Golf Swing

I don’t know why, but my golf game has suddenly improved.  The last three times I’ve played, my drives are longer and straighter and my putting isn’t as awful as it used to be.  Okay, once in a while I’ll still hit one out into the wilderness and I actually took six strokes to putt a couple of weeks ago.  But that’s been the exception, not the rule.  I get a lot of bogies (one over par which for me isn’t bad), and had a par time before last.  (Last time out, we played Scramble, a game in which the best lie – where the ball lands – of our threesome is used in turn by each of us, and we had four pars and five bogies.)  Even when I was playing badly I enjoyed golf, but now I’m growing very fond of it.  A solid straight drive is immensely satisfying, like watching a stitching pattern come out right.

We had a different sort of adventure around another kind of golf: miniature golf.  There is a range in Saint Paul, in Como Park, called Putt’er There.  It’s eighteen holes and had the usual windmill and castle towel, but also lots of trees and flowers.  And it’s eighteen holes.  Very attractive and will be the model for a miniature golf course in the book I’m plotting out.  Sunday before last, four of us went to play, and somewhere that day Ellen lost one of her two-thousand-dollar hearing aids.  We didn’t know exactly when or where it happened, and so we tore the apartment and my car apart looking for it after the golf course owner said it hadn’t been turned in out there.  We were so sure it was gone for good, I didn’t even pray for it to be found and Ellen put in a bid on Amazon.com for a used replacement.  Well, this past Friday Ellen and I went over to play again (I had coupons for two free games) and Ellen walked over to a park bench on which we sat that Sunday waiting for our two friends to arrive.  And by gum, she found the hearing aid in the grass behind the bench!  It hadn’t been rained on, walked on, or mowed over, and is in perfectly good working order except for a dead battery.  Extraordinary.

The sun is going away.  I rise around five in the morning three days a week to stumble to my computer to get my brain in gear so I can drive over to the pool at six for water aerobics.  In the winter, of course, it’s still totally dark at five.  Then, in the spring, the living room dawns brighter and brighter until I don’t need to turn a light on to see to pack my little bag with underwear and a washcloth.  Now here it is, late July, and already the light is dimming again.  We still have all of August to get through, but my heart is starting to turn toward autumn.  The year flies at a scary tempo.  This past week I contacted my poultry source to place an order for three Michaelmas geese.  There are times when I think I’d like to live in a place where long, warm, sunny days are not of so small a number.  But it would have to be a place with four seasons.  The seasons mark the passage of the year.  It helps me remember when something happened long ago: “It was in the summer of sixty-nine . . .”  Gosh, I remember my elderly relatives talking like that.  Sometimes I sound like an old person!