I See No Such Roses

I have seen roses d'masked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks...

And yet, I think my love as fair
As any belied by false compare.

William Shakespeare


In late fall, the air finally turns crisp and brown leaves crunch underfoot in a way that makes me think of potato chips. I find myself dreading the inevitable weekend when I will be pressed into retrieving the multiple and growing number of boxes of holiday decorations that my wife has accumulated, which I keep stashed in the decking above our garage where they mostly bake under the heat of the day.

This year, when rearranging the remaining boxes for the predictable increase in returning partners, I stumbled upon a particularly solid cardboard case, originally designed to protect a mass of cereal boxes. Slowly, a smile spread across my face and I couldn't resist sitting back and pondering its contents for a moment--the box itself reminded me of my high school years as a grocery store clerk and the day of realization, while stocking shelves, after a day of high school, that a guy could use a sturdy box to hold the treasures accumulated throughout life. I brought it home, immediately began filling it, and have subsequently schlepped it superstitously from place to place since leaving home, even giving it some of the honored floor space of my single storage closet in my tiny studio apartment during my early college days.

I have compromised my impulse to keep every possible memento from my childhood in exchange for no complaints from my wife regarding this one box which represents the residual treasures of my youth. Inside it are seemingly random objects which trigger memories of landmark events--among them: the remnants of an arrow that I split straight down the middle with a phenomenal shot (to the awe of watching observers) during my summer teaching archery, a shattered drumstick standing testament to my self-supposed gorilla strength in the drum corps, handwritten notes from my grandparents which still make me misty-eyed, a letter from a secret admirer, newspaper clippings, photos, and my first driver's license. It warms my heart to rummage through these objects occasionally and feel a tangible connection to my youth as my memories fade over time. But One item in particular generates strong memories of adolescent years, victory, fear, and conflict.

When I opened this box, the first time I had done so in a few years, I spotted a chipped, brown golf clubhead curiously split open, and I immediately saw my grandfather's face again as though I had just spent the day with him.

I can't shake the memory of my grandfather as a volatile person from the moment he appears in my memories. The slightest annoyance, even the mention of a mildly controversial topic, could launch him into a rage laced with shouted obscenities that was frightening to me as a small child. Love and respect for the adults in my family came as an ingrained reflex, but memories of hugging Grandpa brings to mind the smell of cigarettes and alcohol mixed with fear and dread. When he was in the vicnity, I would observe closely and be prepared to scurry quietly to a safe corner if something set him off on a sudden tirade.

As conflicting as the memory of Grandpa is, whenever he comes to the forefront of my memory, the game of golf is not too far away. It was sort of a family joke that we could always find him on the golf course--it was the true love of his life. In light of their modest income, his extravagnace when it came to his golfing habit was seen as potentially ruinous folly. Piecing together the facts early anthropologists deriving Piltdown Man from nothing more than a happened-upon tooth, I've come to believe that he could escape at the country club and not have to face the disappointments of his unsatisfying occupation and dysfunctional family relationships. At the country club, and on the course, things were taken at face value, Grandpa could be a hero and have inherent respect. For the cost of purchasing golf equipment, his own personal cart, nice golf clothes, and a country club membership, he could escape to a world where he was on par, if even for a few short hours, with an oil millionaire. No wonder he loved the hit the links as often as possible.

When I was eight years old, Grandpa unceremoniously presented me with an old set of three cut-down women's clubs that once belonged to my mother when she was a child. Grandpa had sent them to be modified so she could learn to golf, but that idea had frustratingly never come to fruition, with the clubs left as an annoying reminder.

I don't think Grandpa was ready to have a grandson when I arrived in the family--he was thirty-eight at the time and preoccupied with fitting into respectable society in North Dallas. Over the years, my grandparents made some effort to be a part of our life, but often showed up late for our birthdays, sometimes by several days. I was the oldest grandson, and this was one of the first times that I remember my presence being acknowledged so kindly. As the family had grown, kids were an annoying decorative item that slinked around quietly on holidays with lowered heads among crowds of tall, unstable adults perpetually downing cocktails and filling the room with a ubiquitous cloud of cigarette smoke. My younger brother, Don, used to joke that "smoked ham" took on a whole new meaning at Christmas time.

