Sunday afternoon, I found it again.
It could have been summer from when I was 17. I found it on the eighth hole at Babbitt Golf Course where, after driving over the trees on the right of the fairway for the second day in a row, I had just an easy chip to the green. I found my swing. I found the smell of summer from the Sinnissippi Valley of my youth. There was a cool breeze blowing with just a little touch of humidity and walking up to that green where you have to ring a bell when you leave, I closed my eyes and I could have been 17 again. Even my back felt young.
There was a little early autumn in the air with the crisp breeze and we were walking, just like high school, just like always. It had rained both mornings before we hit the course.
It could have been the approaching fairway at Silver Ridge, Lost Nation, Mount Morris or even the old Oregon Country Club where we used to sled down the giant hill every winter back when they used to get snow down there. A chill did go down my back, just like snow, perhaps from the sweat I’d built up by the time we rounded the corner of trees and I found my ball had run all the way through the fairway to the other side. Or perhaps that chill just ran the length of my body because I was transported back in time. I thought then about the extremely elevated tee box at Oregon on the ninth hole that looked down to the clubhouse where I bought my first putter.
The give of the soft ground underneath my feet, the smell of grass cut recently, but not today, the way the chip shot came out of the rough and the ball bounced just short of the green and then again, running up the lip and towards the middle of the green… the way that green felt under my feet, it all seemed like I could be finishing up a round with one hole to play before I put my clubs back into my Plymouth Duster with the red, white and black plaid seats.
The back seat of that classic folded forward and gave full access to the trunk, which I may or may not have ever used to sneak a couple people into the last drive in movie theater around when we were seniors at Oregon High School. The golf bag I got from my best friend Brian’s dad.
It was hanging on a hook in his old garage abandoned for years and it was about as old if not older than my car. The plaid on the bag matched the seats of the car, it matched my vintage sensibilities and it matched my school colors but stood out like a sore thumb. One hole to go. There are times in my life where that seems to be the theme, and yet there are plenty of other times when it seems like we’re just teeing off at the first one. In about 10 days, Juliet will go back to college for her junior year. We’ll miss her like crazy. About that time football season will start and Vikings fans will learn the heartbreak of what hope is all about again. I’m pulling for us. The grapes will ripen, the potatoes will get dug and so will the carrots. The leaves will think about turning with the tamaracks to golden, orange, red and every shade of yellow imaginable. There will be some more fish caught and some more swims swum and some more holes played.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to capture that 17th summer again, but who can say? That’s the thing about golf, you’re always just a swing and a stroke away from something magical.
You can never reach perfection, and there’s always someone to be better than, starting with yourself, but it’s more than that. You can’t golf angry and you can’t really golf too excited, you have to forget the last shot as soon as you’ve made it (good or bad) and yet remember the feeling when you were relaxed and everything went right. Then you’ve got to read the room, the fairway, the rough, the wind, the green, the break and the firmness and the speed. You can have a beer, but not too many and you can have fun, but only if you allow yourself to get out of your own head but keep your head in the game.
And that my friends, is the same with life. A round goes by quickly. If you allow yourself to be a kid again.
Then you’ll have a great time. You might find your swing. You might find summer. Summer is the one thing that I never want to be sub-par.
