On Saturday, we teamed up with friends and drove out to the local Scottish Festival / Highland Games, which were held in a local park. Our discussions on the way home took an interesting turn.

Do we, as a society, find our current lives so drab and boring that we find a need in ourselves to dress up and play make-believe with the past? Have our modern conveniences cheapened and sanitized our lives to the point that we have to turn to the simplicity and rusticity of the past to find meaning and enjoyment?I walked around the Scottish Festival and felt myself somehow out of place in my t-shirt, worn sneakers, and denim shorts. Around me were people decked out in clothing that we now perceive as regalia: kilts, swords, hip purses (for men as well as women), knee-length stockings, highly polished shoes.

The tailored modernity of a t-shirt, shorts, and ankle socks signified me for the outsider that I felt. Yet I looked at the people around me and wondered what it was about them that made them keep these clothes in their closet in addition to work clothes and weekend clothes.

For, I know, these people do not wear these clothes every day. But what, I wonder, drives them to wear them?

I had similar reactions a couple of years ago when I attended a friend's handfasting. The event was a SCA event, during the festival for the holiday of Beltaine. I am an amateur photographer, and I had offered to 'do' the photography of her handfasting because, to her, it was just as important as her legal wedding ceremony. As a result, I needed to be in SCA garb.

As I was sewing the material for an underdress and an overskirt, I was stunned to realize that this friend owned as much garb as she did 'mundane' clothing—perhaps even more.

Since I doubted that I would ever attend another SCA event, I chose to go all out. I adopted a different name for the weekend, wore my hair differently, and dressed in clothing that no humans have seen me in before or since.

I enjoyed the experience; it was interesting spending a weekend answering to a different name, wearing different clothing, and eating different food. But it was a diversion, an aberration, for me. Not so for the people around me, whose ease and comfort in the situation indicated long experience and familiarity—as if on Friday afternoons they shed their work clothes for garb, and don't resume twentieth-century life until Monday morning.

It strikes me as a bit odd, this intentional pursuit of a second life. It both confuses and fascinates me. Is there some kind of deeper, richer living in our past that we are missing out on in our current life? Is there romanticism to be found in rusticity? Or are we grown-ups who just can't get past the thrill of dress-up?

I haven't the foggiest idea. My flights of fancy are verbal and linguistic ones, so my initial inclination is to say that I'm just not meant to understand. I'm just a bit too grounded in the world of the 'mundane.'