My mother seemed pleased by this gift--I'm not sure why. Perhaps it was because she had never fulfilled his dream of her being a "daddy's girl" by accompanying him on the golf course. My suspicion is that she was relieved that he finally acknowledged grandfatherhood in some way--she liked to build him up to be a tenderhearted, loving father, but this image could be contemplated with some considerable debate. By transferring the clubs to me, the reminder of failed expectations moved on as well, without much promise of a good outcome, almost like throwing out . The clubs were an odd but utilitarian mix: a four wood, a five iron, and a dismal gray putter which, for purportedy unused clubs, looked like they were almost worn out. He also gave me five balls and ten golf tees zipped inside a lifeless, filthy "white" canvas golf bag which sat in my dad's garage for six months before I touched the clubs again. This gesture of kindness was an afterthought; an alternative to throwing the whole bundle into the trash.

The year was 1979. In my memories, the hot Texas sun blanches the colors out of everything in my world at the time and turns it all to a washed-out, fading, technicolor panorama. Our neighborhood had a small pack of boys that ran around untiringly--we played football all year long: Full contact tackle football across two adjacent yards down the street. If we were lucky we would have six or eight players of roughly the right size and age. Otherwise, we wouldn't count my little brother, Don, who was four years younger than me and who I considered a secret weapon as an unstoppable running back. Occasionally we would play baseball when it was in season, but it wasn't nearly as popular. Golf was definitely not a "cool" preoccupation, and wasn't even considered a viable sport for kids my age--it was a "rich man's game."

One day the following spring, I spotted the bag in the garage, scooped it up, and headed across the street to the schoolyard to see how far I could hit the ball. My brother, Don, saw me headed across the street and ran behind me. By the time I got the first ball teed up, there was an audience of five or six neighborhood kids who had never seen a golf ball hit before. They lined up behind me to my right. I chose an open field about 75 yards long surrounded by a large circular driveway. I picked a flat spot and used a blue tee (later, when it caught on among my friends and I we would all consider the blue tees to be lucky) and one of the rotten water balls that Grandpa had stuffed into the bag.

I whiffed my first shot, of course. I think everyone does. The crowd snickered and I could hear them all vying for dibs on was going to go second. I determinedly regripped my five iron with the blue, smoothly worn leather wrapping. This time I took a big baseball-style cut at it and ripped it wildly with all my might...about 12 yards along the ground, burying it solidly in the thatch of tall weeds. After eight failed shots, I lofted the ball off the tee, arcing it in the air gracefully and straight down the field, where it landed about sixty yards away. To me, it was the most beautiful shot ever hit.

I immediately knew my turn with the clubs was over for the day.

I ran across the field to the ball and, leaning over to pick it up, set the clubhead of my five-iron down in the weeds. A pencil-thin green snake whipped around and wrapped its body up the shaft about 5 inches, startling me into jumping straight up in the air. Don was right behind me but didn't see the snake, even when I, in silent shock, held the club out for him to examine momentarily. I then raised the club over my head and brought the shaft and head down against a medium-sized composite rock, and then again, cutting the snake in two. When he saw the bloody body, Don looked up at me in awe with wide-open blue eyes.

Ever since then, I've joked to myself that my golf game was snakebit from the first day.

After the boys in the neighborhood took a turn, we ended up missing 2 tees and 2 balls. I made everyone search for them, but they still weren't found. There was much fascination over the dead grass snake, though. I vowed that, in the future, I would practice golf by myself.

Before long, I was consistently hitting the five-iron across the field, and eventually I had to move to the second field in the back of the school, which was about 150 yards across with two baseball backstops butted next to each other in the middle. I learned the five-iron first, lofting it over the twin backstops, and eventually making a tight grouping of balls resting on the other side. This was a valuable lesson, because as the weather got hotter, the dry earth ripped open and formed crevices that the ball could fall into, and I didn't feel that I could afford to lose any more balls. I guess other golfers had used the field at one time or another, because eventually I had a stockpile of about a few dozen balls, which I stored under my bed in styrofoam egg cartons, but tees were a precious commodity. Sometimes after hitting a beautiful shot and watching the ball land softly across the field, I would have to turn around and quickly search for the resting place of the dislodged tee, which would spin backward several feet. Pretty soon, I was down to three rough-looking tees with chips knocked off in all directions.

