He talked about Scotland for thirty years. He never went. This is about the journey that lives in the conversation and never makes it to the calendar.
My father talked about going to Scotland.
Not obsessively. Not every week. But periodically, for as long as I can remember, it would come up. Something on television, something he’d read, somebody’s postcard. He’d mention it. Say he wanted to go someday. Get quiet for a minute. Move on.
I don’t know all the reasons. Time, money, the particular calculus of a person who spent most of his life making sure other things were handled before he thought about himself.
By the time the constraints loosened — the kids grown, the mortgage manageable, the schedule more his own — the health started going. Then the window closed.
I have been thinking about that trip a lot lately. The one he talked about and didn’t take. The one I sat there hearing about for thirty years without once saying, let’s figure it out. Let’s make it happen. What do you actually need to go?
That is the thing I didn’t do that I wish I had done.
This essay is not about travel tips. It’s not about where to stay or when to go or which airline to book. Those things matter and I’ll get to them eventually. But today I want to talk about something that matters more — the trip that exists in the conversation but hasn’t made it into the calendar.
Every family has one. Maybe it’s your father’s Scotland. Maybe it’s a fishing trip somewhere remote, a road trip he’s mentioned since you were a kid, a city he grew up near but always meant to go back and see properly. A place attached to a story he tells.
That trip is real. It just hasn’t happened yet.
Here is what I would tell you, from where I’m standing: the logistics of that trip are not the obstacle. The obstacle is the assumption that there will be more time. That next year will be easier. That once this thing resolves and that thing settles down and the other thing stops being so complicated, then you’ll plan it.
If the trip is going to happen, you have to decide it’s happening and then make it happen, in that order. The deciding comes first. The logistics follow. Logistics are solvable. The decision is the hard part — which is why most people never make it, and the trip stays a conversation instead of a memory.
I’m not telling you to book a spontaneous flight this weekend and drag your father to an airport. I’m telling you to have the real conversation. To say: that trip you’ve always talked about — do you actually want to go?
If your father is the type who waves it off — ah, I don’t need to go, it was just a thought — push a little. Sometimes people stop wanting things they’ve wanted for a long time because wanting them and not having them gets heavy.
The trip they talk about has become a symbol of everything that didn’t happen. They protect themselves from the disappointment by saying they didn’t really need it anyway.
They needed it. They just stopped believing it was possible.
That’s where you come in.
The best gift I know of — the one that requires no wrapping and no card — is to look at someone you love and say, that thing you want to do, let’s do it. Let’s make a plan right now, in this conversation, that gets us from here to there. You handle one part. I’ll handle another. We figure out the rest together.
Scotland was my father’s. It belongs to him, even now.
— JT