Pocket Dispatch from Downtown Cincinnati
Leisure for parents can be defined as simply as spending time away from structured time. For a significant wedding anniversary, or even a visit without special occasions, children stay with grandparents and the generation in the middle goes out to remind themselves what it’s like to do nothing in particular on purpose.
On this latest occasion, we booked a night in a hotel in Cincinnati, a city of biographical significance to my in-laws and to my wife in her infancy, but otherwise foreign to me. We explored on foot through a hillside neighborhood called Mount Adams that overlooks the Ohio River and evokes San Francisco via New England. Skinny rowhouses with bold pastel accents reach three or four floors but look just large enough for a family of four, like trippy Easter baskets crowded on a clearance shelf.
After drinking coffee and meandering for an hour or so, we drove downtown, shopped garages for reasonable overnight parking, and walked through an attached complex of office, retail, and another hotel before reaching the street and rounding a couple corners to our own.
The air was damp and unseasonably warm for late December. The ground was wet and gritty from melting snow and ice mixed with dirt from the construction happening everywhere. Cincinnati is an American downtown whose blight rubs shoulders with renewal everywhere. Modern public transit and high concept art spaces wind through blocks of vacant storefronts and the occasional deserted department store. But everywhere there are people turning its wheels, even between two winter holidays.
After check in, we walked up a flight of stairs to our room, a large corner suite with low ceilings, blue-white CFL lighting, and locks on the window shades to keep you from getting too much sunlight. It was bizarre, but large, and most importantly, easy to get to from the entrance without a lot of social interaction at the front desk or on a late night elevator ride.
We changed for an evening out and left as quickly as we could to sit quietly and contemplate cocktails at the first bar, the clock never far from our minds. Precious boredom is not to be wasted.