Banked Passions (of a sort)

I started my public day yesterday in the dining room of a boutique hotel in downtown Nashville. Let me state publicly, so there is no misunderstanding, that the only reason for which I would stay in downtown Nashville in the first place is because there is some function scheduled there which I simply must attend and which begins at an ungodly hour of the morning. In the normal course of events, then, this practice requires me to be in Nashville at least quarterly for board meetings and a couple of times a year for judicial conferences. Having excused myself as being a conference attendee and not a common or garden tourist, I shall now move on to what I was considering as I cut up my bacon yesterday.

I have stayed in this particular hotel many times. It is the place this particular organization always puts me up the night before a board meeting. While the individual hotel rooms are remarkable for their sameness, the ground floor accommodations deserve a moment of note. The photo history lovingly preserved in the lobby by the decorating firm hired by the hotel chain explains that this building was originally a bank in the distant past (well, earlier in the last century anyway). There are charming black and white photos of the bank staff of that time standing proudly in the public areas of the ground floor; all looking as though they are quite pleased to be there. The building has twelve floors and I have no idea whether some or all of those above the first couple of floors were added later. A number of the surrounding buildings, which are of an age with this one, are no more than three or four floors tall. But back to the dining room.  I had taken what I considered meet* as my breakfast portion from the sensible, if Southern, buffet to my solitary table. There was a largish group of people there for some sort of meeting and they were congregated in the dining room also. I suspected them of being with a social services agency because, well, they just had that horrible “I-Know-What’s-Best-For-You” look about them. The men were slightly untidy and wore knitted ties (if, indeed, they wore ties at all) and the women were all wearing boots, jeans and sweaters with yards and yards of ethnic print scarves wound round their necks with the same casualness you would expect of a Russian missile launch. I was perfectly happy in my solitary splendor with my breakfast accoutrements arrayed about me like so much siege fortifications. The snatches of conversation (the ones you find yourself overhearing when you dine alone) confirmed most of my worst fears about this bunch. I also learned that two of the women at the next table diagonal to mine only washed their hair twice a week because it is thick and that the man with whom one of them shared her room has very fuzzy hair in the mornings. I am still pondering what to do with this intelligence. It also reminds me that large rooms can sometimes have remarkable acoustics.

As I was sitting in this room, actually enjoying my breakfast, I suddenly thought of another building very like this which had also caught my imagination. I was living on another planet back then and had the opportunity to visit Budapest while it was still under the direct, if not announced, political administration of the late Soviet Union. While in that ancient city, I had cause to go to a bank to change money, use the telephone, or some other such behavior one engaged in when one was, in fact, a tourist. The bank, which had either survived the depredations of the Nazis and the Soviets, or which had been renovated for capitol tourist consumption, was a truly lovely building with the high ceilings, marble everythings, and marvelous vertical expanses of glass that graced the fin de siècle period of building in European capitols. [As an aside, I note that I seem to have missed the class offered in the Department of History at the Central European University in Budapest, “Fin-de-siècle Cities in Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Empires. A Comparative Viewpoint.” Rats.] When I was growing up in coastal California, shortly after the demise of the Spanish empire, most of the banks I had any reason to frequent were of the variety that encouraged either queuing at an unappetizing teller window or driving alongside the “drive-thru.” I recall thinking that the Hungarian bank was simply the grandest thing I had ever seen. Of course, this was before I saw Gringotts Wizarding Bank  in the first installment of the Harry Potter films. However, neither the Budapest bank nor the hotel in Nashville featured any goblins while I was there. I have no idea whether the bank in Budapest is still there as a bank or if it has, like my little boutique hotel in Nashville, gone on to other things. But aren’t those spaces grand and glorious while they last?  They almost make you want to do something, just occasionally, other than online banking.

“Be careful, Tuppence, this craving for vulgar sensation alarms me." (Agatha Christie, Partners In Crime)

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* Middle English mete, from Old English gemǣte; akin to Old English metan to mete

First Known Use: 14th century