Bye Bye Abbie

The Púca is considered by many to be the most terrifying of all the creatures of faery. Not the slightest reason is its appearance, but it is its powers that are most feared. It is said to waylay travellers and others about at night, and if it is able to toss them onto its back, it will, at very least, provide them with the ride of their lives, from which they will return forever changed.
- Wikipedia

An Offasty without Abbie is a sad Offasty indeed. Friday was Miss Abbie Pooka Pucks last day at ye ol'Offasty and when Monday rolled around, the place felt empty and sad. No Abbie to pop into your office and say, "You know what I did this weekend? I stayed out til 6am and then I..." (censored to protect the involved parties - suffice to say, it is always JUICY!). No Abbie to pull you out the door for a coffee/sweet/creamee break. No Abbie to wrap you up in her stories, dramas, jokes and tall tales. No bright face to light up the drab interior of the fluorescently lit Offasty and bring joy to the hearts of all its inhabitants. These brief Abbie-moments are the stuff that make the day go by less painfully. The absence of Abbie echoes down every corridor, through every cubicle and every copy machine drawer and in each Abbie-less office.

The pagan trickster was reimagined in Old English puca (Christianized as "devil") as a kind of half-tamed woodland sprite, leading folk astray with echoes and lights in nighttime woodlands (like the Celtic/French "White Ladies", the Dames Blanches), or coming into the farmstead and souring milk in the churn.
- Wikipedia

We will sniffle into our coffee cups, wipe our tears with recycled tissues and wish our freebird well. And in the meantime, we will have to visit Miss Abbie on the farm because, as Suzanne said so eloquently, "I like mud." And, of course, "I like hay." So we will fit in just fine.

Here are some videos which celebrate Abbie in all her Offasty/Pookah/Puckish glory:

The Offasty: Burnt Toast
The Offasty: Stolen Yogurt
The Offasty: Losing Aimee (coming soon)
"Where is My Mind", the Pixies

Here's a long quotation from A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's from a meeting between Puck and one of Titania's fairies.

FAIRY
Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Called Robin Goodfellow. Are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery,
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern,
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn,
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm,
Mislead night-wanders, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck.
Are you not he?

PUCK
Thou speakest aright;
I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon, and make him smile
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal;
And sometime lurk I in a gossip's bowl
In very likeness of a roasted crab,
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob
And on her withered dewlap pour the ale.
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;
Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,
And 'tailor' cries, and falls into a cough;
And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh,
And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear
A merrier hour was never wasted there.

-- A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, scene i