Eventually, I realized that more tees could be bought, and I remember that Don and I felt like the richest two boys on earth when we came back from Target with a bag of 250 blue tees, which we continued to conserve like misers out of habit.

Although he occasionally came with me, Don lost interest in the game and golf became my sport. I would leave out each morning during summer break and hit two or three balls through a "course" that I created. I would practice for a couple of hours until the heat became unbearable or I ran out of water in my aluminium canteen.

Hole number one would be to tee up my five iron and hit the ball in the air until it landed against the backstop. Then hit the ball with no tee back to the chocolate-brown painted fence in the corner (I would always "lay up" so I wouldn't accidentally hit the ball over the fence). Next, I would tee up with my four wood, which I became proficient with, and crank the ball as hard as I could diagonally across the field (about 175 yards), hitting it until I bounced the ball off the metal base of a light pole (got 3 "hole in ones" that summer). Then I would tee up the five iron, hitting it back to the original starting place.

Another breakthrough came from my friend, Jody. He had caught a little interest in the game and, being a very studious person, checked out an old-timer golf book, complete with a brown leather cover, from the public library. One technique described in the book was moving the ball in your stance so the effect of the club's loft is altered slightly. Since I only had a couple of clubs, I used this technique to drastically alter the ball flight--I could hit my five iron long like a 3-iron, or short and high-arcing like a 9-iron. Since I had nothing by time on my hands, I learned that club like a musician knows an instrument--I could just walk up and hit it a very predictable distance with a range of 80-175 yards, and soon, I knew just where the ball was going to land within a few feet.

I got the nerve up to casually mention to my grandfather that I had been practicing at golf and he nodded impatiently and promised to take me out to the course with him "someday". A year later, that day finally came around. I was 12 years old.

I spent the night rolling restlessly on the couch. I was very nervous about disappointing my grandfather the next day on the golf course, and possibly annoying him to where he wouldn't want me to come again. I wasn't worried so much about doing my best, but rather avoiding a family scandal or irritating him on the golf course. My secondary goal was to someday be invited back.

We got up that morning and quickly loaded the car. Grandpa had his own golf cart, which in retrospect seems absurd. Their family was middle class at best, and having a cart seems to me to be a luxury beyond their means, even though he did play several days per week. He seemed to be a gadget man: One of the first to have a television set in the neighborhood, and, later, one of the first to have and use a personal computer. We hitched the trailer to the back of the car and headed off to the excluisvely "whites-only" club (one of the last of its kind in racially-charged Dallas) where he was a member.

First, we stopped at McDonald's for breakfast-the first time I ever had experienced Mc-Breakfast. Cautiously cutting my pancakes and sausage, I desperately tried hard not to poke a hole in the styrofoam container, but ended up doing it anyway and having to watch syrup run slowly out onto the table. Grandpa pretended not to notice.

We warmed up at the driving range, and I committed my first mistake of the day--hitting my warm-up shots so rapidly in succession that Grandpa shouted at me to "SLOW YOUR ASS DOWN!!!". But eventually I could tell that he was very pleased that I could hit the ball solidly. I was a small 12-year-old, barely five feet tall and 110 pounds or so, but I was getting the ball about 175 yards straight down the range with my four wood. After one solid smack, I looked back to see him admiring the shot, staring after the ball with folded arms and mouth slightly open in a smile. I even saw him nod a smile to one of his friends who stopped to watch me smack balls down the range.

I suddenly realized that this was a sort of audition, which I had just passed.

To a kid that was pretty much limited to knocking the ball around a weedy field, an actual golf course seemed like a fantasyland. The thick green carpet of grass under my feet seemed to buoy me upward as I walked. The trees were immaculately trimmed. The water was blue and seemed to paint beautiful mirror images as I swept my gaze across the lush fields as we zipped along in the cart. The aroma of freshly cut grass drenched with morning dew and the daily watering of the course smelled like a perfume, and I was suddenly reminded that I was outclassed in this rich man's game. I was intimidated by just the surroundings.

