I was in Rhode Island, my home, with my family -- my husband, nearly ten-year-old daughter, and six-year-old son. We were going to the Cajun Bluegrass Festival...
...which we had been doing every Labor Day weekend since 1992. This would be our last time there. Marital tensions and an eventual move to South Carolina brought an end to those weekend festivals.
But in 1997, when I called in the summer to make reservations for the weekend, for some crazy reason, all my usual haunts were booked. As were all the other hotels anywhere near Escoheag, and by anywhere near Escoheag, I mean thirty miles from Escoheag, which is nowhere near anything.
I couldn't believe there was nowhere in Rhode Island -- Rhode Island! -- that had a hotel room for us, so we just booked it on over there, and tried finding something along the motel/fastfood highway that runs from South County to Warwick. Nothing.
We stopped in to visit a third cousin ("aunt"), one of the few family members I was close to, but apparently not close enough. Guido, one of my favorite warm and sweet distant "uncles," worked in the post office, and back in the pre-internet travel days, he knew how to make his way around anything and anywhere. So he dug around trying to find a motel with a vacancy. It puzzles me to this day that an invitation to spend the night there was never offered. I do come by my curmudgeonly ways honestly.
What Uncle Guido came up with was the Leprechaun Motel. Sadly, the only reference I could come up with was from 2008. But it looks a bit like this:
...only smaller and sadder. I do recall a leprechaun smirking somewhere on a sign in front of the building.
I need to take a few moments to talk about the Leprechaun Motel, as it is such an important part of this story. I grew up in Warwick, and the Leprechaun Motel has always, always been there. It has always been a tiny building with a leprechaun somewhere in front of it, unimpressive, just there.
The room looked a bit like this one:
...only smaller and sadder. I think it was somewhat dirty, but no critters. The toilet worked erratically. There may have been bunk beds crammed in with a double bed. There was definitely a television set.
We no sooner got settled in than it started to rain. Really rain. So we decided on a movie. It may have been a Disney movie, but I do remember waiting in front of the theater in the car and reading Tom Sawyer aloud.
Back at the hotel, we settled in as best we could. The highlight of the stay was watching The Brady Bunch Movie before bed.
Since we had all begun to finally relax, that was when my husband flew into a rage. After he was done making me crazy, he was fine, we continued to watch the movie, and in my mind we definitely moved out the next day. I don't have any idea where we stayed the next couple of days, so it may have been a trick of my memory.
During that evening at the Leprechaun Motel, the movie was interrupted with the news of Diana's death. I don't follow the royals, all I know is that she seemed to be just what those stuffed shirts needed: a young, modern woman who was not from royalty and actually had some clue what the world was all about.
So I don't know what to say, really, about the fact that every single time I hear about Diana's death back in 1997, it is inextricably linked with our night at the Leprechaun Motel.
