Half a generation ago now, I studied international law in Edinburgh, at the university bearing the same name. We, the students, lived only a few paces from the Castle, in a dormitory called Patrick Geddes Hall. The Hall stands so near the Castle that it appears just out of frame in nearly every photograph taken uphill from the fashionable, touristy Royal Mile.

The setting was memorable. The voices, even more so.

Scottish, as anyone who has lived in the United Kingdom or visited knows, is a language unto itself. Over the course of several months, I took pride in learning to interpret nearly every local variation, including drunk Scottish, which resembles the regular Scottish with a touch more volume and considerably more fight. Yet one speaker was the toughest to crack: Ruthie. She happened to be the housekeeper for the dormitory.

Ruthie was short, broad, with a pale, wide face and a fixed, wry smile. She remained in constant motion, always talking, sometimes to herself, sometimes to whomever happened to be nearby. You might catch something about trouble at home, a bit of gossip about the Royal family, or the latest mess she needed to tend to. Now and then, woven into her monologue, she would stop pushing her broom, cock her head slightly, and recite a bit of her personal philosophy. Her favorite was this: “Clogs to clogs in three generations,” delivered in a brogue tuned by the same reed as a bagpipe. And then she would laugh.

Hearing her often-repeated line, I once asked her what it meant. She explained: one generation builds, the next inherits and squanders it, and the third returns to where the first began.

Whether she was speaking from personal experience or musing on the fate of others, I could not tell. Or perhaps she was issuing a warning: watching us, young and striving, possessed by the ambition of stacking a pile higher than we could ever spend. Such folly, she mused. Our children, or if lucky, grandchildren, would return it all. For the next generation to start all over again.¶