Should've Been Scottish
On discovering I was meant to be from the most special place in the world.
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here; My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer; A-chasing the wild-deer and following the roe, My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.—Robert Burns
I knew it from the first sip of Irn-Bru. Everything that came after the heavenly serum touched my lips: the Highlands, the friends from Aberdeen and Forfar and Edinburgh who I’d suffer through European Championships and World Cup qualifications with in group chats, the melancholia and fascination with tobacco and literature and suffering was only secondary evidence to support my suspicion that whoever had been working logistics for the Big Man on the day of my formation had fudged the dispatch coordinates.
I’m a Scotsman trapped in a foreign body.
When my friends and I ventured to Caledonia for no reason other than that we loved Braveheart—Jeremy, a child of Poles, I of Argentines, and Mickey, a descendant of Alba’s Irish neighbors—it was by divine appointment. I’m sure of it now. The only thing in the world I wanted at 19, besides a kilt I could wear to college the next September, was to scream out loud the words of Peter Martin to a Council of Men who could put the stamp on what I’d been feeling since we pulled into the Megabus station in Edinburgh.
“Aye, you cannae hide it, son,” they’d say after listening attentively to my pitch-perfect reproduction of James McFadden’s howitzer strike against the French, arguably the greatest goal in football history not scored by an Argentine. “You’re a proper one,” the gruffest among them, wearing the face paint of St. Andrew’s cross, would say. And then he’d signal the bagpipes and slide a ceremonial pint glass across the bartop, nodding for the man behind the counter to fill it up halfway with Tennant’s Lager and “a dram of whisky” for good measure.
Four years after returning to America, I realized—again, mistakenly—that God's call was not to missionary soccer coaching in Tajikistan or Argentina, but to a career in sports journalism. So I launched “A Peach of a Goal,” an endeavor inspired by the Tartan Maradona’s sucker punch in Paris. From the outset, the blog was a flop. But months after, steeped in depression, I met Jamie, an Aberdonian, during grad school orientation. This new friendship was a celestial encouragement for when I was at my lowest: bereft of nation and vocation. “You’re not alone here,” the Big Man seemed to tell me, as I unloaded on poor Jamie like he was my therapist. “Be strong while you’re in exile. I’ll bring you home someday.”
It is terrible to admit, in these divided times, that I’m no patriot. As a migrant’s son, the Red, White, and Blue has always felt a little foreign on my skin. Until that trip to Scotland in 2008 with my best friends, regardless of what my passport read, I was homeless. I could not understand why my parents traded Argentina for New Jersey and then gave me a name with no connection to the place they came from. I arrived at college a Latin American studies major, convinced that I would right their wrongs and restore my bloodline to the Land of Silver. But then I wandered the cobblestone streets of Stirling. Stared up through the gray clouds into the Scottish night in Fort William and Arbroath. Traversed the Isle of Skye, beyond the tourists at the Quiraing, past the gorges and lochs and ancient boulders that form the barricades in No Man’s Land, where only blackface sheep graze, and I knew that my Argentine identity was only the starting point, not the final destination of my heart.1
Early in our trip, on a sunny train ride somewhere in the Scottish countryside, possibly to see the white-sand beaches of Morar, an older woman sitting in the row behind us peeked through a crack in our seat cushions. “Excuse me,” she said, “Are you boys from America?” We told her we were backpackers from New York City seeking overseas adventure, pitching tents in the gardens of whoever’d let us, and hoping the weather didn’t turn or the midges didn’t eat us alive.
“Och, you’ve picked your week!” she said, elated. “It’s usually pelting down. But the English have got all the rain this week.”
Her husband, a gruff-looking man in a tweed coat and grey bunnet, lowered his newspaper. “Serves them right,” he said in a voice that bore the weight of history. She scolded him: “Don’t say that, love! They’ll think we hate the English.”
“We do hate the English,” he grumbled, staring straight into my headrest.
One of those many nights we talked ourselves to sleep in the tent, souls and bellies full after another friendly older woman welcomed us in for mince and tatties, I admitted to Mickey and Jeremy that I didn’t want to go back to America. I hated college. I didn’t care about making new friends or getting a degree or anything but what those green hills seemed to promise. I wanted to be here.
It was halfway through the trip. I still hadn’t gotten my chance to recount Faddy’s goal to the Council, but I’d assumed the accent well enough that I was sure I could pass as an exchange student to other teenagers with no culture.2
“You know what,” I said, petulantly, “my first day back at Willy P, I’m just going to pretend I’m Scottish.” And I did. That first week of September, I walked into Professor Douglas’s Western Philosophy class with backstory and all. “Aye, I’m from a wee town called Dalkeith,” I said to the classmates who approached me afterward in a brogue so thick it made English knees buckle.
“Ma da was a pro fae Argentina—signed wi’ Hearts back in the ‘80s. And I was born in Edinburgh. When he packed in the fitba, the economy back hame went tae bits, and he reckoned, ‘Aye, why no gie America a go?’ Hame will always be here,’ he said.”
But 16 years have passed, and I’ve yet to see my hills again.
