FREEBIES
/
My mother was not a common thief. She was discriminating, more like a careful collector — if not a consummate curator — of items she viewed as “take-able.” In short, she liked freebies.
Back in the late 1950s, the cutlery at our vacation home in New York state featured stainless steel forks, knives and spoons etched with “Eastern Air Lines” and “Pan Am.” Our white terrycloth bath towels featured “The Claridge Hotel” (apparently snuck into Mom’s suitcase during family forays to Atlantic City). Mom sipped her morning coffee from a cream-colored mug, filched from Trenton’s Hotel Hildebrecht. She poured her evening margarita into a glass labeled “The Stork Club.”
It wasn’t like she didn’t have plenty of Waterford, Wedgewood and Gorham silver in the dining room breakfront, either.
Mom’s sister, Aunt Rosy, was equally light-fingered. During brunch in a lovely Philadelphia restaurant years ago, I watched my dear aunt help herself to a huge handful of Smuckers jam packages, then stuff them and umpteen envelopes of Sweet & Low into her navy blue purse. No shame whatsoever. I must have looked at her aghast because she whispered, “That’s why they are on the table, Val. They’re free.”
Two days ago, my good friend Carla Perkins called. “Val, I just found an ashtray you lent me some time ago and I’d like to return it to you.” (Ashtray? I gave up smoking 25 years ago!) The white ashtray is three inches wide, trimmed in golf leaf, and displays the name SPAGO, Wolfgang Puck’s flagship restaurant in Beverly Hills, California. I sorta remember stealthily slipping it into my purse that evening. Why I lent it to Carla is a mystery, but I’m happy to have it back in my “collection.”
Because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
My favorite spoon-rest on my stovetop is a white ashtray from La Voile d’Or in St. Jean Cap Ferrat, a spectacular hotel where Mr. Wonderful and I spent a few days while visiting France one July. Another treasured memento is a heavy bronze door key to Room 453 at the Hotel Paris, “lifted” probably during that same French vacation.
Believe me, I have more swag — a wooden coaster from a charming hotel in Melbourne, Australia, numerous vials of shampoo and conditioner from the University Club in New York City, a purse-size tube of hand lotion from the Royal Poinciana Golf Club in Naples, Florida. But during a trip to Paris this past Spring with my daughter and granddaughter, I realized that freebies had fizzled.
We stayed at the ultrachic Hotel Melia Paris Vendome. You would THINK there might be a wine glass, an embroidered washcloth, even a shoehorn with the hotel’s name. NOTHING! Believe me, I combed that room with the daring and deft of a CIA agent. Even the door key was one of those plastic cards which didn’t have the name of our lodging. So disappointing.
I’ve never felt guilty about snatching any of this this stuff. I felt I was giving the place free advertising. Or maybe just exhibiting a flawed gene inherited directly from Mom and Aunt Rosy.