We got out onto the course and I started to tee up one of my raggedy, now thoroughly grass-stained practice balls--it was one of the balls he had given me with the clubs over a year before.

"What the hell is that?" he asked.

"It's my golf ball." I answered, cringing inside. The ball looked like it had been painted camoflouge-colored, like it was part of a top-secret military project.

"Looks like a goddam roadkill to me" he said, holding his cigarette with his lips and pulling his baseball cap down a little. I thought I saw a little gleam in his blue eyes when his voice became a little gentler "Let me see that thing--it's shot all to hell!"

He reached into his bag and fished out a brand new sleeve of the most beautiful, new golf balls I had seen. I had not hit a new golf ball before, and when I hit my first drive I could feel the vinyl covering around it send a smooth wave of vibration through my hands from the club all the way down through my legs to my feet.

"Damn, boy, I've never seen a 10-year-old hit the ball like that. Don't lose those balls--that's all you get!"

I didn't correct him about my age.

When we went up to the hole, he put his cigarette on the side of the fringe with the filter hanging out over the green so it wasn't touching the ground. I'll never forget the awkward sight of Grandpa walking across the green: Blue striped shirt, a puffy baseball cap with a sailboat on it, dark blue shorts down to mid-thigh and loosely fitting white cotton socks that hung very loose on ankles that seemed much too thin. He had a pot belly and his skin was reddish brown and the texture of leather, but with beautiful, sparkling, blue eyes. He had already drank three beers that morning by the time we got to the first green.

On the fourth hole, we stopped for about fifteen minutes to look for balls that were lost by other golfers. Grandpa found about ten, reaching them with a long pole with a scoop on the end. When we finished the hole, the Marshall drove up to us at the teebox. He looked like a good 'ol boy and seemed to know my grandfather.

"Sorry we're going a little slow--it's my grandson's first time to play."

My face reddened but I didn't dare say anything. I lined up my shot on the par 3, fairly confident despite my audience of potential critics. I heard some murmuring behind me then my grandfather laughed a little. I could tell they were having a conversation but I had no idea what they were laughing about.

"Michael, hit the green on this one and I'll buy you a cherry coke when we get back to the clubhouse."

"What's a cherry coke?" I had never heard of it.

"What the hell do you think it is? It's a coke with cherry juice in it. Just hit the damn ball!"

I lined up and took a swing and lost my concentration at the last second. The ball sliced right of the green by about 30 yards into the trees beyond. The marshall laughed loudly and I turned around to see my grandfather, with a clenched jaw, reach into his pocket and slowly hand him a couple of bills before he got back into his cart and drove off. Puzzled a little, I knew that wasn't a good sign for the mood of the rest of the day.

We went down to the green in silence. I didn't have any place to go, so I figured I would make the best of the rest of the day. Playing good golf was now the last thing on my mind. I saw my ball at the edge of the trees, and waited til Grandpa wasn't watching. I picked it up, clinked it loudly against my club with my hand, and then lobbed it with an overhand toss aimed at the top of the flag on the raised green. It landed ten feet from the hole.

Grandpa whirled around, angry that I had hit a shot in his direction, then looking down at the ball.

"That was a great chip-shot, boy! Now get up here and putt it in the hole for your first par!"

I putted the ball, rocketing it past the hole three times before Grandpa, disappointed, had needed to go back to the cart for another beer.

Looking back, it wasn't too bad for my first time on a real course--and my first time to get to putt the ball on an actual golf green. I even seem to remember Grandpa putting his arm around me as we walked back to the clubhouse, happy for the siginificance of the moment--his first outing with his grandson.

When we got back to the clubhouse, I stared wide-eyed at the gentleman in the lounge. Surrounded by dark wood paneling, dim lighting, and wandering among the tables loaded with coctails, I was certainly out of place-it was a peek at an alternate world, where men reclined in thickly padded chairs while drinking scotch and women dressed up and put on makeup to play tennis.

"Hey, Bill. Who you got there with you?"

"This is my grandson, Michael."

"How did you two duffers do out there today?"

"Not bad at all. This boy can knock the hell out of the ball straight down the fairway, but he can't putt for shit."

