Is a 20 percent discount worth the humiliation?

The Lovely Mrs. Taylor and I just got back from vacation. We were gone only a week or so, but it was wonderful. Nice hotels, great meals, nothing but sunny skies the whole time. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?

And it would have been, save for one incident, an incident that—for me, at least—cast a pall over the entire trip. I blame Mrs. Taylor.

We were pulling into St. Ignace after crossing the Mackinaw Bridge (for us acrophobes, the scariest structure in the world). I was trying to get my knees to stop knocking while Mrs. T kept an eye out for inexpensive accommodations.

Now, hunting for a hotel with Mrs. Taylor is an object lesson in patience. She desires—no, requires—all the luxuries of a four-star resort, but at prices comparable to those charged at “Crazy Moe’s Transients Welcome Motel & Grill—Rooms Let by the Night or the Hour.” Therefore, in each new town several hotels must be visited before she’s satisfied that a decent room is going to cost over a hundred bucks after all.

We’d just made it across the bridge alive when Mrs. T shouted excitedly, “There’s one! Look!”

I looked. It was like any of a hundred other nice hotels we’d seen this trip.

“So?” I said.

“Look,” she repeated, pointing to the establishment’s lighted sign.

Rooms $49.95 and up, it read. They all say that, by the way, but they don’t really mean it. That elusive $49.95 room is located in the hotel basement behind the boiler and is available only to blue-eyed, one-armed triathletes visiting from Guatemala who have three forms of notarized documentation proving that they do, indeed, have only one arm.

Everyone else has to pay around a hundred bucks.

I was surprised that Mrs. Taylor hadn’t caught on to the scam yet.

“So?” I said again. “Are you a one-armed triathlete?”

“No, not that,” Mrs. T said. “What it says below.”

I looked at the sign again. In smaller letters, beneath the main sign, was a banner stating, “20 percent discount for seniors over 50.”

“We can get a deal!” Mrs. T enthused.

And we could, I realized. I am over 50, though just barely. But a senior? I haven’t been a senior since my last year of school, and that was the good kind of senior, the kind one actually looks forward to being.

The hotel sign was talking about the sort of senior who watches television ads for “Rascal” and “Hoveround” scooters with avid interest; who tunes in regularly for episodes of “Matlock” and “Murder, She Wrote”; who yells at neighborhood kids to get the hell off the front lawn, already!

To her credit, the girl at the reception desk didn’t take my word for it when I told her I was a geezer. She looked skeptical and made me show her my driver’s license. I could have kissed her, but she was younger than my daughter and might have taken it the wrong way.

The Lovely Mrs. Taylor, who won’t be a senior for nearly two decades, thought the whole thing was great fun and quite hilarious.

I have plenty to say about that, but later. Right now, I’ve got to go chase those kids off my lawn again.



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.