There is an undeniable melancholy to every roadside motel. Innkeeping in the middle of nowhere - usually in a beautiful setting - it is absolutely one of the saddest, loneliest, most thankless gigs in the world…
My cousin Wanda had survived WW2 in Poland, with blue eyes and blonde hair and false papers. She had worked with the Resistance and after the war got her two sisters to an Austrian Displaced Persons Camp. All their huge extended family had been killed in concentration camps. She fell in love with the American captain in charge of the Displaced Persons Camp, and agreed to marry him.
Which meant moving to Brooklyn and learning a new language.
Her son Stephen told me about the first time her husband, Jack drove himself and Wanda to the Catskills, where they were going for a summer Vacation. It was 1948.
As Jack and Wanda got out of New York, and drove into the places that people went to get away from the city in the summer, they passed roadside motel after roadside motel with big signs like that.
Eventually, Wanda said, “So, this Motel, he must be doing very well for himself.”
For the modern era, she is the definitive Egyptian queen, although she was descended from the Macedonians who ruled Egypt from the time of Alexander the Great. Black basalt, 146 cm tall. Ptolemaic Period, 1st century BC. Photograph: Hermitage Museum/Grimaldi Forum
