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Pink!
Ahh, I love that.
Not the color. The sound.
The sound of a well hit golf ball.
Golf is a mystery to me. It’s a wondrous sport that we sometimes love to hate, yet it keeps calling us back no matter how bad things get. It’s a simple premise that takes a tremendous amount of skill and patience to play well. It can be very frustrating. It’s essential that we mere mortals leave certain things at home before going to the course. These things include expectations, emotions and guns. Bring only a keen sense of humor. I tip my hat to anyone who, by the end of playing a round, can say that they still have all their clubs in their bag and a clear enough mind to operate a motor vehicle.
I believe you need to be super-human. Take the men and women on the professional tours. These are not mere mortals. An unseen hand has touched them. Butch Harmon's perhaps? Or a David Leadbetter. They play with such control, such certainty. How is it that they can hit a drive without taking up two feet of prime real estate or shape a shot that drops fifteen feet past the hole, then mysteriously pulls back to within three. No magic. No strings. It’s just divine.
I enjoy the game of golf especially when I’m eyeing every putt from the undulated green of my couch. I haven’t played in months. I’m not very good. Perhaps there are easier recreational endeavors that are not so taxing on the mind or body; things like log rolling or zoo docent. My...
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On Friday morning I took 20 men and
we marched out about 12 miles to a chateau
where we stayed and did a little training.
We slept out in the grounds not because we had to
but because it was so close inside.
It was a beautiful place in peace time I imagine,
but since the war it has deteriorated.
It belongs to a rich lady in Brussels.
We slept under the rose trees
and they were all in bloom.
-letter from my father to his parents May 13, 1945
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On a recent visit to the grocery store I bought sixteen items of basic necessities; milk, potatoes, chicken, toilet paper, Welsh rarebit, things like that. After unpacking these items, I found littering my counter- five brown paper bags, seven plastic bags and five styrene-packing trays. It puzzled me as to how I had ended up with more throwaway packaging than consumable product?
In an earlier time, all these items would have fit into one doubled, large brown paper bag. The bag boys of this earlier era would have known how to ‘stack, bend, angle, turn, wedge and fudge’ all of it into the bag with not one square millimeter of space left unfilled. The bag would have literally been bursting at the seams. Bag boys these days either never went to Kindergarten or just can’t seem to help themselves. They use up bags like there’s no tomorrow. I’ve seen them inexplicitly wrap several individual bottles of water in paper bags as if they were a dusty vintage of French Champagne. I’ve witnessed a bottle of Aspirin put into one paper bag then wrapped into another paper bag, double packed like an unstable bottle of Nitro. I bought a New York Times and they put it in a plastic bag, my paper paper in plastic. Meanwhile, they dropped the five hundred pound bag of cat litter directly on top of the delicate styrene egg carton, which was at the bottom of the bag for some unexplained reason.
What were they thinking? Well, that right there may have been the problem. Of...
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I have to say right off that I’m not much of a dog person.
It’s not that I don’t like dogs. I just feel uneasy when I’m around them and I’m not sure where this stems from. I was never attacked or chased down by dogs as a child, never had any negative experience at all really. But when I encounter one, particularly a dog whose head is at groin level or a breed with an unfortunate killer reputation, I sense a deeply inbred intelligence, a yearning to dominate and challenge. There’s an overwhelming feeling of being observed with an instinctual malice. Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe they just want to play, to engage me as if I were a walking plaything. Or chew toy.
My friends, Henry and Frank own a pair of beautiful Border Collies named Mamie and Bess. They are devoted to them and as with most people who own dogs, treat and pamper them like they are their children. These are kind and loving relationships between dog and man but this ‘dog bug’ has never bitten me.
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On a visit to Henry and Frank’s house, my knock on the door is greeted with the double barking and ruckus of Mamie (May-me) and Bess as they barrel down the stairs to engage the intruder. Once they see it’s me, they quiet down and allow me to peaceably enter. I too relax but still entertain a lingering memory of Frank and Henry telling me on first meeting the dogs, specifically not to stare at Mamie.
“Don’t stare at Mamie,” they said in unison. “She’s...
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Views 577
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