New Member

[LRRobertson327]

Hello All,
new to this forum, and look forward to meeting you as time goes on.
currently living in Awendaw, South Carolina, and have lived in the state since 1986.
Proud of my Scottish and Irish heritage, My mother got me interested in attending the local Scottish Highland Gatherings

[User]

Welcome and glad to have you here!

[Liam]

Welcome to the forum from Alberta!

[Jock Scot]

Welcome, from Inverness-shire.

[Father Bill]

Welcome to the “Great Rabble!”

[Balaamsass51]

Welcome. SC has some great highland games. Charleston, Myrtle Beach, (both close to you) and Cayce.

[jsrnephdoc]

Hello All,
currently living in Awendaw, South Carolina, and have lived in the state since 1986.
Proud of my Scottish and Irish heritage, My mother got me interested in attending the local Scottish Highland Gatherings

For me, it was my Dad, who had recordings of Harry Lauder and various Pipes and Drums Corps monopolizing our living room console record player even before we had a TV set. He didn't start wearing a kilt that I can remember until his "middle" years, and by that time his own "middle" was so expansive that when he left us at age 81 there was no way that stoplight red Robertson kilt could be repurposed to my more diminutive stature (I think I inherited all of THAT from my 5'0" diminutive mom, but from her I inherited her love of proper sentence structure and good writing. SHE remained healthy until she passed suddenly at age 92 by slamming her head into the river-rock surround of her fireplace, having carried in a double armload of wood from the shed in their lakeside Michigan UP retirement cottage in SO many ways as bucolic as the architectural main character of On Golden Pond. Dad was a homebody. He died in the city in which he was born (Marquette), but managed to coerce my world-traveler mom to direct a few of HER more than annual expeditions to Pitlochry for formal clan gatherings, sharing that on one occasion with my sister.

My own kilted adventures have clustered into 3 timeframes:

1. In college (Trinity, Connecticut) my Jewish but Celtic Curious dorm resident adviser convinced me to join the school's pipes and drums corps. I managed to learn 3 marches that I could play so long as I plugged the drones with wine corks, and I gave the band a splash of different color by "borrowing" my sister's kilt skirt for four years (5 decades later, she reminded me as we were walking the battlefield at Culloden that I'd never returned it)!
2. In my own 60s, on a whim I walked into the same shop my Dad had used to purchase his kilt, off Union Square in San Francisco, and learned that "Robertson" Tartan could be had in a dramatically different color palate (I had NO idea). I had a lovely "Modern Hunting" tartan kilt made and wore it to many dressy events for my business, for family gatherings, and sometimes just because (paired with either of 2 jackets I'd inherited from Dad that a SUPREMELY skilled seamstress in Santa Rosa, CA managed to downsize. However, all THAT ended on 10/8/2017, when my spouse and I were among the 5,000 homeowners to lose pretty much all their material possessions in the Napa and Sonoma County "Tubbs" wildfire.
3. Over the next two years, pretty much ALL of our non-essential time was devoted to recovering from that calamity, including moving to Montana on the second anniversary of the fire. But, as early as 4-5 months after the fire, little Celtic trinkets (a sealskin dress sporran, glassware and wall mountings embossed with the clan crest, a tie or two) would show up on our temporary residence's front porch, placed there anonymously. We suspected my elder son. The move to Montana was precipitated by an agreement among ALL the homeowners' insurance companies to terminate "temporary living expenses" support on the fire's second anniversary (at which rebuilds had completed on only 8% of the incinerated homes). We fled to the tiny town of Hamilton in Montana, 50 miles south of Missoula (but home to some really NICE Celtic Games each summer). Just two months after our move, my son called from some other continent (I never know where his wanderlust will carry him next) and inquired about my measurements. An odd request, but about six weeks later explained by a package that arrived from Edinburgh, shipped from a business I'd never heard of before (Kinloch Anderson). Inside was a gorgeous kilt jacket that looks remarkably like the type favored by HRH King Charles. Just a month or two later, along came a Robertson Ancient Hunting Kilt, this one from another business unknown to me (USA Kiits), and from that moment it's been "off to the races" in my quest to learn more about my roots (Celtic Games, trips to Scotland with my sister and that same son, a cross-country flight to visit my other son for the NYC Tartan Day Parade last spring, and I'm now pondering perhaps a FIFTH kilt.

Actually, the jump from phase 2 to 3 was delayed, because "the virus" followed us to Montana, so my first Burns Night Supper didn't occur until 2024. I took advantage of THAT occasion to reveal a bit more family history, which YOU now get a chance to suffer through:

My mom and dad NEVER called each other by their Christian names. My Dad had hijacked my mom from her anticipated career as a romance languages professor at some metropolitan university (when my sibs and I were VERY young, that living room record player blaring out "Roamin', in the Gloaming" or "The Black Bear" march was borrowed by my mom every Saturday afternoon, as she leaned in to listen to Matinee broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera). They met when my dad was a seminarian at Seabury Western in Evanston and she was launching her intended escape from upbringing in far southwestern Nebraska as a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. BUT, when dad graduated and became an ordained Episcopal Priest, she followed him to Michigan's UP, where they both lived the rest of their lives. All that time, they called each other "Jo" or "Jo Jo," interchangeably, although Dad's parishioners always called him "Father Bill," (his MIDDLE name was William); by the way, one of the forum moderators here is also a "Father Bill."

But NONE of my own parents' 3 children or his parishioners EVER questioned their terms of address for each other until just before what WOULD have been her 92nd birthday, when we gathered in their retirement cottage to plan her Requiem Eucharist. Of COURSE there was some "down time," and on one of those occasions i wandered through Dad's bookcase (probably undisturbed since his death a decade earlier), and pulled out a copy of Bobby Burns poetry, and totally by caprice, stumbled upon "John Anderson, my Jo." Immediately, I memorized it, and now I plan to recite it and an abbreviated version of why it makes me blubber every time I do so at Burns Night Suppers until I'm no longer able to do so.