Both of them laughed. I smiled but didn't speak.

"Isn't that the way it is, sometimes?"

That day, there was no cherry coke for me. Or talk of me ever coming back.

My experience of playing golf with Grandpa fueled my desire to improve my skills. Finding myself on a real course had given me challenges that I hadn't anticipated--the most difficult was my inability to gauge relative distances--the huge scale of the outdoor surroundings played tricks on my eyes and I would think the hole was close and it would end up being 200 yards away.

Also, it was surprising how wonderful it was to hit the ball off the supporting grass carpet of the fairway. My weed-filled practice field had made me an expert at getting the ball in the air under the worst conditions.

Lastly, it caught me off guard how far I could hit the ball--the schoolyard where I practiced was only a little over 100 yards, and I would hit diagonally and maybe be able to get the ball about 130 yards. When I got out on the course with new golf balls and the necessity to crank the ball as hard as I could to get it down the fairway, I was able to do it.

That Christmas, my dad gave me a great gift: his old set of golf clubs. I guess I didn't realize that they were in the garage all this time. He took them out, cleaned them up, and put them in a brand new bag and there they were on Christmas morning--I couldn't wait to get to practice with them.

My dad, an engineer, really didn't care too much for outdoor activities like fishing, camping, and golf--he would suffer through it, and would go camping with us sometimes and took us fishing a couple of times, but it just wasn't his thing.

One thing he was good at, though, was hanging on to stuff for a long time. Our garage was a work of storage art--it pretty much hit critical mass early on and stayed there, even through today, despite my mother's best efforts to reform it. Following the philosophy that something saved isn't of value until it is used again, I was often given things in their second life. The best example of this was my baseball glove, which was perhaps the exact model that Lou Gehrig started his career with in 1925. In fact, it could have been the same glove. The leather had a dusty, rust-colored coating that I used to scratch at with my fingernail while playing out in the outfield. The padding had been pounded flat in the palm from hundreds and hundreds of caught balls, so if you played catch with someone with a good arm, your hand would sting for a few hours afterward. Now, this would typically be a pretty cool thing for a kid to have when he was growing up, but it kind of embarrassed me. I wished I could have a brand new glove from Target to play with and not a hand-me-down antique. My coaches would kind of look at me funny when I would trot out to the field with my "mitt".

Here are other items which my dad held onto beyond their anticipated useful life: Lawn mower (push mower with no automatic drive): 20-something years til it finally died, fire alarms (still has them after 35 years), college books, LP's of marching band performances from the '50's that we used to torture my mother with by blaring them on our stereo (age: 30 years) on Saturday mornings, VCR (17 years before it died), Electric carving knife that Edison could have invented, and the list goes on.

However...my dad now rides around in comfort on a new riding lawn mower while I push my broken-down 8-year old model like a tackling dummy because the automatic drive broke down. So who is modernized and who is a stubborn miser now?

So it didn't surprise me too much, when examining these old clubs, that they weren't of the same generation of the clubs that I had seen when playing with my grandfather. These clubs were labeled with old English names: Mashie, Niblick, Mid-Iron, And the driver had a huge wooden head, unlike my Grandfather's "metal woods" that made a nice "ping" when he hit it solidly. Back to the library to get a key that would tell me how these older-style clubs translated to modern-day equipment. There was a pretty good translation, but the book refered to these clubs as "pre-modern-era". Too funny. In some ways, these slim clubs made me a better golfer. It turns out that modern clubs are weighted differently to increase the club head momentum during the golf swing. These "new" clubs of mine were decidedly unforgiving and required the perfect stance.

I imagined myself hitting shots in the highlands, but the best Scottish accent I could muster sounded more like the leprechaun on the Lucky Charms commercial.

Nevertheless, I practiced with these clubs for another year, then showed them to Grandpa when he was over for a rare visit. I guess it renewed his interest in taking me golfing, because, almost one year to the day after our first visit, we went out again.

This time, I was much better prepared for the challenges of the day. It was a beautiful spring morning and the air was crisp. I teed up a practice ball on the range, reminding myself to go slowly. I hit my first shot with my huge, wooden driver from the 19th century.

