Riverdance Revisited in Charting new territory

Ha. What would we do without search engines? Last night's Olympic mystery solved. Jason Brown skated to music from Riverdance. No wonder it was slightly familiar. I've only watched Riverdance about 20 times. Well, its been awhile. Celtic music resonates through some long buried gene pool, remembers it's roots and manages to transport my imagination back to other places, other times.

Sometimes which ever part of me belongs to Scotland and Wales longs to go to a home it never knew. I'm sure my immigrant relatives came to America for good reasons. They came here to become Americans and they did a fine job of it. They gave us the best they had to offer and I am grateful. Still, I tend to romanticize the history of those brave folks, imagine how it was, how they lived, how their souls sang for the home they left and the people they left behind. I can romanticize from a distance because they gave me this life but the struggles they endured so that I could be here and now probably left little time to be homesick.

I do wish I knew more of their history though. They married other Americans, some native, some other immigrants, and here I am, thoroughly homogenized into an American Mongrel. I rather like it but still, sometimes, my mind wanders to the days when this America was just a dream, their dream. I wonder how they lived. I wonder about the legends and folk lore of their time. Did they dance to music similar to Riverdance? Were they young, strong and happy? How much did it cost them emotionally to leave home and were they glad of it in the end? I hope so. If they are somewhere looking down, I hope our Riverdance through time makes then proud.