When I was seven years old, my father brought a recording of bagpipe music home from the library. The sound of it stopped me in my tracks. I was enthralled. I’d never heard anything of the sort before, but it stirred my blood from the first strains.
He was Canadian, and one of his grannies was a full-blooded MacNeill.
I still love bagpipes and will stop what I’m doing anywhere, anytime, when I hear the sound and just listen. If I’m out in the world somewhere, I will move toward it, almost as if I can’t help myself. It’s a powerful effect.
All my life I longed to visit Scotland, and in 1998 I did. It was wonderful, everything I’d hoped it would be. I would go back again in preference to a lot of first-time visits I might make elsewhere, but since the odds are against it, I’ll treasure my memories of my one chance.
That same year I also joined the local Scottish society and participated for a while, including attending Burns Nights, but I found it a rather closed group, very hard to break into—I mean hard even to get people sitting at the same table with me at potlucks to acknowledge my presence and respond to my conversational overtures—so after a couple of years I gave it up.