I am the anonymous Scotsman who stood up to sing.
It was 1958. President Dwight Eisenhower asked Bobby Jones to captain the Americans in the World Amateur Team Championship. A terrible spinal cord disease had left the champion crippled. One night, the local elders invited Jones to the town hall to become a Freeman of the Burgh of St. Andrews, the first American so honored since Benjamin Franklin.
We are the townspeople who came to welcome him home.
Jones grabbed the table and struggled to rise, pushed and pulled by the love in the room. His son waited behind him in case he fell. Jones inched down to the podium, and we rose, cheering each awkward step, all of us one, feeling the pain of age and disease, remembering a time when he was young and invincible. Could this old man in braces really be the great Bobby Jones?
He didn't have notes. He spoke from the heart for about 12 minutes. He called all of us his friends and hoped we would call him ours. He spoke slowly, in his Georgia drawl, and his words rang true. "I could take out of my life everything except my experiences at St. Andrews," he said, "and I would still have had a rich and full life."
He shuffled off the stage and slipped into a golf cart. He rode down the center aisle, leaving this place for the last time.
Overcome with the moment, I began to sing an old Scottish song.
The clear words gave us chills.
"Will ye no come back again?" I sang.
We joined in -- singing the song slow and sad, a funeral recessional, as the cart pulled slowly into the night, a living man turning into a ghost before our eyes. He became part of us, and we sang goodbye to a piece of ourselves.
"Will ye no come back again?
Better loved ye cannot be,
Will ye no come back again?"
He rode in the cart, never to return to the town he loved so much. We stayed in the town hall, grieving, unable to speak.