So familiar, and also entirely new

Another blog post from Scotland! Or, at least, about Scotland. My most keen-eyed blog followers (you know who you are!) are absolutely correct – this trip was in May and I am really behind on my posts. Still, anything good is worth the wait, and Edinburgh, the third stop on my trip, is absolutely fabulous.

I have my friend Andy to thank for getting to see so much of the city – we toured the biggest sites, like Holyrood House (the royal residence in Edinburgh) and the Cathedral, and wandered around the gorgeous ancient part of town with its bustle, drama and color. It was so crowded – but Andy said it was nothing compared to the Fringe Festival.

We stayed at Andy’s centrally-located, top floor, beautiful flat – which he is currently in the process of selling, so get in touch with me if you’re interested! :> It was a perfect home base from which to explore. I loved hearing the accents and the turns of phrase that felt somehow familiar – like calling lunch “dinner” and dinner, “supper” – as my parents and my dad’s parents did. There were other familiar-unfamiliar things, too, like Andy’s habit of carrying a handkerchief (like my dad and granddad), and the way they make the beds and tuck the coverlet under the pillow – just like at grandma’s house.

There were just multiple flashes of recognition I shouldn’t have been having in a place I’d never been before. Last year, when Shane and Ali and I toured southern Italy, Shane said he felt something like this – familiarity based on stuff handed down from his grandfather, who had migrated to the US and brought traditions with him. It wasn’t weird or uncanny, just comfortable and homey in a way I hadn’t been expecting.

One day we took a long stroll starting from his place and along the Water of Leith. (The “Water” is a creek.)

This took us alongside the Royal Botanical Gardens and meandering all the way to the old ports of the city at Leith, where there are now restaurants and hipsters and the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. Also, these scenes waterside:

We made our way to the Whisky Society where we had a meet-up scheduled with Sara and Iain, friends we hadn’t met yet. It’s luxurious and old-school, with hundreds of bottles of special blends of whisky from the Highlands, Speyside, Islay… Distillers make the bottles they sell to liquor stores, but they also dabble in creating special flavor profiles – it is these that the Whisky Society brings to the public. Of course it’s dizzying (and not just by alcohol content) and impenetrable for a newbie like myself, but the setting was gorgeous!

I wrote to Sara on the recommendation of my dear friend Niki, and she and her husband invited us to the whisky society – but we didn’t know each other, and both pairs of people (Sara and her husband Iain, and me and my friend Andy) arrived quite early and right at the same time. But we were so early that we didn’t think the others could possibly be the people we were planning to meet. So we sat waiting and drinking whisky for, well, quite some time before we realized we were actually meant to be sitting together.

Then, my Scots friend Andy and Sara’s Scots husband Iain realized that they were from the same small Scottish town. No, really!

Sara and Iain also said they had a friend who looked a lot like me – which was another moment when I felt a bit like, “I’m home!”

I’m conscious that these happenstances may not come across as quite as surprising, fun, and lively as they did in person, under the influence of increasingly snappy-tasting Scotch whisky. But, you’ve followed me this far, perhaps you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt.

Somehow I failed to get a pic of Andy and Iain, but it’s easy enough to blame the whisky. BTW, for an American lady, that Sara sure knows her drams! She picked the ones I tried, and helped me taste them properly.

Potterlandia

Edinburgh is home to J.K. Rowling, with numerous spots associated with the Harry Potter books and movies highlighted for travelers, like me, who loved the books. (I know many people have been deeply angered by Rowling’s stance on transgender issues, and though there is much to discuss on those topics, I’ll leave it for another post.) I just loved the Harry Potter books and that hasn’t changed. Seeing places that resonated from the books was an unexpected joy on this trip. Some of the buildings just ooze Hogwarts.

I spent a happy stretch of time on the colorfully-painted Victoria Street, which is said to have inspired Diagon Alley. One store selling Potterphernalia had a line to enter, and turned out to be worth the wait. Of course, you could buy a Griffindor scarf or a Sorting Hat, but there was just a general jumbly overstuffed character to this place that it was really fun to pick through. Commerce isn’t my favorite way to engage with any book or series – the best part is reading. I did feel some magic, though, amid the customers’ shared love of these books.

