“Teddie, Boy-o,” Gramps would drawl through his dentures, “you gotta be careful ’round them critter–gnome folk, I mean–bite and scratch you if you don’t get a drop on ’em.” And then he’d tell me how he saw his first gnome out on the farm when he was eight, learned to shoot when he was nine, got his first gun for his tenth birthday, and felled his first gnome two weeks later on a Boy Scout trip up in Missouri. Scouts were different in those days, I think.

My father, on the other hand, never claimed to have seen a gnome, much less bagged one. He always thought his dad’s talk of nefarious critters was nonsense, the rambling results of an uneducated mind cut off from civilized society. Like many men his age, my father left the farm as soon as he could and moved to the city to earn his education and respect. Neither of which accorded with hunting imaginary little people. He called it a “load of fly-addled horseshit,” claimed Gramps was just seeing things, a little crazy in the head from too long in the sun. I think this might explain why it took me so long to see one.

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