About the Author

In 1937, a boy in Buffalo saw the movie “Wee Willie Winkie”, staring Shirley Temple. He was overwhelmed at the beauty of the funeral song “Auld Lang Sine” and the bagpipes playing with her. He decided then and there to someday learn to play the bagpipes. That boy eventually became my Grandfather, who was drum major of the Gordon Highlanders of Buffalo, NY, and who inspired me from a very young age to love Scottish, well, anything. I even had a piper at my wedding, which struck many of my in-laws as strange since no one in my family is Scottish.

My uncle played in the Pipe Band World Championship with the Caledonians of Western New York as a drummer on the Glasgow Green and won their division. When he later married, my daughter was one of his flower girls. As we entered the parking lot, she heard the pipes from a distance and saw them warming up to the side. She asked what they were, and to my horror it occurred to me that she’d never heard bagpipes. My Grandfather died before she was born, and we didn’t live close enough to hear my uncle’s band play. My daughter politely told me that the pipe music was very nice, but since she was plugging her ears (the room had low ceilings) it was clear she was just being kind. Since my uncle has no children, it seems rather likely that our family passion for Scottish music is going to die with me.

Heartsick to the core, I cam home and researched all about Scotland. I found music young and old, politics on the very edge of the new, jokes that made me laugh until the tears came, and a very familiar look at life where you hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But I did run into a stumbling block: Scots, the language of the western side and the lowlands. I’m sick of tripping over it and missing the best parts of everything. So I’m going to learn the language and hope you’ll join me along the way.

Me? I’m a writer in Maryland with a children’s book, an unproduced screenplay (set in Scotland of course), a few magazine articles, and plenty of stories that I never finished. My general activities involved running around after my kids and escaping to the internet when they are not looking.