Cobblings from My Memories

I recently stumbled across this photo on my phone. Upon first glance, you'd assume this was taken in a bathroom from a hotel. More specifically, a Hampton Inn. That's what it says right there on the towel, right?

Well you'd be wrong. That towel is in my bathroom back home in Louisville. And it's not alone. There's probably 10 or so more towels exactly like that, from hotels all over this great land of ours (more specifically, the route between Louisville and New Jersey).

I don't know how to describe it other than to say my family loved taking mementos from our vacations. My father's favorite thing was taking hotel towels. I'm not saying we were the Bonnie and Clyde family of Kentucky. No gunplay or violence. For one damn reason or another, we ended up with a whole washroom filled with towels from vacation hotels. There's no better explanation than that.

Once on a trip to Florida my dad convinced me to steal a dinner plate from a restaurant just because it was shaped like a fish and I thought it was cool. I don't think I have that plate anymore, but I'll always remember how funny it was to be talked into stealing dinnerware from a seafood restaurant when I was 20 years old. That's the weird things we did on our family vacations. Malice or ill will was never part of it, and we didn't go into vacations thinking we'd snatch a towel.

It'd just happen. You're a family of five crammed into a hotel room and when you wake up to leave everything just gets thrown into luggage and the occasional towel made it in. It started happening so often that we all got a chuckle out of it, and I'll always be secretly convinced my dad did it on purpose as a joke. That was the kind of guy he was, teasing my mom when we returned home, "Don't throw away that towel that's a remembrance of our trip!" Mom would roll her eyes, fold it up and toss it on the basement shelf with the 15 other ones. Good times.