Check out H(M)otel 128

Oh-my-God.

Talk about traveling in time. When I saw this I was "Little Rosie" again, as in the "Rose is Rose" comic strip, about eight years old and watching the world from the right-side backseat of our black 1958 Chevrolet Impala (oh-so-imaginatively dubbed "Blackie").

My dad's youngest sister had married a man who was in the home construction field. Later in the 70s when the housing boom died in New England they moved down to Maryland, then to Florida. But at this particular time, the early Sixties, they lived in Peabody, Massachusetts along with their adopted daughter. My dad's youngest brother worked with him at the time, and he, his wife, and his son, a couple of years older than myself, lived nearby in Beverly. Before my mom got a part-time job to supplement our income and we could go to more "touristy" places, our yearly vacation consisted of spending a week with each family.

Each household had its own charms. Dad's brother lived in a place that was right on the street, like photos you see of English homes: a sidewalk, a step, a door, and you are in the house. The land sloped down in the back of the property, so you had to descend a long wooden staircase to the back yard to play with the English springer spaniel, Jeff, who ate Cocoa Puffs for breakfast and was that great miracle to an allergic kid, a pet dog! His wife didn't buy groceries at any old neighborhood store like we did: she shopped at an "exotic" supermarket called an "IGA." Dad's sister had a modern ranch house with radiant heat in the floor--so nice to pad on warm floors in the morning!--and a refrigerator built directly into the cabinets (it seemed so odd to find the milk right next to the cabinet the cereal was kept in). But the big hit here was the big inground pool, which my uncle seemed to clean more than he swam in. Both aunts took us to that most exciting of all places, a real shopping mall--oh, not enclosed in those days, but a mall just the same, with all those "foreign" Boston stores: Jordan Marsh, Filenes, Marshalls. My very first tricycle came from Jordan Marsh.

Aside from vacations, though, every month or two we'd wake up early on a Sunday morning and "go to Massachusetts." Originally this was a longer drive before Interstate 95 was finished. Dad would swear all the way to Dedham because U.S. 1 was clotted with small towns, traffic lights, and "Sunday drivers." And there was the big glittering attraction of Jolly Cholly's amusement park in North Attleboro, with its huge clown logo, enough to leave a youngster with eyes big as those proverbial saucers pleading "Can we come here some time?"

Dedham was a relief because that's when you reached Route 128 (otherwise known as "the New England Circumferential Highway"--don't worry, no one actually called it that). It was one of the first freeways in the area and once you got on you didn't have to worry about a traffic light (except for one stretch of road almost to Peabody). Being on 128 was almost like being home. We'd get on at Exit 63 and I would spend the time counting up to Exit 32, which was where we got off. We passed all the towns with their wonderful English-sounding names: Burlington, Dedham, Lexington, Concord, Needham, Wakefield, Wrentham. Dad's little joke was "Needham? Just Dedham or Wrentham!" which was high humor to a small child. We passed tempting places like big drive-in theatres and Pleasure Island, the big, big amusement park that had live stage shows with favorite celebrities--Lassie, the Lone Ranger, Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody had appeared there.

The H(M)otel 128 was the sign that you had really "arrived" at 128; it was set right on the intersection of U.S. 1 and Route 128. At that point I had never stayed in a motel that I remembered; we'd gone to Florida when I was three, but all I remember was being hot on the train and playing in the sand, not the motel. And I'd never stayed at an honest-to-God hotel which of course had fantastic things like bellboys and a fancy restaurant and elevators and big, long hallways with moulding and wallpaper and carpeting, like the places rich bachelors lived on TV. What now looks hideously dated, with cookie-cutter pseudo futuristic furniture and bad color combinations, was back then a glimpse of opulent paradise and modernity, of that other world out there that only existed in the square boxed screen of the television, and the gateway to adventure west and north of Boston as well.

Thanks for the memory, Mr. Lileks...

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 4:07:00 PM

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