“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”

― Attributed to Morticia Addams, it is a quote by Charles Addams, creator of the characters who became The Addams Family. I guess Morticia could be considered his daughter since he created her.

Once Southerners knew how to deal with folks who were a half bubble off plumb. Most were viewed humorously and talked about with a twinkle in one’s eye. They were “quare which simply meant they were a little crazy, giddy, or off kilter when compared to accepted societal norms. Many were gifted in ways we don’t understand as well but as I have grown to understand, normal doesn’t exist.

Designing Women’s Julia Sugarbaker summed it up this way, “We, here in the South, don’t hide our crazy relatives up in the attic; we bring them downstairs and show them off.” We even had cute ways to refer to them, “their cornbread ain’t quite done in the middle.”

It seems we have recently created more chaos for us flies by labeling anything or anyone we disagree with as being “not” normal if not downright abnormal to the point of criminality. This is a disservice to those of us who have not stepped over the line to wearing tin foil hats but are a bit odd…the fruitcakes Jimmy Buffett sang about. The weird, the odd, those with a screw loose.

“Fruitcakes in the kitchen, fruitcakes on the street. Struttin’ naked through the crosswalk in the middle of the week. Half-baked cookies in the oven, half-baked people on the bus. There’s a little bit of fruitcake left in every one of us.”

I’ve written about normal before, “Normal is Just a Setting but the Knob on my Dryer is Broken”. See https://cigarman501.com/2023/03/19/normal-is-just-a-setting-but-the-knob-on-my-dryer-is-broken/ if you are a mind to.  

I used the Addams quote in that previous post but saw it again this week and for some reason, it was if I’d never seen it before.

Now there are limits to not being normal. I’m not talking about people who are dangerous to themselves and others. I’m thinking about special people, who here in the southern Appalachian, would be called “quare.” “Old Jeb, now he was a quare bird” kind of people. Just a little eccentric, a bubble or a couple of bubbles off plume but for the most part, harmless and yet special.

Special? Those people with unique gifts, sometimes subtle, sometimes supernatural in addition to being eccentric.

When we needed a new well drilled, the company brought what was described by the company as a water savant. The statement was further qualified, “He’s a little out there…you know, in left field out there. Don’t mind him none, and don’t be surprised if he doesn’t speak to you.” He didn’t but after pointing to a spot on the ground, the drillers struck water at sixty feet, so I didn’t care. The man was a dowser and came from a lengthy line of dowsers…some five generation.

My mother’s friend was one of those special people. She didn’t dress like women in the Sixties were supposed to, she dressed like a man in denim pants and shirts and kept her hair cut short. She was loud and boisterous with a deep and ready laugh. Despite being married and with children there were whispers. “Old Gracie was a quare bird.”

One of her gifts was that she was a kind woman, always willing to help and bring joy where she could. She brought much happiness to my ailing mother. I found out she also had a hidden talent that brought her specialness into better focus.

One day shelling beans with my mother and regaling her with humorous stories, she saw me rubbing a nasty wart on my wedding ring finger as I prepared to head to high school football practice.

“Donnie, I kin get riddah that wart if you want me to.” She carried a knife, and I had a bloody vision.

Instead of reaching for her knife, she reached into the bowl of butter beans that had been shelled and pulled one out.

“I can talk it off. I learned from my daddy. He passed it down to me and his daddy to him.”

Taking my hand in hers she began to rub the bean on that old wart and mumbled words that made no sense. The old “mumbo jumbo” I guess.

After a bit she stopped and said, “Donnie, mark my words. That wart will be gone fore the sun goes down. I just talked it off.”

I was not a believer until Al Stevenson stepped on my hand during practice and made a right turn, a cleat from his shoe on top of that wart. I still bear the scar but true to her words, “That wart will be gone fore the sun goes down,” and it was. Coincidence? I think not.

We don’t seem to abide special people who “dance to the beat of a different drum” as we once did. People who dress differently or pray to different gods or swing differently. In some cultures, they were held in reverence, as our Native American brothers and sisters did. Now we just call them names it seems and it ain’t just “quare.” If the Bible is to be believed, Jesus was special. I wonder if we would welcome him now or try to hide him in the attic. I think he would be proud to be called a “quare bird.”

Update

Linda Gail is a bit of a quare bird. She has taken to dressing like a gipsy woman who likes purple and I’m not complaining. She always had a special gift for people. She is kind and caring, children and old people seem to search her out…as do animals. A person with the special gift of empathy.

She has a spirituality about herself that she doesn’t manage very well, dropping anything she is doing to help both the young and the old. The problem is now she can’t, and it weighs heavily upon her.

It has been a rough week following Linda’s chemo treatment and as I write this, it is only Tuesday. A friend of mine recently passed from the ravages of cancer. She opted to discontinue chemo when the path it followed became too rutted to travel. I thought she was a little selfish. I don’t feel that way anymore.

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