Little green heron

 Little green heron 

I played golf yesterday, the first time in at least a year — at least a year since I’d held a club in my hands. It is such a bizarre concept, hitting a ball with a crooked stick across fields, hoping to find a hole it will fit in.
     The origins of the game must be something like that: spheroid, crooked stick, fields, hole. A shepherd hitting frozen sheep turds with his crook until he lodges one back in one of the sheep. Practice. Then, he comes on another shepherd: “Watch this!” “Wait! I’ve got to try that.”

We no longer live in the Scottish hills of that far-off, innocent time. We live under bustling Western Capitalism run amok. So games’ origins must be scraped away so associations can rise up to organize them, industries to supply them. Consider the evolution of the baseball mitt from a pancake to protect the hand to a Venus flytrap the size of a rhino’s head. Consider how in golf not only does a sheep turd become gutta percha become balata become Surlyn but hickory will become steel will become sixteen different grades of glass, and two legs will become four wheels with a motor.

I shot 90 from the so-called senior tees, which I allowed myself as I was afraid to swing more than a 4-iron given the state of my lower back, even fortified by 600 mg of Ibuprofen.
     I started with a seven on the opening par-5, but then I had three pars in a row, and I thought I might know what I was doing. I didn’t. I hit the ball well all day and still shot 90.

    But the course we played, near Luray, is nestled into the Blue Ridge, and there were some lovely views — the close-mowed meadows of the fairways bumping into the mountains, the mountains bumping into a sky like a shell, the way it is in Genesis 1, the firm-ament.

I used to like playing golf, a kid with other kids, humping seven clubs around the shaggy course in Beeburg (where Uncle Darrow made part of his living), trying to make the ball move in different directions without cutting it. Sometimes, running between shots, we’d play nine in less than an hour, less than forty-five minutes! Then, we would lie on our stomachs in the grass by the first tee to look down at the girls lying by the pool on their towels in swimsuits like tropical birds. Summer, we were sure, would not end this year.
      Hard to remember. Our round cost us four hours (with motor).

A typical golf shot, from the time you take the club head away from the ball until the time you strike it, must be at most a second-and-a-half. So, out of 240 minutes, you’re actually playing about two-and-a-quarter minutes if you shoot 90 like I did. (Those that have claimed that golf is better than sex, incidentally: what does that say about them?)
     Anyway, I made it through eighteen holes without minimal embarrassment.

The highlight of the round: We may have seen a green heron, but we couldn’t be sure. But then
     “It's hard these days to be sure of anything,” as my golfing friend Hamlin Moody (aka Jackass Jones) likes to say.*

                                                                            08.22.23 

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* See here and here about the time he played with Donald Trump.