It was an odd feeling to have my view of someone changed in an instant - a true paradigm shift. This person wasn't a close friend, but rather the girlfriend of one of my fraternity brothers. At the time, the mid 1980s, I was going to a college on one of the more remote campuses outside of a very working class city. The girl involved with my frat brother was nice, fairly intelligent, pretty but not stunning, and didn't really stand out from the other girls we associated with.

Until, that is, one day when she mentioned that her parents were away for the weekend and we could have our weekly party there, as long as we cleaned up afterward (my chapter had a reputation for partying hard, but always cleaning up the next day - it was kind of our credo).

It was dark when I arrived. The driveway was at least a half mile through a wooded area, and the house was large, but those things weren't really unusual; lots of farmhouses are like that. The interior seemed rather nice with furniture that felt like high quality leather, which was a little out of the ordinary but not unheard of. There was a large mural of a Formula 1 car in the study which she called "my dad's race car" which I took to mean that he was a big racing fan - again a little odd (most people in that region follow Nascar, not Formula 1).

I still didn't "get it" until I started to go into one of the smaller rooms and she asked me not to take my drink into the "card room" (I think that's what she called it, though it's been a very long time and I'd already had two or three beers). I asked why and she told me that room was special because it was from a Scottish castle.

Long pause while my slightly inebriated brain tried to make sense of that statement…

What?

Apparently her father (or maybe grandfather?) had bought the room from an actual Scottish castle that was being demolished and had it shipped to the United States and reconstructed in their house. Also, the car in the mural? That was one of the cars from the racing team her family owned, but that was a couple of cars ago and the new one didn't really look very much like that…

I have no idea how this girl (young woman, really) found herself traveling in my social circle and dating my fraternity brother. He didn't really talk about it and rarely mentioned her wealth.