Highland Fling or Irish Jig?

In June 1992, the same month that my kids spent at camp in North Carolina, my parents toured the British Isles. In fact, part of the reason we sent our kids to the June camp session was so they could visit my parents later in the summer, after my parents returned from Europe.

Unfortunately, my mother fell while visiting a church in England and broke her ankle. As I understand it, there was no guard rail on the church steps, and she went off the side when she missed a stair.

Then she experienced the British health care system of the 1990s up close and personal. She was X-rayed and casted with minimal fuss and given a cane to help her navigate.

And off my parents went on their tour. My dad reported later that Mother accompanied him to all the tourist stops after resting her ankle for a day or so. (Though they didn’t do any hiking.) He took this picture of Mother with her cast and cane outside of an inn or pub in Scotland.

I found this photo a few weeks ago while looking for snapshots of my kids to include with other posts. My mother had sent me an envelope of pictures from their trip, and this was one of them. She wrote on the back of the photo,

“Was it too much Highland Fling? Or not enough Irish Jig? Scotland, June 1992”

When I saw the picture again and read what she had written, so many thoughts and images rushed through my head.

How young she looked. (Younger than I am now.)

What a sense of humor she had. (Which she didn’t show much of when I was a child.)

The white owl pin on her sweater (Which I now have.)

How much she changed before she died. (The last pictures of her, taken when her Alzheimer’s was quite advanced, reveal none of the vitality that this snapshot depicts, even when her leg is in a cast.)

And what a sense of history and connectedness I felt imagining her in Scotland.

Her references to Highland Fling and Irish Jig reminded me how proud she was of her Scotch and Irish ancestors. Actually, her father’s family came from England, with some ancestors arriving in Massachusetts before 1700. Later generations of that branch of the family emigrated to Oregon in 1848. But her mother’s father’s family was from Scotland, and her mother’s mother’s family from Ireland. The Irish branch of the family arrived in California in 1849, along with thousands of other Forty-Niners. The Scots came a bit later, in the mid-1880s.

I thought in particular of her maternal grandfather, James Strachan. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and immigrated to the United States in 1884 when he was twelve. His wife, my mother’s grandmother, died young, and he was a widower for many years. My mother remembers him visiting her family when she was a child and dancing a jig. (Or maybe it was a fling. She always called it a jig when she told me the story, but as her note on the photograph indicates, jigs were Irish, and flings were Scotch.)

“He was a short little Scotsman and danced a jig with a pillow on his head,” she told me.

I wish I had a picture of him dancing whatever he danced with a pillow on his head. I would pair it with this picture of his granddaughter—disabled, but still dancing. Then I could see life coming full circle across the generations.

What humorous images do you have of your parents or other ancestors?