It seemed an inauspicious day to be wearing a kilt: hot and sunny, with highs in the 90s. Yet there stood a bearded young man in a heavy woolen green-patterned tartan kilt, tam-o’-shanter, tweed jacket with white cuffs peeking from the sleeves, thick woolen knee socks with garters, and a swath of plaid cloth pinned to his shoulder and flowing to his knees. He peered out at the summer-dried park through round wire-rimmed glasses and his dark hair was clubbed into a ponytail all of two inches long. The whole ensemble leaned picturesquely upon a black stick. On his left was the gathering place for Clan Hay, its kilted occupants wisely holed up at a table that was shaded by a tarpaulin; on his right, a giant inflated blue-sweatered Spuds McKenzie bobbed against its tethers atop a beer truck. In the background was the omnipresent high-pitched whine of bagpipes and the thudding of drums. The Highland Games had come to North Riverside.
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The crowd was cheerful and neat. There was amazingly little trash, and, for all the beer being swilled, there were no belligerents–not even any raucous laughter. Even the security guards were helpful and friendly. It was the most polite crowd I’ve ever seen. It would be hard to imagine an ethnic event less like, for example, the various local festivities around Saint Patrick’s Day.
The young girls in the dance competition, numbers pinned to the hems of their kilts, raised arms and knees in near unison, occasionally forgetting to smile in their fierce concentration. A glazed-eyed lone piper puffed the same tune over and over, stranded behind the dancers in a corner of the stage. Behind the rope that separated the crowd from the stage, other competitors in various stages of dress watched their rivals, cheered their friends, or practiced beneath a tree. One, a torn gray sweatshirt over her costume, tuned it all out, snapping her fingers to the tunes of her Walkman.
It was time for the pipe-band competition to start again, so I crossed to the other side of the road and sat with the family groups, who were patiently camping on their tartan blankets in the shade around the roped-off field. Forty minutes late, the “Tunes of Glory” from Batavia, an aggregation of teenagers and middle-aged men and women, stopped their march along the road to squeeze past a limousine that blocked the entrance of the home. They reformed their circle and played a last warmup of “Scotland the Brave,” their chests heaving in the oddly out-of-time way of pipers, who depend on their arms squeezing sheepskin sacks to supply their drones and chanters with air. A hanger-on walked behind them, straightening the tall red cockades they wore on their hats. Then they marched onto the field to applause and formed another circle, the better to hear themselves play. Drums rapped and thudded, and shrill pipes hurled their notes into the dusty sky.
