Okay, so it turns out that I did write about seeing the leprechauns. I just had to burrow deeper into the archives to find it. Here's what I wrote back in 2001, about my time in Northern Ireland, more than 40 years earlier:
I was pretty young. My dad was in the Foreign Service (or the diplomatic corps or whatever you want to call it) and he was assigned to the consulate in Belfast as a vice consul (visa officer) back in spring of 1957.
We lived in a government-rented house in Bangor, a little ways outside of Belfast, that had a good-sized yard, holly hedges all the way around, and a "fairy tree" in the back yard. Behind that, there was a small apple orchard. Inside, there was no central heat, so we had coal-burning fireplaces in the main rooms, and kerosene heaters in the hallways. There was a coal bin around back, and a coal scuttle by each fireplace.
This was apparently during a lull in the Troubles, since no one was shooting at anyone else, and the Orangemen (the Protestants) could have their annual parade (which I attended with my dad, at least once) and no one reacted badly.
I recall riding on one of those double-decker buses (but being disappointed that we didn't go up on top), taking the Picky Walk down to the ocean and seeing thatched roof cottages along the way (although it was always gray out, and never warm enough to go in the water once we got down there). I recently discovered that MapQuest works for locations outside the USA, and had it map our old neighborhood. I was surprised to find out how close to the sea we actually were.
There was a guy who came around at dusk to light the gas lamps on the street outside of our house, and a guy from the bakery would come around to the door every couple of days with a big tray of baked goods (I liked to take one of my parents' trays and pretend to be the baker).
It all seemed very normal and unremarkable to me at the time (I was about Sarah's age when we left), but looking back on it now, I'm amazed by how old-fashioned it all was by comparison to what I encountered when we moved back to the United States.
Oh, and there were the two occasions when I saw leprechauns.
I don't quite know how to explain them—as I say, I was pretty young—but I remember (or at least I remember remembering) seeing a tiny man with a wrinkled face and a pointed leather cap sitting inside one of the holly hedges around our garden, watching me one afternoon. I didn't find it particularly remarkable at the time—I was a kid, and fairies and leprechauns were things I heard about from my parents all the time, so seeing one in a place where I'd always heard they were didn't seem like such a big deal.
Anyway, he was there for a while, with his chin in his hands and his head kind of tipped, then he was gone.
At the end of our time there, when we were on the train, beginning our journey south, where we'd board the SS America and return to the States. After we'd pulled out of the railroad station, I saw another little man alongside the railroad tracks. He waved to me and I waved back—that was that. But I swear he would have been no more than up to the knee of the various railroad porters and others that I'd just seen out the same window as we left the station.
Of course, I can think up all kinds of reasonable explanations now for what I saw then, but I guess I'd prefer not to. Better to have seen the leprechauns.
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