I had a friend once who had a three-legged dog named Tripod. I think he had to love "Tripper" more than most people loved their four-legged dogs. Somehow it compensated for the missing leg or something. This is the way I felt about my old set of clubs. I was glad to have them, and I felt a little protective of them from ridicule. Over time, I came to secretly believe that I was really a better golfer and played a more "pure" game than people who used currently, more technologically advanced equipment.

Craaaaaaack! The ball sailed beautifully over 200 yards. I turned around and saw my grandfather's face break out in a wide smile. I had been practicing at the local driving range, and had become impressive with this driver--I knew exactly how to hit it perfectly, like a musician with an instrument.

I went through the bucket of practice balls, warming up and getting my footing and swing down for each of my clubs. At this point I had accepted that I was never going to have "modern" equipment, so I had thrown myself with enthusiasm into learning how to use what I had. By this point, my swing had become so solid that I had outgrown my practice field and could really only practice with a couple of short-range clubs. I still carried my cut-down 5 iron and 4-wood in my bag, just in case.

I felt more at ease walking around the country club now--I didn't feel like I belonged there, but I didn't fear being thrown out for invading their forbidden culture. I was too self-conscious to make many close observations, but now that I had a bag of clubs and new golf balls that I had purchased with money from my magazine delivery job, I felt like I didn't stick out so badly.

We walked up to the first tee box. Grandpa went first, and I followed with a solid shot. I had clearly improved.

On the fourth hole, a long par five requiring the best driver shot you can hit straight down the fairway, I decided to unleash everything I had on the ball. I hit a thundering 275-yard drive which was so incredible that my grandfather actually drove back and forth, measuring the distance with the markers on the course. He wrote on the scorecard "275 yard drive". I know, because I still have the card. Unfortunately, I still hadn't learned out to putt and ended up shooting a score of 6 on the hole. I had even tried mowing a patch of particularly fine grass in our yard down to putting green size, but the mower wouldn't go that low. It was pretty laughable, because, even though the grass looked nice from a distance, the ground under it was lumpy as hell and the ball wouldn't roll smooth. Besides, practicing putting wasn't nearly as impressive as pounding huge drives at the range.

Two holes later, it was time for another drive. We had met up with one of Grandpa's fellow club members, and older gentleman with white hair and a red face. I remember his gold watch sparkling in the sun that morning as I went to tee up with my trusty driver.

"What do you say, Tom? I bet my grandson outdrives you on this one."

(laughing), then quietly: "okay".

Oddly, this didn't shake me at all, even when I thought I heard someone say "fifty bucks."

I teed up my ball, picking out a blazing white, new ball I had just bought for today's game, my second game ever on a real course. As I set the ball on the lucky blue tee, I was determined to just hit it as solidly as I had just a few minutes before. I clamped my teeth together and things seemed to go in slow motion as I spun my 13-year-old body with perfect form. This time, as I hammered the ball with all my might, I felt a nauseating dull thud. The ball came off the club with a funny, lilting spin, swerved over to the cart path, and slammed against it with a loud whack, bouncing twice more on the path before rolling back onto the fairway a fairly disappointing 180 yards away.

I turned around and Grandpa was shocked and silent. So far he had never seen me mis-hit a drive so poorly, and I'm sure he chalked it up to inexperience and rattled nerves.

But then I looked down at my club. I knew something felt odd--the clubhead was missing.

We walked together, silently, about fifty yards down the course, straight down the middle. There we found the ancient, wooden clubhead split open down the middle, the freshly-exposed wood shining bright against the emerald field. Grandpa picked it up, grinning, and held it up for his friend, who was impatiently sitting in his cart by the tee box, to see. Then he turned to me.

"God Damn, Boy! We're going to have to send you for a Mad Dog test! You knocked the everloving shit out of that one. Split the club head clean down the middle where it connects to the shaft!" It was the combination of the hard drive on the previous hole, which certainly was what cracked the head, and all the force that I put into the final drive, which split the clubhead open cleanly. I held the clubhead up to my nose and will never forget that it smelled just like newly sawed lumber. Obviously, that club could never be repaired.

