SCOTS-AMERICAN FEELS CALL OF THE HIGHLANDS; ETHNIC HERITAGE IS A GIFT THAT BRINGS A BOND STRONGER THAN TIME, DISTANCE OR CONQUEST TO A TRANSPLANTED SON OF THE TARTAN; WHATEVER OUR ROOTS WE ALL ARE FORGED FROM OUR PEOPLE'S PAST.

Byline: Arthur R. Vinsel

KNOWING who you are and where your connections lie foregoes an ineffable bond stronger than blood or memory as a bridge to forbears from the Old Country, wherever it may have been.

Mine is Scotland, a tiny nation numbering only 5 million today, but whose impact on the world in the past three centuries has been enormous and disproportionate to its size.

Statistics compiled by the volume detail Scots' prowess in education, science, scholarship, invention, aviation, global and space exploration, military tactics, business and much more. Did you know Prince Henry Sinclair left a written record of landing in the New World a century before Columbus, chiseled into Nova Scotia stone? Do ye ken that 75 percent of the U.S. presidents have been of Scots' descent; also five of the 12 astronauts who walked on the moon?

One still needs tokens and written or spoken runes to give one's heritage shape and substance.

Mine include my grandmother's gift, a small, battered tin coin bank fashioned of a Folger's Coffee can with a lithographed label showing a tall, black-hulled clipper ship, and her bloody tale retold for four centuries among descendants of my ancestor, the executioner who raised high ax in 1587 and swung it down on the thin, pale neck of Mary, Queen of Scots.

No, my 16th century kinsmen of the sept (member family) Adam, of Clan Gordon, were not royalty. No aristocrats are we. But the eyewitness yarn handed down from the death chamber of that doomed dowager Mary Stuart affirms that we, by God, knew royalty's worth and a people's destiny.

The tales were far more real than Bible stories, and they kindled a feel and fascination that remains alive today, on the eve of the United Scottish Society's 65th Annual Highland Gathering and Festival on Saturday and Sunday in Costa Mesa. The two-day event at the Orange County Fairgrounds is the second-largest in California (For information, call [phone]). The Caledonian Club of San Francisco began to host the state's pre-eminent Highland Games, set for Labor Day weekend this year at Pleasanton, during the U.S. Civil War.

Scots revere ethnic pride - as well we should - but it serves to enrich all of society wherever we may reside, we 28 million of Scots blood who've scattered worldwide. America has 12 million, compared to only 5 million in Scotland and 4 million in Canada.

Our history alone should drown the whining of that faction of beer-belching U.S. flag-wavers who believe world history began in 1776. They would homogenize the rich U.S. ethnic stew into a bland McNation of nobodies no more distinctive than 99 billion steam table hamburgers.

They dislike hyphenated names; scoff at ritualized regard for one's nation of origin and believe only John Wayne wars are worth recalling. They like ``Buy American'' bumper stickers and assail college minority studies programs.

``In most of America, with the exception of those neighborhoods where skin color and income level are involved, we just don't live naturally in ethnic communities,'' says La Mirada graphic designer Claudia Penney DuFau. ``My clan is MacDonald. I love attending the Scottish gatherings. It just gives me a good feeling to be connected to my roots.''

I know what it is I feel each year as the Scottish gatherings and games begin: pride and identity. They reaffirm my sense of self-hood, awakened at age 8 when I began reading adult magazine fiction and articles. My maternal, Scottish side is who I am, along with a dash of Cherokee Indian.

My maternal, Scottish side defines me, even if the other, dark half of my hereditary mix tried to triumph in past sieges, only to be defeated, finally.

Migrations across half a world are always wrenching for hopeful pilgrims seeking better lives. Yet intolerable as the old places may have seemed, there remains a strand of shared and handed-down memory as tough and enduring as the DNA of our physical beings, blended and redefined in descendants.

This, I think, is what heritage is about. Perhaps the crisp, brittle rattle of snare drums and the deep, humming drone of bagpipes is really in our blood and bone, not just some ethereal thrill alone. It always feels so to me, from blocks away as we approach the stadium, where the distant drums and hum of pipes herald another Scots' festival.

True, the myriad clans of Highland and Lowland Scotland had their bloody history. There was heartbreak from seas to windy peaks after the Battle of Culloden in 1745, when the victorious English banned the wearing of the tartans, on pain of death. But there have always been the lively dances, the strathspeys, the reels, the gillie calum (sword dance) and the seann triubhas and, of course, the Highland Fling.

And there always will be, as long as we descendants remember and reach out to the past, to remind ourselves of who we are and where we've come from, in a nation made better by our presence. I can already hear the merry, martial thunder of ``Scotland the Brave,'' and the sweet, low whine of ``Amazing Grace,'' that haunting hymn written in a sudden moment of clarity by a repentant, unschooled slave ship captain who then turned to the ministry.

This weekend, the hackles will rise on my neck and my eyes will burn again at the grand Massing of the Bands, as scores of pipers and drummers in myriad clan tartans plaids set off by burnished brass and silver shake the very air with music we carry in our blood.

Who knows? Maybe the Gordon Highlanders Regiment (soldiers of my clan) that drills and re-stages battles in red tunics and white helmets worn when Queen Victoria dispatched the Gordons' First Regiment to Egypt in 1882 to guard the Suez Canal, will be taking enlistments.

I'm too old and short-winded to learn the bagpipes, but with my 44-inch chest I'd look fine in a crimson jacket with brass buttons.

And aye, these legs are yet fit indeed for wearing a Dress Gordon tartan kilt.