Hotel ruckus was smile-inducing

I seldom sleep very well in a hotel.
And it’s always harder to sleep on a Saturday night. That’s when hotels are at their noisiest.
We had flown up to Boston for Thanksgiving weekend, a chance to delight in our grandchildren and enjoy our twins and their husbands.
It wasn’t the first time we’d made this particular excursion, but usually we had stayed in the heart of the city. There was a quirky hotel we were fond of that had a great location when it came to public transportation. 
(In Boston, public transportation is everything. When visiting, it’s best not to find yourself behind the wheel of a car. If you do, you will regret it.)
This time around was different. Maggie and her husband Josh have bought a half-a-duplex condo in Watertown, while Emily and her husband Mike have bought a house in Waltham.
To save you the trouble of getting out your atlas, let me just say that both households are now much further away from the center than before. Boston’s a patchwork of distinct communities, but both Watertown and Waltham were too distant for our old favorite hotel.
Fair enough, I figured. We’d find someplace closer, and we did.
Was it a little short on Boston and New England charm? Yep. Step inside its doors and you could have been anywhere in the United States, maybe in any metropolitan city in the world.
But it worked, and it was close. (I was also going to say that it was cheap, but I would be lying. In Boston, nothing is cheap. Nothing.)
The room was nice. The bed was big, one of those Montana-sized kings that give you the impression of sleeping alone. 
The fact that there was a huge, noisy air-handling unit on the roof outside our window wasn’t exactly a treat. But it was one of those noises you can quickly adjust to when trying to sleep, sort of like highway noise or a distant freight train.
The same couldn’t be said about the noise from the hallway on Saturday night.
We’d had wonderful family gatherings on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and planned to have dinner on Dad at a restaurant on Sunday. But Saturday was the busiest day and night at the hotel.
For starters, there were more guests roaming the halls. And then there was the 40th reunion on the Class of 1976 of a Boston area high school. That involved its own set of noises.
At any rate, settling in for the night, I was more than a little conscious of the conversations and occasional shouts in the hallway. Connie was fighting the beginnings of a cold — a hazard when interacting with toddlers — and had a clogged head.
I wasn’t so lucky.
And then I heard it, a man’s voice out in the hall.
“Susan,” he said, clearly exasperated. “Susan, this is ridiculous. Open the door. I’m standing in the hall in my underwear and people are coming this way.”
The bed shook with my giggling. “What’s the matter?” asked my wife.
“Nothing,” I said. Nothing if you’re not out in the hall in your underwear.
I told her the details the next morning and shared them with the kids later, wondering whether this had anything to do with the reunion of the Class of 1976.
But then Monday morning, as we waited in the lobby for our son-in-law Josh to give us a lift to the airport, I found myself eavesdropping again.
A couple in their mid-seventies, looking grumpy, was checking out. He had a bald head shaped like an artillery shell. She was tiny and skittish.
Inevitably, it seemed, artillery head started squabbling over the bill. He questioned the charge for the room’s mini-bar and turned to his wife.
“Susan, do you know anything about this?” he said.
And I could not help but smile. And smile. And smile.
The good news is that he wasn’t standing there in his underwear.