How often do hotels refurbish or do they all look the same?  I met someone in the lobby of a hotel in which I had stayed, okay, 26 years ago.  Nothing about it looked the slightest bit familiar .  Look, I grew up poor and only remember one hotel from before college (we never stayed in them)—the one I remember was a place we stayed on a family trip to Washington DC.  Ironically, I had a stuffed elephant toy with me on that trip.  With the career upgrade to professional and conference attendance, stays at hotels became more common, although they’re still somewhat infrequent.  Conference organizers entice with luxury hotels in major cities.  Some remain in memory.  Most don’t.

I know hotels pay a lot to decorate and brand, yet the places of the monied seem anodyne.  This hotel could be just about anywhere and will eventually blend into that haze of places somehow very alike that cost many hundreds of dollars to stay.  I might’ve stayed here before.  Maybe not.  This lobby doesn’t look familiar but the street outside does.  When I stayed here in 1999 [check] my wife and daughter were able to come.  Not being an editor, we’d been to the New England Aquarium that day and my daughter wanted a seahorse rubber ball as a souvenir.  On the way to this hotel she dropped it and it bounced into Tremont Street.  In a poor object lesson, I ran after it.  I wasn’t hit by a car, but my doing so traumatized my daughter enough that she still won’t talk about it as an adult.  That’s how I know we stayed here before.

When I visited Boston for work I 2012, I stayed in a hotel I remember but whose name I do not.  It’s never been a conference hotel or I’d choose it.  It was a bit run down, but it had character.  I don’t even know if it’s still there.  Cities change.  Some parts of Boston are unrecognizable since I lived here.  Even the hotel in which I’m staying (which is nice enough, except for the loud music that suddenly starts at 2 a.m.) used to be a school.  I suppose that’s appropriate for a hotel used as an educational conference venue.  Generations of young people were once educated where I’m trying to sleep as the room shakes with someone else’s rock beat.  I may remember this hotel as a place where sleep fled, or I may find it fading into that space where all conference hotels merge even as a poignant thought arises that nothing ever remains the same.