With St. Patrick's Day nearing, I'm reminded of a childhood scene seared upon my psyche: one fateful March 17 when my kindergarten teacher told the legend of the leprechaun, with a twist.
As she finished the standard story, the teacher stopped, stared bug-eyed out the bank of windows facing our school's arboretum and proclaimed to the class she had just seen a leprechaun.
We kids swarmed the sills and within seconds, one shouted, "I just saw it!"
"I see it!" screeched another. "There, behind that tree!"
Soon the majority were crying leprechaun like they were Bush hawks out circling for WMD. I peered through the fingerprints, fingerpaints and Lord only knew what else mottling the glass, but nothing stirred.
As I looked to my prattling peers, then back out at the inert greenery, something happened: There was no leprechaun outside that window, I realized, and there never was.
It was one of those diaphanous moments of literary epiphany, illuminating the fact that everyone around me, from the educator I trusted to the classmates I already suspected were a tad slow, was completely full of shit. It was a lesson that prepared me well for life beyond cut-and-paste of the paper persuasion.
So it's a pity no teacher could ever get away with pulling that little spiel on a class of contemporary kindergartners.
Kids returning home with tales of a little man lurking about the school’s wooded areas would send the town into pedophile-panic, and vigilantes would mobilize to root out the wretch, whom the local paper sensationally dubs "O'Leery the Lascivious Leprechaun."
Any children who claimed to see the leprechaun would be sent in for psychiatric evaluations and promptly put on Ritalin. Those the leprechaun did not appear to would be declared damaged goods and need years of therapy to recover any semblance of all-important self-esteem.
Parents would complain that because the teacher, the earliest authority figure pupils encounter, plainly suffers from a leprechaun-friendly bias, the whole idea of intellectual diversity in the K-12 system is a farce, and in the name of academic freedom, the teacher should be silenced so nonbelievers aren't tyrannically indoctrinated.
Other parents would vie for equal instructional time for all the sprites of the collective pantheon, from garden-variety pixies and gnomes to the chronically neglected afrits and imps.
Some would decry decorating public schools with green streamers and four-leaf clovers as an institutional endorsement of religion; others would object to it as part of a secular humanist assault to take the Saint out of St. Patrick’s Day.
Perhaps a few would lobby to post signs about the trees and affix stickers to the windows disclaiming that should anyone spot a wee fellow in green doing a jig around a pot of gold, wearing a shamrock, smoking a pipe, making shoes and/or wielding a Shillelagh, it MAY be a leprechaun, but that is merely a theory, and only one of many possible, equally valid interpretations.
But eventually, everybody would probably just get plastered on green beer and forget about it all, averting cognitive crisis for another year–or at least until Easter brings its own unnerving mix of divine saviors, magical bunnies and butter lambs.
Holly Noe’s column runs each Friday. Write to her at [email protected], and while you're at it, Google "leprechaun watch."