior creature--tried to talk us into selling or leasing to him part of our land, so that he could put up a cold fruit juice stand on the highway; a carpenter came to ask permission to measure the exterior of one of our cabins because, he said, his client wanted a house built just like it; and we were embroiled in the first stages of what was to be a bitter commercial battle between the local laundry we patronized, and a laundry in Beaumont, a town six miles away.
Grant and I have almost never left the motel together that something didn't happen. Once it was the truck that swerved off the highway and crashed into the garage of cabin 16; once it was a careless smoker who, having fallen asleep with a lighted cigarette in his hand, set the blankets on fire. Another time there was an enormous oil tanker, Mrs. Clark related, which turned sharply off the highway to avoid hitting a child, and came plummeting up to within fifteen feet of the office before the driver could stop it. Another time we were driving home from a short trip we had made, during which we had left Mrs. Clark in charge. As we approached the motel we began talking about how something always happened while we were gone, and wondering whether anything had happened this time.
And then we saw, beside the edge of the highway in front of the motel, what looked like the smoking remains of charred furniture and mattresses.
Grant couldn't get out of the car fast enough, to run inside and ask Mrs. Clark how bad the fire had been, and in which cabin or cabins.
It turned out, though, that there hadn't been a fire in our cabins at all. It had been a house trailer that had caught fire on the highway, and the Negro family to whom it belonged had stopped their car quickly--directly in front of the motel, as it happened--to detach the trailer from the car.
Even when we stay home, there are innumerable small tragedies occurring on the highway. Dogs and cats are run over frequently, and--interspersing the few really serious accidents, there are many minor ones. Although a little further into town there is a twenty-five-mile an hour speed limit, there is no speed limit in our immediate neighborhood. There should be, because of the many motels, restaurants, and other places of business that make a great deal of turning in and out of the swift lanes of traffic inevitable. The scream of brakes has become a familiar part of the daily refrain of life.
I had been promising Grandma for some time that I would invite her "boy" friend, Hellwig, out to Banning. At last we settled on the time--it had to be a Saturday night because of his work. Although he is past eighty, he still works half-days in a printing plant.