TBT: Innocent until proven Kilty

This is a picture of me, my father, and my baby brother taken at my brother's wedding a few years ago. I guess it's kind of obvious, but for those of you who have never been to the Scottish Games, those are kilts we are wearing and not fatboy skirts.

We wore those in celebration of our scottish heritage.

Cause that's where the name Macrae comes from. Scotland.

I was thinking about this picture, and 'Heritage' more specifically, because Calvin had been asked recently, where he was from.

Like . . . not where he was born . . . or where he lives . . . but what nationality gets to claim such nice skin, long eyelashes, perfectly rounded eyebrows, and the kind of shiny blond highlights that are the dream of every Californian soccer mom who ever sat in a hairdresser's chair.

He ran home and asked me that question.

"Wait . . . Dad?"

"Mmmhmm?"

"Where am I from?"

and in true dad fashion (with a little help from his namesake Calvin&Hobbes), I pulled the tag out from his T-Shirt and replied;

"This says you were 'Made in Mexico'

He didn't find that answer either interesting or clever and continued to push the issue. There were many secondary answers I could have given him that were just as annoying like "There was a sale at Walmart" or "We found you in an industrial sized CrackerJack box" but he was having none of it.

The real answer was boring.

I mean he already gets to claim that he's half Italian. Pretty badass when you think about it. His mother is ALL Italian. ALL italian.

That can mean whatever you think it means.

What it does mean, is that she could go to Italy and say she's italian. Unfotunately, by procreating with me, it means when her brood goes to Italy, they're/we're, just Americans.

Cause on his father's side, my side, kind of a chop suey of accidental leftover genetics.

Since I am quite the Geneology Geek I can tell you for certain that some of his ancesters came over on the Mayflower. Some fought in the Revolution, the war of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American war, the War to End all Wars, WWII (Cause we lied the first time), and the Korean War (The war which made a star of Alan Alda).

He's got nothing from the Vietnam War.

Actually, did anyone get anything from the Vietnam War?

Anyway, it's boring because he has one great-great-grandfather who was Scottish, and one great-great-grandmother who was Austrian, but the rest, a hodgepodge of English, Germon, Dutch, French, and my mom thinks there is some Native American in there, but I never found it.

If you do a little cheap math, (I say cheap because genetics don't play by my rules), if you do a little cheap math, that makes him 1/2 Italian, 1/16th Scottsih, 1/16th Austrian, and 7/8s other.

By the same rules, I am 1/8th Scottish, 1/8th Austrian, and 3/4s non-hispanic caucasian.

So why do I get to proudly don a kilt at a wedding instead of leiderhosen, or if my mother is right, an indian headress?

Because of my last name, silly.

I'm Californian in my bone marrow, American on my passport, and a member of Clan Macrae just because my father took his biological father's last name back in the seventies. Till then he'd been a 'Hubbard' after his actual father. I'm only a Macrae because it makes a better stage name than Hubbard.

And allows me to wear a kilt at formal gatherings.

I wonder if there will ever come a time when American is it's own heritage. I also wonder if that's why every other country in the world likes soccer so much. They don't get to import the players we do, so it's a real matter of the national testicle for them.

A couple of hours after this photo was taken, my wife snuck a few crude shots of the things hiding under that kilt while I lay passed out on the hotel bed.

You couldn't tell then if I was 1/8 Scottish, or 1/8 Austrian, or 3/4s non-hispanic caucasian.

But I was clearly a boy.