Like us, Lily was taking the train to Glasgow. She and her beau just bought a place there. He’s Scottish. She’s posh English. “I will teach our children proper English,” she said, laughing.

Lily works for a uni in London. Her beau drives a lorry when he’s not off to some far-flung place playing on an international football team. Hockey is her game. They met on Tinder.

She’d broke off a seven-year relationship with her ex-beau. It was the misogyny, she explained. It was easy during Covid when they both were working from home to divvy up the chores of cooking and cleaning. What else was there to do with one’s time? But once Covid waned and she returned to the office, it was an altogether different matter to come home from work to a man complaining that he was hungry and when was she going to fix his meal.

“We were both working and getting home at the same time but he’d want his dinner when I wanted to take half-an-hour to unwind.” She told him to make his own dinner if he wasn’t willing to give her time to herself. “And here I was making more money than him.”

Good thing you recognized it before you married him, I offered. Lily nodded enthusiastically.

It was while standing in front of the display of John Knox’s cane at the Perth Museum that I was reminded of the conversation I’d had with Lily only a day earlier. Misogyny and patriarchy being the brand of Knox’s particular fundamentalism. I wish it had died off with Knox, but unfortunately people like Doug Wilson and so many other firebrand fundamentalists (men and women) like to keep it going, mostly because it serves their very selfish purposes.

But such self-serving ambitions aren’t limited to men as I was reminded while viewing the last letter of Mary Queen of Scots, also on exhibit at the Perth Museum. This was our first visit to Perth, made on a whim on a sunny day in Glasgow. Museums are often closed on Mondays but in a stroke of luck the Perth Museum was open. So we were able to see Mary’s letter to her brother-in-law, written in the wee hours of the morning, less than six hours before her execution by beheading. I can’t imagine how she could steady her hand enough at 2 a.m. to write such a thoughtful letter.

An estimated 300-400 people turned up to watch the execution. Beheadings are rarely clean affairs. The executioner would typically have to strike the head more than once, and such was the case for Mary. It took three hacks before the executioner could display her head for the jeering crowd. (Every time I wonder how bad things in the US can get, or how cruel can those working for ICE can be, I’m going to think of the crowd that pressed in to see Mary’s head chopped off).

The irony of it all to me is that Mary’s son James ended up replacing Queen Elizabeth anyway, given she remained childless. Poetry. There’s always a poetic twist to these all too common man-made cruelties. We don’t know yet what the poetic outcome will be of the MAGA cult that has unleashed ICE terrorists upon the people of America but we know that one awaits all those who’ve bowed in worship to a false king with an orange pallor.

At dinner tonight a young woman visited with us about her own family’s migrant story. Her Argentinian mother met her Scottish father at a bus stop in South Africa. Together they made their home and raised their family in a small Scottish town in the Cairngorm mountains. The young woman is now majoring in International Business and Spanish, and plans to do a year abroad study in Spain. When she graduates, she plans to travel the world. No AI is going to be able to replace her beautiful spirit or the desires of her heart.

Inscribed on the wall of our hotel room in Glasgow is this admonition from St. Augustine: “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

Illiteracy comes in many forms. I know people who were illiterate because they never had the chance to learn to read, and never had the chance to travel. Others do not read and do not travel because they lack curiosity about others, and about the world in which we all abide.

Humanity would be in a much better place if we’d all work at being more curious about one another, and a lot less critical of those who don’t look like us, don’t worship like us, and don’t share our spaces. Our fear of others keeps us chained to some dungeon of darkness, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.