1 April 2011 Bagpiper

On our walk home from downtown this afternoon I heard bagpipes. “Must be in my head,” I thought. I’d been feeling wistful for our time in the UK this morning–specifically when I turned one of my photo calendars to the April page this morning and saw a picture from our trip to Scotland last year. Has it been a year already since we hiked in the Highlands? So when I heard the haunting drone of pipes as Sam and I walked down East Market Street in Charlottesville, VA, I figured it was really the drone of an American leaf-blower and a few nostalgic neurons decided it would be more fun to tell my brain that it was bagpipes. But then the piping grew louder.

“Do you hear music?” I asked Sam. (She was little help. Her neurons were telling her that we were stalking red dogs through Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle.)

A radio program, I thought. Or a CD or a podcast. This is Charlottesville, after all. Someone could be blaring NPR’s “The Thistle and Shamrock.”

But then as we neared an intersection, I became certain. It was live bagpipes. From somewhere. Elated, as though I had just won a bet, I looked around for the bagpiper. Where was he?

Finally I spotted him: a young guy standing outside of a warehouse. Bagpiping his heart out in central Virginia. Why? Who knows. The picture of a piper outside a warehouse probably won’t live on in my memory the way Scotland does, but I do love the incongruity. The random, nonsensical beauty of it. It made me smile.