In Praise of People Who Make Our Lives Better

by | Jul 20, 2025 | The Truscott Chronicles

Photo by geckophotos, Istockphoto

In Praise of People Who Make Our Lives Better

by | Jul 20, 2025 | The Truscott Chronicles

Photo by geckophotos, Istockphoto

There are many people who in our daily lives, no matter who they are or where they come from—down the street or across an ocean—they make our lives a little bit better, and we should be thankful for them.

Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

I’m going to trust that you will know what I’m writing about here, and why I am being circumspect.

Tracy and I just returned from a trip to see the Kingston Trio at a wonderful venue in New Jersey. Not wanting to drive back to Milford at night, we stayed nearby in a nice suburban hotel, one of those you see along the roadside if you drive for a distance through any state in this country.

The staff made us welcome right from the start when they learned we were in town for the concert. We checked in and dropped our bags and headed for the nearby venue to watch the soundcheck and have a pre-concert dinner with the Trio, my friends Mike Marvin, Tim Gorelangton, and Buddy Woodward. The concert was great. The Kingston Trio are three guys who take a great deal of pleasure in what they do, and they do it with verve and talent. In between-songs patter, one of them, who is a reader of this newsletter, even included a mention of Box Cat and Graycie, our cats who have appeared in my writings.

Back at the hotel, we discovered the room was chilly enough that we would need a blanket and an extra pillow, so I called down to the front desk. They said housekeeping staff had left for the night, and there was only one person at the desk, but if I would come down, they would have the blanket and pillow for me. I picked up the blanket and pillow, and we had a delightful sleep on a very comfortable king-size bed.

In the morning, I went downstairs to the hotel’s free breakfast buffet to pick up some coffee for Tracy. The dining room was crowded with guests going through the line, toasting bagels, serving themselves French toast and tasty yogurt and fresh fruit from bowls arranged on a refrigerated countertop. The French toast had run out when I went through the line, but quickly, another tray was delivered by a hotel worker wearing an apron and a hairnet. The same thing happened with the bagels. An empty tray was filled with fresh bagels the moment they ran out. The guests, including yours truly, continued to fill their plates from the buffet.

I delivered coffee to Tracy and returned to the hotel’s buffet for some yogurt and fruit and witnessed the same effortless flow movement of servers moving between guests, refilling hot trays of sausage and eggs and the toast and bagels, carrying away one coffee urn and returning with another. Coming back from the room, I passed an open door and looked in to find a fully-equipped restaurant style kitchen where several cooks were preparing food for the buffet.

I sat down to have a bagel and coffee amidst other hotel guests, most of whom were absentmindedly eating and looking at their phones. The food, for a hotel’s free breakfast buffet, was surprisingly good. One of the servers, a middle-aged woman, walked past me and asked if there was anything I needed. I told her I was fine and said something about how good the buffet was. She paused for a moment and smiled widely, clearly pleased.

Back at the room, Tracy and I finished packing our bags and headed for the elevator. Tracy remarked on how good the coffee and yogurt were. We had put our bags in the backseat and started to pull out of the parking lot, when Tracy checked her purse and discovered she had forgotten her cell phone charging cable. I parked the car and went back to the room to get it.

Upstairs on our floor, I could see two housekeeper’s carts had arrived and were standing near the door to our room, which was open. I walked in to look for the cable. The bed had already been stripped—the sheets and blankets and bedspread and mattress topper were on the floor, the pillows stripped of their cases. Next to the bathroom door was a pile of the few towels we had used. A plastic garbage bag was next to one of the room’s chairs and contained the clear plastic bags from the trash cans in the bathroom and bedroom. The piles of bedclothes and towels were neat and ready to go into canvas sacks hanging from the housekeeper’s cart in the hall.

I looked for the cable, but it wasn’t on the bedside table. The housekeeper, a woman of a certain age who did not speak English, came into the room and seeing me looking around for something, produced the charging cable and said, “I found.”

Standing there and taking the cable from the housekeeper, I looked at the disassembled room and realized how much work had gone into making our brief overnight stay in the hotel so pleasurable. It came to me that the ballet of servers and guests I had witnessed around the breakfast buffet was repeated every morning. The bed was stripped, the bathroom was scrubbed, the toilet swabbed out, the trash collected, the carpet vacuumed, the bed remade, the sheets and spread pulled taut, the surfaces of the dresser and table that held the television dusted, the whole room, in fact, cleaned and polished and rearranged in a manner that nobody does in their own homes every day.

We had been in contact with a half-dozen workers during the 15 hours or so that we had stayed in the hotel. The jobs they did were not easy. The woman at the desk who got the extra blanket and pillow for me was still there in the morning when I came down to get coffee. There were two women with housekeeping carts on the hall of the floor on which we were staying. There were at least four women refilling buffet trays with French toast and bagels and moving heavy coffee urns when they ran out.

I passed only a few words with the receptionist at the front desk and the buffet worker and housekeeper, and yet our stay at the hotel had been seamless. I thought back to the hotel where we had stayed in New York on Eighth Street when we took the train into town for the reading I did at KGB Bar a few of weeks ago. Our experience there had been almost identical to the one from our night in New Jersey.

We live here in the United States. We travel freely. We stay in hotels and motels. We eat in restaurants or at buffets or we are served in coffee shops or we buy incidentals at local stores. We pass through and go on with our lives, but the people who work in hotels or suburban mini-malls or in big city restaurants or clean the rooms in which we have slept—they stay on, and they do it again and again and again. Many of them come from lands far away. Others went to schools down the road or come from the next town over and come from families with deep roots in the states and towns we pass through.

They work hard. They are there as we pass through and have a cup of coffee and spend the night and leave in the morning and go back to our lives. No matter who they are or where they come from—down the street or across an ocean—they make our lives a little bit better, and we should be thankful for them.

Lucian K. Truscott IV

Lucian K. Truscott IV

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.

You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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