Deja Vu 2013

Have you ever had a serious déjà vu experience? I have. And it was weird!! 

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of spending some time traveling around Scotland. Driving through the Scottish Highlands, I was so sure that the further north I went, the more I had an incredible sense of home that I have never felt before when traveling. And I have never felt it since. One of my girlfriends told me about a similar experience she had in Greece. She couldn’t explain it, but she knew she had been there before and that she was at home.

​Ok, so perhaps we are all pretty much bat #$*& crazy!

​But, on the Isle of Skye, way up there where the tides are extreme enough to leave fleets of boats high and dry, where the sun can set at 1 am and rise at 4am, I knew I had found the place from whence I had come. And just how did I arrive at this conclusion. 

Simple.

​There was a buffet. They had cooked their string beans to death in fat back. The rutabagas tasted just like my Mama’s. The rice and gravy could have come straight from Alice’s kitchen. The turkey, sans steroids and antibiotics, (because they have sense enough to outlaw all that crap over there) was just as flat chested as the ones we had when I was a kid. And, are you ready for this??? Collards!!! Also cooked in fat back!!! Yep, I had come home alright…at soul food central on the Isle of Skye, Scotland.

​Maybe the strong déjà vu was subconscious from equating it with the time, when I was 11 and we went to the mountains for a vacation. We happened upon the Highland Games at Grandfather Mountain, NC. It was the closest my mother ever came to leaving the country and her excitement over all of those bearded, kilt clad lads running around throwing heavy stuff was almost too much for her to contain. I certainly get that now!!! It was the mid ‘60s and the world was huge and enormous. Men in skirts may as well have been men from Mars, at least to us.

Maybe I was recalling that my all-time favorite outfit when I was a child was a kilt with a pin, which I wore with knee socks that had a tassel on them. It came from the Children’s Shop on the courthouse square and I thought it was AMAZING!!
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I need to swab my mouth and send that sucker to Ancestry.com, give them 99 of my hard earned dollars and settle this once and for all. True story, I have a friend who did that recently and they actually told her that she shared DNA with BONO! SHUT UP!! That’s worth $99, right there, because she is kind of musical.
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​But, go figure. It turns out that I do have that heritage. I was sprung from some crazy Scots (explains a whole lot) and perhaps my mother was having her own déjà vu experience when we went to pretend Scotland in 1967. And now that I think about it, there is no way that my mother “accidentally” happened upon the Highland Games. Miss Alice was way too savvy for that!!

​So on October 12th, my son will be getting married in Alexandria, Virginia. He’ll be wearing a kilt for the clan McDonald from which he has descended on his father’s side.  If my mother were alive, afterwards we could set a spell and have some string beans cooked to death in fat back, rutabagas, collards, rice and gravy and dry turkey. She could fiegn being a teetotaler and I'd sneak her a beverage. Yep, that's what we'd do.​