About 13 years ago, I was taking a creative writing class with the Canadian poet Susan Musgrave. We were given an exercise in which we were to take a half hour walk and write a story in our heads. As I passed a garden rife with gnomes, I recalled a much older tale told by friends of gnome-nappers whose crime had made the local papers.
In my story, The Return of Winky, some cops tease a rookie by sending him to the scene of a kidnapping, which turns out to be a gnome- napping, complete with notes and Polaroids. But the rookie stays with the joke and pursues it to the end, and succeeds in curbing a scene of domestic violence in which the husband of the gnome-owner, a partially paralyzed stroke victim, on a strict diet and forced to watch his wife eat anything she wants, cracks and manages to hold her at gun point with his good arm until the rookie, with very lucky timing, intervenes.
I borrowed part of my Winky story for my RDI story, Lucy’s Launderette and unfortunately, the film Amelie had come out just before that. I hadn’t seen Amelie. I never go to the cinema here in Italy because all the films make it onto TV eventually. The Full Monty also had references to gnome-foolery which hints at the fact that this is an older game than it appears to be.
I’m sure that Gnome-napping has been around since gnomes turned kitsch, which may have been with the release of Disney’s Snow White. But certainly, it was around before the 80’s. Is youth wasted on the young? Not for the most part. I'm old enough to say that when I was young myself, and teaching guitar at the Y, my pupils thought that Sergent Pepper's Lonely Hearts had been conceived and recorded by the BeeGees.
What's that I hear? Some of you saying "Wasn't it?"
And for my next trick, I must go flamingo a lawn.
Gnome napping stories
http://www.nthposition.com/gnomeliberation.php
http://urbanlegends.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/writing/Skeptic/pd72.html
http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2000-10-18/nightcrawler.html
http://newsobserver.com/business/v-print/story/3189683p-2868942c.html
7:47:12 AM 
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