“If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?” (-Lily Tomlin)

When my grandparents came from Scotland to America, my grandfather Edward arrived first. He was going to find a place for them to live and help establish things before my grandmother Susan came to meet him here.

The two of them had been avid readers of a romance novel in Scotland that described so-called everyday life in America, and it made America sound like a wild frontier all over the country. The story's focus was on cowboys and the excitement of blazing new territories in this new, wild land. The main characters in the novel were “Saxon” and “Billy.”

Well, when my grandfather first came here, he found a house and expected to situate himself in the middle of the USA, in Kansas, and found a big white house with a wrap-around porch and airy land around it. My grandmother was not happy there, though, and they wound up living in New Jersey, much closer to the hustle and bustle of New York City.

Once, years later, my mom had bought a dozen yellow roses for my grandfather for his birthday, and I asked her why she was giving him that. She explained to me that they stood “for the yellow rose of Texas,” because that was a favorite song of his, and he never really got to live the life he had expected, as a cowboy, in America.

One of my prized possessions is a small autograph book, faded and old, dating from the early 1900's, that belonged to my grandmother and it has wonderful drawings and poems in it that tell a rich history of life back in Scotland. For example, there are images relating to World War I on the frontispiece in it, with sailors under a moon, at war, that is “the same moon shining over” the woman waiting behind at home. And there is a caricature of two men celebrating “Hogmanay” the New Year’s celebration in Scotland. My grandfather had a great sense of humor and some of the lines evoke that. One of his entries says: "No woman, on her way to buy a new hat, has ever been known to commit suicide." I cherish it and remember them whenever I look at it.

In it there are several lines written about Saxon and Billy, which is what my grandparents sometimes called each other…

“We need not think alike to love alike.”
(-Francis David)