The best I could do was convince my wife to name my daughter for the place I lost. That was another thing I told my best friends on the road from Perth to Pitlochry, after learning the Ancient Name for paradise from the signs and the Gaelic radio playing in the background.3 “I will have a daughter many years from now and name her Alba. And one day we will return to Scotland together and take a picture in front of the Fàilte gu Alba sign and I will cry knowing that, by God, she will always be sure of where she came from.”
Like so many of us, I stumble through this techno-fueled dystopia, forgetting who I am or why I’ve been put here, lost in the milieu of screens and noise. Nudges reawaken me like the sound of bagpipes playing “Auld Lang Syne.”4 Learning that the Scottish church is Presbyterian, as I am, and thus I am no fool to believe that God holds office hours in Flodigarry. Or when Michael, a Jekyll-and-Hyde of a footballer who’s convinced that I’m insane,5 played me the video of Allaster McKallaster’s commentary of the boys’ 2-nil pummeling of the Spanish. “We’ll deep fry your paella. We’ll deep fry your tapas. We’ll deep fry your gazpacho soup. You come to Scotland, you’re getting battered!” and I thought, “That’s so like us.” Or when I learned about the origins of my favorite football club, Rosario Central, and how its founder and first president, Mr. Colin Calder, was not an Englishman but a Scot from Dingwall who’d emigrated to Rosario to work for the Central Argentine Railway.6 (What is the Argentine gaucho, with his mate and poncho, if not the spiritual cousin of the Highland Scot with his tweed bunnet and tobacco pipe?)
On the final day of our trip abroad, we ventured south by bus from Edinburgh to London. The three of us were sad to go. But selfishly, I was just as sad about missing my shot at performing the commentary of Faddy’s wondergoal in front of a Native Son before crossing the Atlantic the wrong way.
Across from the bus station was a pub where we would sink our sorrows before being barred from consuming alcohol again in public for at least two years. We took three empty seats at the bar. Beside us, a pudgy, bald man with an acoustic guitar in a black case methodically counted his pence. He was watching the highlights of the day’s Euro matches on the TV, as we were, and shaking his head in dismay. The clock was ticking.
“I can’t believe we didn’t make it,” I said, taking a stab that the reason for his consternation was akin to mine.
“Tell me aboot it!” he assented in Glaswegian. We got to talking. Turned out he was a wanderer, like us, who’d made his home in Plymouth for the past decade. “You know he’s memorized McFadden’s goal,” Mickey told him, as we chatted over pints of lager. The man’s eyebrows touched the ceiling.
“Aye, is that so? G’wan then,” he said with a look somewhere between doubt and hope.
I took a deep breath—
“McFadden, drags it down now. Long way out…”
I saw the balance teeter.
“AHHH WHAT A GOAL! WHAT A GOAL BY MCFADDEN! MAGIC FROM JAMES MCFADDEN!”
The room was spinning. By miracle or magic, we’d somehow been transported back in time to that twelfth of September in the Parc des Princes. “HE’S A GENIUS AGAIN FOR SCOTLAND. THEY’VE BEEN SUCKERED…”
As the words left my lips, the empathic connection between us, two men, so far from home, struck a minor chord at the eleventh volume. “JAMES MCFADDEN FROM 40 YARDS! INTO THE ROOF OF THE NET! PICK IT OUT, LANDREAU! FRANCE NIL, SCOTLAND ONE!”
I performed the whole thing, right there at the bar counter, sandwiched between my closest friends and this stranger. And I swear that his eyes turned red as he gripped his pint glass to the point of breaking. Water welled and then spilled over, as my brothers cheered the moment of shared ecstasy.
The Scotsman’s gaze was still on mine. “Like a bloody arrow that,” he muttered, sniffling in nostalgia. “Best goal I’ve ever seen.”
The Council had approved. And when the time is right, whether in 2026 or 2035 or on the final day before the world burns in nuclear fire or armageddon, I can only hope that the stamp has not expired and the Auld Country welcomes my return with open arms.
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There is a shared brotherhood between the Scottish and Argentines, founded (mostly) on a shared hatred of the English. I’ve read that in 1986, after Maradona eliminated the English from the World Cup with two of the most iconic goals in history, there was a petition going around to name him Scotland’s Player of the Year. The commentary for Maradona’s first goal, ‘The Hand of God,’ is parodied here by Allaster McKallaster.
There are so many great video clips of people being unable to understand Scottish accent. This one is my favorite. One of Jeremy’s Polish friends, a blue-collar father whose family housed us during our final night in Edinburgh, said that when he was on the plane from Warsaw to Glasgow and heard the natives speaking he broke out into tears, sure that he would never understand them.
We are all language nerds and didn’t have a concept for how popular or unpopular the Scottish native tongue was in 2008. But we strategically picked the Isle of Skye to visit because it was the southernmost place we read that you could still hear people casually speaking Gaelic to each other. And we did hear it, between a schoolboy and a bus driver, on our way from Portree to Flodigarry.
It isn’t only that, of course. On any given day, you’ll catch me whistling the tune to “Scotland the Brave.”
When I told Michael about my geographical dysphoria, he shared this scene from Trainspotting.
In 2023, Rosario Central debuted a third kit inspired by the Saltire.
You write the Scottish accent so well I’m convinced you’re either already an Irvine Welsh fan or you should be.