Loose Leaf Notes

There was a lot of green to be seen at McDaniel’s Tavern at Buffalo Mountain Brewery last night and a new brew called Lucky Charm.

I was already lucky because I had just come from The Great Clover Hunt with Muriel Alderman at Floyd’s Center for the Arts and found my first wild four-leaf clover.

Ninety-year-old Muriel had a pop-up exhibit at the Center displaying her decades of luck finding the four-leaf rare variations of the common three-leaf clover, known in Ireland as the shamrock.

I found my first 4-leaf clover in a used book that I bought a book sale (which I wrote a poem about HERE) and the second in my brother Danny’s wallet (featured in THIS poem) after he died and this was the first time I found one in the grass. I was elated and felt like I had won the luck lottery!

But the Irish legacy is one of paradox. The luck of the Irish is super-imposed over Murphy’s Law (if something can go wrong it will).  Twenty minutes after finding my first four leaf clover, I pulled out the art center and scraped my car against a driveway barrier. That’s not good luck, I thought to myself, but then when I got home, I saw no marks on the car, I found my white beret that I had been looking for and received free medication in the mail from Abbvie Patient Assistance for a very expensive drug I now need, so good luck maybe, after all.

Later, Joe and I enjoyed chatting with friends at the brewery and hearing a bag pipe performance by Geoffrey of the Appalachian Piping Academy.

We enjoyed a delicious Irish-Inspired menu from the Vittles food truck, as well as left over biscuits, the name of the featured band. Sing along HERE.

This is the picture our friend Lester took just before my shamrock pin fell in my Irish stew and we had to fish it out with a spoon.

HERE’S Joe singing The Star of County Down (the Irish song with  my name in it) to me four years ago. Maybe next year he’ll sing it at the tavern.

And HERE I am drinking green beer a few years ago at the Tavern. Sláinte!