Satanic Goat Lawn Ornament

I'm feeling fairly relaxed after a feast at an Indian restaurant with some very good friends, including the newlywed couple whose wedding I participated in two weeks ago. After our get-together I drove through a brief rainstorm and stopped off at Big Lots! to do a little shopping, and was greeted with an enormous double rainbow in the eastern sky opposite the setting sun. I stood next to my car in the parking lot and looked at it for a good long time, rotating my polarized sunglasses this way and that to emphasize first the legs of the rainbow, then the top; twisting them to maximize the appearance of one made the other disappear. If you can, get your hands on a copy of Carl B. Boyer's The Rainbow: From Myth To Mathematics. You'll never look at a rainbow in quite the same way.

I was going into Big Lots! because I was looking for a very specific lawn ornament. I saw it there a few weeks ago and didn't buy it. It was a small black goat, or maybe a ram, about 14 inches tall, made of polyresin to have the look and feel of weathered polished stone without the weight. But this goat stood on two legs, like a mythological faun or satyr, and like them, it was playing a fife - or was it (more appropriately) a set of pan-pipes? It seemed a little weird, and my friends and I decided that such an anthropomorphic horned creature could only be a minion of evil...hence the designation of Satanic Goat Lawn Ornament. In any event, I didn't buy it.

I thought about it afterwards. Something jogged my memory about a statue of a goat, and I remembered something I saw during a driving tour of the Ring Of Kerry in Ireland two years ago. It was in the city of Killorglin (which is fun to mispronounce as "Kill Organ" - something Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme must have hypertrophied versions of), where they have an annual Puck Fair every August, a three-day festival during which a goat is crowned King Puck. This must be very confusing for the goat, and seems very pagan for such a notoriously Roman Catholic country as Ireland.

I told my friend in Ireland about the Satanic Goat Lawn Ornament, and she thought it sounded hysterical. I decided to go out and, dammit, make that goat my own.

Of course, by now the goat was gone. A thorough search of the store turned up a similar one, but this one was playing a concertina - hardly the same thing. But, a deal is a deal, and I had promised myself that if I found the goat, I would buy it. To declare that this was a different goat would be splitting hairs, would it not?

So now my kitchen is graced by a small black plastic goat (or ram) playing a concertina while standing upright. Very nice, yes, very odd, but not exactly what I was looking for. And so I search, like some soul doomed to complete a task, looking through all of the area Big Lots! for a slightly different Satanic Goat Lawn Ornament.