The Scottish Exodus

Undiscovering Edinburgh

10 November 2000
Greenside Hotel, Edinburgh, Scotland

I don’t know Edinburgh yet. I don’t have a feel for the city, having only been here a day. Traffic blurs by without perspective, gray and beige slate buildings cluster around and on top of each other in the Old Town, and I can’t pick out the bums from the urban yuppies from the yokel Highland jimmies from the students from the thieves yet. Streets are new to me, winding and descending arteries that snake around and about the massive basalt rock that vaults Edinburgh Castle seemingly above the clouds. The shops and stores, unsurprisingly similar to shops and stores everywhere else in Scotland, are nevertheless in different places. Tourist idiot signs are seemingly absent from street corners. At least the Big Issue peddlers are constant.

This uncertainty and confusion does not bother me in the least. It’s all rather exciting really. I freely admit to having an obsessive compulsion always to be prepared for anything, but this is Andrea’s labour of love—her first family visitors from America—so I’ve pretty much tried to stay in the background. That being said, Andrea could not, would not, and cannot handle this kind of uncertainty. Her’s is a mercurial disposition that requires constant handling and stage-managing (she should have come with a ‘handle with care’ sticker on her butt). And everything needs to be exactly perfect, precisely so, immaculately so.

However, in this instance, confusion is mandatory. We’ve never been to Edinburgh; Andrea’s sister and grandmother have certainly never been here either. This recipe called for disaster. Amazingly, it’s been rather mellow.

Andrea started the day with that twinge of hysterical panic in the corners of her eyes, a look I’m very familiar with, especially after watching her meltdown in the Continental queue at Detroit Metro the day we left for Glasgow on a different plane. You see, we walked the few blocks from our flat to Central Station to catch the Edinburgh train, except because of the Great Train Debacle we had to take the train from Queen Street station, a few blocks in a different direction. Suddenly, everything wasn’t perfect. We actually had to walk a few more blocks to the other station. Oh my fucking God!!! How could that happen?!?

It was there; I could see it, that twinge tweaking in the corner of her eye, her prolific apologies, the wounded animal look. My first instinct was to flee, climb a tree, and throw sticks at the frenzied bear. But I stood my ground, put my hand on the small of her back, and told her to calm down; everything would be fine. It sometimes works, and this time it did. For the rest of the day, she was relatively relaxed, only having a concerned look here and there when she thought I was pissed off at tourist chaos.

Perhaps my desire to be a follower today was a mistimed choice, or perhaps I was being a petulant punk. Who knows, but the end result is still the same: I’m mellow and relaxed and munching on a tuna sandwich and a Coke in the bed and breakfast with Grandma while the girls are out on a literary pub crawl. Election chaos, petrol chaos, and flooding chaos dominate the BBC news. I’m not missing Glasgow. I’m not wondering when I’m going to find the time to finish E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class by Wednesday. I’m not wondering when my next stipend is going to arrive. I’m not worried about punks on Buchanan Street or thieves robbing our apartment complex.

I’m vegetating in front of the television and some shitty British medical soap opera while Andrea’s Grandma Tazzia reads the Frommer’s tour guide just to read something.

She’s holding up pretty well considering the recent death of her husband. Naturally people react to such a situation in vastly different ways, but I find it particularly amazing that she’s made the trip to Scotland in the first place. That fact alone tells me that she is a strong, tough woman who, after the loss has lessened a bit, will find a new path to walk, a new direction to take.

After fifty plus years of marriage and spending a considerable portion of that taking care of a sick husband, some people start to lose a sense of who they are. The focus of their lives becomes the well being and final comfort of their love. You and your husband/wife don’t go to some event; you take your husband/wife to some event for their enjoyment. Andrea’s Grandma is probably going through the aftereffects of that identity loss: how to define and orient herself without the other.

Rediscovery is normally considered a young person’s ego trip, something you do when in college (normally involving a lot of drugs and wild sex) or in your late thirties/early forties when you question where your life has gone (but can also include drugs and wild sex). I’ve been a tax consultant since I was twenty-three, have two beautiful children and a loving wife, and drive a Volvo. But who am I really? It doesn’t immediately jump to mind that an older person would have to do this; cliché would have it that they are busy reflecting on their life and reliving the good ole years. I remember the Great Depression, you whippersnapper. It was tough, but we survived it.

But that isn’t really the case. Fifty plus years of marriage isn’t so much a union of two people as it is a merging. There is a difference between those terms in my mind. A union is the joining of two people as a whole corporate unit, only really valid in a legal sense as well as a religious one (there being no difference between business and religion in my mind; the goals are both the same: brand loyalty), but with separate identities still compartmentalized within. A merger is more of an absorption, two becoming one. The ceremony and the paper work are quibbling details; the real merge comes with time.

Death tears away one half of that "merged" person. What do you do when you’re suddenly half gone? Some cannot handle this devastatingly unexpected process and die of a broken heart, but that won’t happen to Andrea’s Grandma. She’s too tough for that. She’ll find that new path; in fact, she’s already started. The road begins in Scotland, paved in haggis and shortbread, steep city hills and leek and parsnip soup, a hide-a-bed couch and a quaint bed and breakfast.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t know Edinburgh yet, that I don’t know the streets or how to find the entrance to Waverly train station. I’ll be back again soon, probably with McCabe and Andrea in tow, a general leading his troops to conquer the unknown. Then I’ll learn Edinburgh, absorb its feel and its ways, and take people around to everything they want to see. I have all the time in the world.

In the meantime, I sit here now, quietly watching Andrea’s Grandma rediscover herself.

---drew, drink and be merry...

Copyright ©Andrew D. Devenney, 2009, all rights reserved.