Golfing with dad

[vaneramos]

Photo: living room window.

~~~~~~~~~~

The thirteenth book on the second shelf from the bottom, page 126, fifth sentence: "Not his dad's." What am I supposed to write about that?

Not dad's sweat on a hot summer day after mowing the lawn. Not dad on a Saturday afternoon. Stay in your room. Hide from the aloofness, run away. Write yourself into another world until he's done distracting himself with this one and everything wrong with it. Until he's done talking conspiracy theories.

Not a religious man, he hardly saw the bulk of fundamentalism mounting up on the horizon, never dreamed about Christianity and Islam squaring off in the next couple decades. No, it was all about the Jews. How I hated listening to that, tried calling him on it, but he had read much more than I. I was afraid to pick up a history book in case it taught me one of Dad's fictions.

On a long Saturday afternoon he was never near. No, he was over there, playing a round of golf with my older brothers. Sometimes I would go with them, actually riding on the back of someone's golf bag. They would let me wash the golf balls in the little stands by each tee. It was some kind of container on the top of a post. You would lift out the plunger, a wooden gizmo with a hole the right size for the ball. You would put the ball in the hole, and then plunge it up and down. The container had brushes that scrubbed it to a shine. The weirdness is I can't remember the shape or construction of the contraption in my mind's eye, but can still hear the socka-socka as it stroked up and down. I must have been three or four. Then you would take out the ball and dry it with a cloth. That was the only fun part about golf, apart from being with the men. Then I would give the ball to Dad or my brothers and they would tee off, covering it with grass stains again.

Sometime long ago they took those washing contraptions down. I wonder why. Too much trouble changing the water. That would be the Russells, the elderly couple who ran Oxley Beach Golf Course until Mr. Russell fell ill. Eventually it got sold and handed down to a younger couple, not much older than me, an older brother and sister of kids I went to school with in Harrow.

The best part about the golf course was the water trap on the thirteenth fairway. It wasn't much of a pond, just a muddy pit. But it offered up a ready supply of tadpoles for my childhood attempts to raise things. Small children know that a living animal can't look after itself. We called them polliwogs. Polyester polliwogs. Little black dots like plastic with flexible tails. I brought home a bucket and set it under the silver maple, but the afternoon sun still tipped in. They were dead by the end of the day.

Comments

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

this was wonderful to read, both poignant and evocative. i can just hear the socka-socka of the golf balls!

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks V. I don't know why, but my post was hard to write today. I guess my mind has gone so far into the other story that I can't think of anything else to say. I had to write a lot of extraneous nonsense to get something down, then editing it to the bare bones. I'm glad it came out so well. Too bad I can't afford the luxury of editing my NaNo yet.