Maybe Next Year

The luck of the Irish was not with my son this St. Patrick’s Day.  He built a leprechaun trap, but failed to catch a leprechaun with it.  He’s been feeling a bit down about the whole thing, and he’s hoping that next year might be better.  He’s already planning for it.

Leprechaun traps, if you are not familiar with them, are made from empty boxes, plastic wrap, pennies, and scotch tape.  The pennies hang from the inside of the box attached to long strands of scotch tape because “Leprechauns like shiny things.”  And then, if your father lets you, you can throw in some Lucky Charms, like cheese on a mouse trap, to lure the little green fellow into the trap.  The plastic wrap covers the opening of the box but has a hole just large enough for a leprechaun to crawl through.  I’m not sure why a leprechaun would be unable to go back out through the hole in the plastic wrap to escape, but Snags assures me this is not possible.  Maybe the leprechaun gets entangled in the strands of scotch tape… maybe he peels the pennies off the tape and fills his pockets with them, bulging his sides out just large enough to prevent the escape… at any rate, once he gets in, it is not possible to get out. 

If luck IS on your side and you do catch a leprechaun this way, he has to “…give you his bag of gold!”  But like I said, it didn’t work out, and so we didn’t get rich this year after all.  It’s a pity, really.  We could have used the gold to pay off some bills.

Snags thinks the reason we didn’t catch a leprechaun is because his father, fearing they would attract a parade of ants, wouldn’t let him put any Lucky Charms into the box.  That may or may not be true.

It may be, however, that the failure to catch a leprechaun has more to do with the fact that there is no such thing, but I hesitate to tell Snags that.  He is, at the moment, caught in some plane of existence between the reality of a schizophrenic stuck in a fantasy world and that of a normal person leading a boring life devoid of things like magic and imaginary friends and tricky little leprechauns.  In other words, there are some wildly unbelievable things that he believes in, and some, I can tell, he is beginning to question. May his belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny remain strong.  May his belief in Darth Vader begin to wane.

Snags informs me that leprechauns are very tricky little fellows.  They can change themselves into a squirrel or a rabbit to fool you.  They are sly that way, he says.  Sly like a fox!  And that is why he insists that we must be cautious around any squirrels or rabbits that we find in our garden.  They might be leprechauns out to trick us.  Or, they might be plain old squirrels or rabbits.  In any event, we shouldn’t go near them, he tells me.  If they are of the regular variety, “they might have rabies!”

Now that St. Patrick’s day is past, I’m hoping that I can dispose of the leprechaun trap that didn’t work.  It’s taking up all of the counter space in front of my toaster.