Scotland the Brave!

Over the years, one of our family's favorite outings has been the Colonial Highland Gathering, held every year in mid-May at the Fair Hill Horse Show grounds in Fair Hill, Maryland, just over the Mason-Dixon Line from Oxford, Pennsylvania. My daughter Lindsay was a competing Highland dancer, and I competed occasionally in the amateur solo piping events and participated in the pipe band competitions. If you're ever looking for a colorful and unusual way to spend a lovely outdoor Saturday afternoon in May, I commend this event to you. These folks have been putting on this show for over 50 years, and they have the details worked out to near-perfection.

After Lindsay grew up and moved away, and after I drifted away from the piping scene (more's the pity), I missed the Colonial Gathering for more years than I can remember. So, it was with a poignant sense of nostalgia that Eve and I headed down the road to Fair Hill for this year's Gathering. Of course, there was the spectacle of the massed pipe bands at the formal opening of the Games...

And you could watch the mysterious process of tuning a pipe band for competition: Half an hour's fiddling with reeds and drones and chanters, for maybe seven minutes of time performing under the critical scrutiny of a panel of judges (who would probably write on the score sheets that the tuning should have been better)...

There were many tempting (mostly greasy) Scottish food items for sale...

...but you had to be prepared to wait ... and wait ... and wait... (Don't see too many skinny folks here. Do you?)

And whether all that waiting was worth it is a question on which I take a more jaundiced view nowadays than I did in my earlier years when I was blessed -- or cursed -- with an industrial-strength gastrointestinal system.

As the soon-to-be summer sun began to sink in the perfect sky overhead, we headed for home, burping happily with the taste of Forfar bridies and beer. The Fair Hill Games had been one of our family's favorite gigs back in younger times, but this year I found I had experienced at first hand the truth of Thomas Wolfe's observation that you can't go home again. It was fun, but it didn't have quite the electric thrill it has had for me in the past. Ah, so, sic transit gloria mundi.

And, I hasten to add, if you haven't experienced a Scottish festival like this one -- especially if you have children -- you owe it to yourself to check it out. Who knows? The bug might bite you the way it bit me and my family many years ago. It's a great way to experience something you don't see every day if you're not in Scotland or Canada!

In the final analysis -- even if you can't go home again in the strictest sense -- it's satisfying to revisit places you've been happy in the past.