Gene-alogy

I planned to do a little genealogical searching while in Scotland. My dad saved some old letters from our family’s past, like a handwritten letter from my grandma about her parents and grandparents, a letter typed on what feels like onionskin by Dad’s cousin, a drawing of a coat of arms… We’ve always had legends but this was the first time I tried to make sense of them.

Everyone in Dad’s family has always had a deep fascination for England and Scotland. Being descended from English and Scotspeople was a point of pride, showing up in a deep love of the English language, a more than passing interest in the royals, and a penchant for plaid. My grandma passed much of this to her kids, my dad and his sister, the brilliant and increasingly cantankerous Aunt Virginia. Here’s Grandma, pictured with one of her beloved white cats, all named for old-school alcoholic drinks (Mai tai, Harvey Wallbanger, you get the picture.)

Dad and Aunt Virginia went to visit some distant relatives in England once, but I never got their details. For as much as the family was proud of our heritage, record-keeping was slipshod or at least piecemeal. Stories also changed over time, and there were embellishments. My great-great-grandfather, for example, was said to have been the Surgeon General in London in the late 1800s. This is not true, though it’s not all false, either. He was a surgeon, but not the Surgeon General, and he lived and worked and raised his family in Edinburgh.

Somehow the collective family memory also added a middle name – “Winston” – to him, that I can’t find any trace of, anywhere. I wonder if it was an homage to Winston Churchill – well in keeping with my family’s anglophilia. Or it might be because, two generations later, my g-grandfather named his only son after his father, but added Winston to the name. Sadly, that boy died from measles. G-Grandad Louis still had five kids to raise – all girls, including my grandma.

Surgeons Hall Museums

In Edinburgh, thanks to Andy’s encyclopedic knowledge of the city and its history, I got to see what surgeons were doing in Edinburgh during my g-g-grandfather’s time at the Surgeons Museums, and someone from the university sent me a copy of G-G-Granddad’s handwritten thesis (“On the physiological and therapeutical actions of exercise“). Edinburgh was hopping with medical advances in the mid 1800s, it seems, and my g-g-granddad was there for it.

Something else felt very familiar about this search: everyone I met was kind and went out of their way to help. This was true of Andy to begin with, but also the archivist at the Museum, and the folks at the University of Edinburgh library. I mean within minutes I had answers and resources… and that felt like my family. Sometimes we bend over backwards for a stranger while perhaps letting our own responsibilities lag… but as a family trait, we could do a lot worse. (And have, but I’m not putting that in a post!)

I wish I could find out more about his wife, Isabella. She had a passel of kids, including my great-granddad. But other than her birth, death, and marriage dates, I have so far been unable to find anything out about her. What was she like? Was she stern, like my grandma seemed to me? Was she a good cook and/or seamstress, since those are two professions she wouldn’t have been barred from? All I know of her is that her surname passed down to my dad, to become his (often-misspelled) middle name.

I laugh when I think of my dad, aunt and grandma telling these stories to each other, and over time, altering them piece by piece till they become even bigger, even brighter versions of the truth. My dad always told the story of his grandfather, who had five brothers who all left their Edinburgh-based parents and headed, separately, to South Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, and the U.S. My g-granddad Louis, pictured below with g-grandma Nettie Inez, sounds particularly colorful. Grandma wrote that her father had been in medical school in Oxford when he upped sticks and headed across the pond to, as she put it, “become a cowboy,” despite being disinherited for it.

I’m not sure all of that is true – the records seem to show some of the sons staying in and around Edinburgh, for example, though at least one parallel family flourished in Australia, following the indentured servitude of my g-g-uncle Julian. And, of course, G-Granddad Louis’s history is a bit clearer to us, despite the mists of time, and he certainly did put down roots in the American West.

I have a long row to hoe to find out more about these family members, particularly the women, whose stories are less visible in standard documents. But I’m very glad to have gotten to hang out in the city where some of them lived.

Last picture, and a video

I’ve noticed that my blog posts often have a picture at the end that didn’t fit in any other section of the story – and this post is no different. For your delight and delectation, our Last Picture today is both a picture and a video – I spent a fun few hours in Edinburgh’s World of Illusions Museum and Camera Obscura. Tons of mindblowing exhibits, very hands-on, and full of people having as much fun as I did. I wasn’t even the only 50-something on her own, sticking her face in weird contraptions and begging strangers to take my picture.