Sometimes it was hard to tell when my grandfather was mad or when he was just making a fervent point with lots of emphasis. I clearly remember thinking that I was somehow in trouble, and slowly realizing that he was proud of what happened, and it was a story that he could talk over with his golf friends later, especially since there was a witness to the event.

His friend didn't hit a shot. He drove off in the cart, shaking his head.

I still don't know if the bet was ever paid.

I finished the round horribly. It didn't sink in until later, but losing that old driver took the fun out of it for me. I liked to think of myself as playing against the odds in the face of adverse conditions--my secret that was an indicator that I could be even better than I appeared to be.

My grandfather let me use his metal driver for the rest of the round. It was depressing to see my shattered clubhead rolling around in the cart as we drove from hole to hole--I guess I'm not sure why I saved it but sometimes I do just save things like that (in my cardboard "memory" box I still have it in a zipper bag stuffed with playbills from Broadway, birthday cards from my ninth year, business cards of people I don't know anymore, and a silver medal from the National Latin Exam--it reminds me of things that Boo Radley would stuff into a knothole.)

I imagine in my mind that my old clubs let me feel the ball making contact with the club better, and I got depressed when I knew there was no going back to my old rejects--I was going to have to join the world and start playing with current equipment. Or did I? No, I refused to get a new club. My old ones got dusty in the garage, and I didn't play anymore.

We packed up my parents' household and moved away, away from the schoolyard. I had already stopped practicing at that point, but it was a point of no return--Much like life progresses, I realized I could never go back to running across the street and hitting golf balls for an hour. In retrospect, this has even greater symbolic meaning to me as my responsibilities continued to increase to the point where I can't just break away to do what I want anymore.

The clubs got left out in the rain by my younger brothers, and started to rust. I rescued them from my parents' garage, took them with me, and then let them sit in a corner of my tiny apartment while I slaved away working forty hours a week and taking a full load of college courses.

When I was nineteen, I got angry at my dad, and took revenge in the only way that I could--I loaded the clubs in the back of my car, and gave them away to an acquaintence. They were a constant and painful reminder, and I just wanted to unload that burden, mutilating myself somehow in a way that could never be reversed, and would always conjure up memories of the pain that I was going through. When I was unloading them, he saw the funny names and realized that they were quite old, and asked "Are you sure you want to give these to me? I mean, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them, but I would hate for you to regret this." I assured him at the time that I wouldn't, and, strangely, I never have.

Four years later, my grandfather died of cancer. While he was sick I felt like kind of an ambassador for the family, primarily because I spoke "golf" and had spent those two full days with Grandpa, which had comparatively made me an expert.. I went and visited him a few times before he got really sick, and I was so glad to have something to talk about with him. I hadn't played in ten years, since that now infamous day on the course when the Mad Dog was unleashed, but it felt like it had just happened the week before, and it was good to see him laugh. I remember him clearly, sitting on the edge of his bed in his striped pajamas, his blue eyes glistening a little as he told me "I want you to know that I'm proud of all of you kids." It felt like he regretted just getting to know me and not taking the same time with my brothers and sisters. If it hadn't been for golf, it would have never happened, and we both knew it.

It was another ten years, a full twenty years after my last game, when I picked up clubs again. The game had vanished from my mind, with the exception of occasional reminders, like driving by the pristine fairways near my house or sometimes the sweet smell of cut grass. My company had a tournament, and I faced the inevitable experience of venturing out on the course again. My skills were surprisingly decent, and when I smashed the ball, the quiet of the fairways seemed to echo my grandfather's voice "Goddamn, son, that was a helluva shot!" I smiled.

A year later, I introduced my son, Ryan, to the game. It felt like I was introducing him to his grandfather, whom he never had the opportunity to meet. I tried not to let it sink in to deeply or attach too much importance to the event, but I can't help but consider how generations link together.

I even bought a new set of clubs, but it will never mean the same thing to me. There will never be a passion for the sport like there was during my youth, but that makes the memories sweeter.

I liken my brief, life-changing experiences with my grandfather to the brushstrokes of an impressionist's painting. Colorful, seemingly randomly placed blips of paint--some tiny, some large, and the whole creation is best viewed from a distance. The paint has been dry for a long time, and,when viewed from the distance of time, the picture, even with it's defects, still makes me smile.