Griswold's Hotel

A story of a family and a hotel where they opened and closed a chapter of their lives.

Postcard of Griswold’s. I collected postcards as a child and picked this one up in 1981 when we stayed at the hotel. The tower of stairs is now an enclosed elevator shaft. the duck pond and bridge are a parking lot with a Buca di Beppo, a pinao bar, and a Trader Joe’s in it.

“I’m staying at the hotel that used to be Griswold’s”, I told my siblings. I had flown down to Claremont, California to visit my parents in their new assisted living/memory care apartments and help prepare their house for sale.

As a child, I thought Griswold’s Hotel was the height of luxury when my family stayed there in 1981. It was my twelfth summer, and my family had just moved from Ohio to Southern California. We stayed at the hotel while we waited for the moving van to arrive and we could move into our new home. Being between homes never looked so good.

The hotel had a mythical quality to it. It was the hotel where my father stayed when he was on one of his many business trips. The pool, where the four of us tried to spend every waking moment, playing (much to the other guests’ chagrin) hours of Marco Polo, was once the place where my father swam when he was away from us. Now we were playing in it!

This pool, so large, with fancy chairs and umbrellas surrounding it, was the place our father sat and called our mother when he was away. It was the place where, as we heard her caustically tell her friends after he called, she could hear the ice clinking in his drink, water splashing as he lounged by the pool. Meanwhile, she was in freezing Ohio with four children, under 8, all with ear infections, and a blizzard on the way. We all wished we were in California after those phone calls. And now we were.

We were swimming in Griswold’s pool. We were in California-a state most kids in the Midwest considered a dream vacation. We were going to live there! Our new house had a pool too! We would miss our friends, but we weren’t afraid because we had each other. The four of us always had each other.

Forty-one years later, I am back at Griswold’s, now a Doubletree Hotel. The pool looks smaller than I remember. I am staying there because, once again, my family is between homes.

While the house I am there to help pack up isn’t the house we moved to when we came to California, it was the home where I stayed when I visited, where we had holidays. Now, the only place for me to stay is a hotel.

There is a loneliness to staying alone in a hotel, it certainly isn’t the same as staying in my parents’ house. My father isn’t running around in his pajamas in the morning, the top tucked into the bottoms that are pulled up past his waist. My mother isn’t there to make me hash and eggs like she tried to do at least once whenever I visited them. The reality of what was happening to my family was starting to set in as I sat alone in a hotel room, eating a continental breakfast off a desk.

But then, one evening, before we began the huge task of dismantling my parents’ home, the four of us; my two sisters, my brother, and I, went out to dinner at the restaurant across the parking lot from the hotel.

We were all teary, tired, and weary from the stress of dealing with this point in our parents’ life, when one of my sisters said, “Let’s hold hands.”, and we did.

There we were, four adults, aged 49-55, sitting in a Mexican restaurant, holding hands. Maybe the other customers thought we were praying, but we weren’t, we were holding onto one another, trying to keep each other afloat, feeling nostalgic for a home that no longer exists, but also knowing the only home we really need is the one within that unbreakable circle of us holding hands.

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At the Check-Out Desk

Just a reminder that I lead the Prairie Pages Book Club for Modern Prairie. This month we’re discussing Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister. She’ll be at the virtual book club meeting and you are invited! We’ll be meeting on March 19 at 4-5pm PST and it’s a free event. I know it’s late notice to get the book read, but I also know most of you are voracious readers and I am confident you could get most of it read in a weekend. It’s a sweet book and I love interviewing authors because, as a writer, I learn so much! Sign-up here if you want to join the fun!