PAD Day 2: Ode to Motels

 Today's prompts:

Write Better Poetry: Write a "happy" and/or "sad" poem.

NaPoWriMo: Write a "platonic love poem" to a person or thing, Address them/it as in a letter and include three memories of interacting with it. 

Poetry Super Highway: Use the Mirriam Webster website's "Time Travel" feature and pick any year. Use some of the words that were coined in that year in a poem.

I didn't do much with the rather generic prompt from Write Better Poetry (though I guess it would qualify as a "happy poem), but I wrote a "platonic love" ode to one of the things from the Mirriam-Webster list of new words from 1951 (the year I was born). It's the title of the poem, but I also included other "new words" from the list: cable TV, church key, dayglow, flab, home fries, launching pad, meat-and-potatoes, Murphy's Law, nit-picking, shoe-leather, truck stop, and the word that seemed created that year just for me, nerd.

Motor Inn
 
O, oasis on the highway,
or just off of it,
you beckoned my family
with promises of vacancies,
air-conditioning and cable TV.
 
Once the red-and-blue shields
of the interstate signs went up,
you became more vital,
even if you showed years of wear.
 
With a clean bed, if a little lumpy,
a TV— sometimes even color—
and light-blocking curtains,
you were all we needed to crash in the evening
and use you as next morning’s launching pad.
 
Sometimes breakfast was included—
powdered eggs, home fries, shoe-leather bacon.
The place may have doubled as a truck stop,
the long-haul drivers, gritty and scowling,
meat-and-potatoes men eating at the counter.
 
One summer we stayed near the Jersey shore,
at a dayglow-decorated motel.
Despite the beach a mile away,
my parents donned swimsuits (flab be damned)
and frequented the pool, while I maintained
my nerd status, reading Asimov from a lounge chair,
drinking Coke from a bottle that still had
to be opened with a church key.
 
You served me well too, when I grew up
and took my own family on the road.
Sometimes Murphy’s Law was in effect,
and we couldn’t seem to find the perfect place,
not that we were nit-picking or anything.
 
One night we stayed at a place in Miinnesota
that my wife said reminded her of
that creepy lodge on Twin Peaks.
We didn’t sleep well that night.
I dreamed of a dwarf talking backwards.
 
But all in all, you made the journey easier,
and tried your best to make us feel at home,
even when we couldn’t find the ice maker,
and the king bed was really a queen.