Which Reminds Me

I vaguely recall at one time over the dinner table at our house in El Salvador the talk was of ancient European royalty and something about the glories of that. My mother laughingly made some flip and/or self-deprecating remark about how back in the Middle Ages she probably would have been the maid of the manor, not the aristocracy, probably not wanting to seem boastful and vain in attempting to claim some vague promise of royalty to which we obviously are not entitled. I don't recall whether this bit of conversation was connected to the discussion of the McClellan "Castle," a barren pile of rocks located in the city of Kirkcudbright, Scotland, which at one time was a house owned by the McClellan clan of my grandfather's ancestry. Upon more recent investigation, I learned there is also a title, the Lord of Kirkcudbright or something like that, gone extinct some time in the 19th century due partly to the deaths of the childless McClellan heirs and also a mass exodus of Scots people who would rather be free in America than burdened by the claims of British aristocracy on one's time and money. It just doesn't seem to matter here in America what happens to the pile of rocks that is mainly a tourist attraction over there. If I could afford to travel I probably would go there and spend the hour or two required for the guided tour but beyond that I really don't know why it matters that much to me personally. The fact that this was discussed in front of the Bueno family is perhaps unfortunate because those people latch onto every little detail and incorporate everything into their private fantasy world about kings and castles and whatever. The Middle Ages were a bleak and miserable time for most people so, yes, it is a bit hard to understand why the Tripletts would want to fuel that fantasy, to actually take that so seriously, not that I would want to make a federal case out of that. I mean, lots of people enjoy the museum tours and the history books about castles but would we really want to go back to that miserable time when printed books had not yet been invented and regular people like me were mostly illiterate? No, I think not.