Have you ever had a serious déjà vu experience? I have. And it was weird!! 

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of spending some time traveling around Scotland. Driving through the Scottish Highlands, I was so sure that the further north I went, the more I had an incredible sense of home that I have never felt before when traveling. And I have never felt it since. One of my girlfriends told me about a similar experience she had in Greece. She couldn’t explain it, but she knew she had been there before and that she was at home.

​Ok, so perhaps we are all pretty much bat #$*& crazy!

​But, on the Isle of Skye, way up there where the tides are extreme enough to leave fleets of boats high and dry, where the sun can set at 1 am and rise at 4am, I knew I had found the place from whence I had come. And just how did I arrive at this conclusion. 

Simple.

​There was a buffet. They had cooked their string beans to death in fat back. The rutabagas tasted just like my Mama’s. The rice and gravy could have come straight from Alice’s kitchen. The turkey, sans steroids and antibiotics, (because they have sense enough to outlaw all that crap over there) was just as flat chested as the ones we had when I was a kid. And, are you ready for this??? Collards!!! Also cooked in fat back!!! Yep, I had come home alright…at soul food central on the Isle of Skye, Scotland.

​Maybe the strong déjà vu was subconscious from equating it with the time, when I was 11 and we went to the mountains for a vacation. We happened upon the Highland Games at Grandfather Mountain, NC. It was the closest my mother ever came to leaving the country and her excitement over all of those bearded, kilt clad lads running around throwing heavy stuff was almost too much for her to contain. I certainly get that now!!! It was the mid ‘60s and the world was huge and enormous. Men in skirts may as well have been men from Mars, at least to us.

Maybe I was recalling that my all-time favorite outfit when I was a child was a kilt with a pin, which I wore with knee socks that had a tassel on them. It came from the Children’s Shop on the courthouse square and I thought it was AMAZING!!
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I need to swab my mouth and send that sucker to Ancestry.com, give them 99 of my hard earned dollars and settle this once and for all. True story, I have a friend who did that recently and they actually told her that she shared DNA with BONO! SHUT UP!! That’s worth $99, right there, because she is kind of musical.
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​But, go figure. It turns out that I do have that heritage. I was sprung from some crazy Scots (explains a whole lot) and perhaps my mother was having her own déjà vu experience when we went to pretend Scotland in 1967. And now that I think about it, there is no way that my mother “accidentally” happened upon the Highland Games. Miss Alice was way too savvy for that!!

​So on October 12th, my son will be getting married in Alexandria, Virginia. He’ll be wearing a kilt for the clan McDonald from which he has descended on his father’s side.  If my mother were alive, afterwards we could set a spell and have some string beans cooked to death in fat back, rutabagas, collards, rice and gravy and dry turkey. She could fiegn being a teetotaler and I'd sneak her a beverage. Yep, that's what we'd do.​

Why the Paper Craner, you may ask. It’s very simple.  The origami crane is a symbol for happiness, good luck and peace. That pretty much covers anything that interests me.

This crane is made from construction paper, which is way too heavy for origami, but it’s what had. I looked up paper cranes in wiki-how, and realized that there were 24 steps that were not as easy as they looked. As a result, this crane is a little wonkier and big boned, kind of like me.

So tonight in the pursiut of happiness, good luck and peace, this paper craner went to the Satellite Lounge for bluegrass, beer and people watching. I would say that the cougar (is that too derogatory?? Nah, if you were there, you would agree.) gets the most interesting person award. I mean, she even dressed like she was a member of the cat family, wearing a very tiny cheetah print dress with steep heels in a bluegrass bar. She rocked the place for sure.  And I am pretty sure she didn’t go home alone.

Sooo…Sunday nights! Free bluegrass and incredible  people watching, although you have to pay for your beer. It’s a hell of a good time.

Wishing y’all  a great week, happiness, good luck and peace.

​ I have these friends. They aren’t your normal, run of the mill, sane friends. You know what I mean by sane, right? Sane people’s lives go according to the best laid plans, their trains never derail, they are never set adrift and they never need a life jacket. But if they did, they would know exactly where they are and have extras because they had planned well. These are not those people. My drifty, derailed friends are the ones that brighten the world, one block at a time. The forces of gravity that pull us all together are strong and nonjudgmental, as opposed to the weak, sane gravity that judges and never shows its vulnerability.

For example, let’s take the folks I know who live on a particular corner in an historic southern city, with charming brick streets lined with oak trees that have dangling moss and sidewalks that are broken from tree roots. The front doors have lush seasonal wreaths and the backyards have pretty gardens and drippy water features. The local color is as vibrant as a showroom full of Tory Burch patent leather ballerina flats and we wouldn’t know if they are now passé. Nor would we care.

See, now you want to go visit too, right?

Recently, we had our first cool evening that was perfect for a front porch tarriance . My friend and I rocked in her white rocking chairs and sipped red wine, while we chatted about an upcoming non- profit fundraiser. We love to save the world, one cause at a time.

And then it started.

The fellow un-sane friends across the street, who had gathered on the upstairs porch, cranked up the volume…with a bull horn. It’s the same kind that the Po-Po uses to evacuate us when a category 3 hurricane is coming and we still don’t leave, or to tell you to spread out on the ground. The kind of sound that usually strikes fear and loathing. But what we heard was seated stand-up comedy coming through a device that’s meant to disperse people like us. When it comes to irony, the un-sane never disappoint!

Then we heard an unamplified voice say, “Tell them about Brenda!” which was followed by laughter. Then, the story was relayed through a bull horn, for ALL the world to hear, about a neighbor who was on a trip to meet an “old friend” and how there were some hot springs at night, some screwing that wrapped up years of sexual tension between the two of them, and just in case they thought no one noticed them making hot spring waves, her bathing suit was on wrong side out upon sheepishly slinking out of the water. This was a tip off to the sane people that the water may have some biohazards. SCORE!!!

We do not take lightly, the need to celebrate each other’s successes, since we are the kind of women who actually want happiness for our friends with none of that jealousy crap. Well, not just happiness….fulfillment, weight loss, love, pay raises and yes, the kind of great sex that deserves to be shouted from above, via bull horn.

And then the bull horn music started. “Everybody get up…….hey, hey, hey”, and instead of being ordered “Spread ‘em up against the wall!” like it sounded, we were ordered from across that Victorian era street to get up out of those rocking chairs and dance.   So, we did, while some other neighbors walked their dog by us on the sidewalk and said, “God, I love this place!!”  I had never met them, but I know that they, too, are un-sane.