A short story by R. Craig Lord 

  I live in a golfer’s house, pretty much the same as anyone’s house, just a white cape cod with a front porch and a couple of rockers. If your imagination is good, and mine is, you can sit in a rocker and dream of Pinehurst, of elevated greens on numbered courses. You can gaze out over the fairways, er lawn, well the lawn is diagonal cut with a Hogan path down to the mailbox and think of high draws rising in the blue sky catching the sun as they turn and cascade to earth. Just a normal street. The house on the right belongs to Marie, the forty-two-year-old divorcee; the property line is marked with white stakes. She is definitely out of bounds. So if you go over there it’s stroke and distance or you lose two strokes or something like that. I play it as it lies. 

   My house is neat but if you look closely there is some neglect. Last fall I was supposed to paint the trim then came the Member/Member and the trip to Scottsdale. I don’t know where the time went. Same with the spring once you get past Opening Day and the Member/ Guest well it’s too hot to paint. This fall I will get to it for sure once we get back from Ireland.   

  The inside of my house is no different from anyone else’s house. The doormat says, “Let’s Par Tee Our Putts Off”. My boys gave that to me when my wife left so you know I had to keep it. By the door I keep several of my vast collection of golf umbrellas in case someone needs one. They were gifts from many of the charity tournaments I play in, like the Swings for Rings event that helps provide telephones for the deaf. Still can’t remember to put an umbrella in my golf bag though, got soaked the other day. Excuse the putters, I like to work on my putting here in the living room. The living room is rolling at about a fourteen since I had the rug trimmed. My wife called the ten putters lined up against the wall excessive. She called the left-handed one peculiar. They didn’t need to hear that. That’s why I play the soft music, it’s for them. The scorecards are everywhere. I don’t know why I keep them. Maybe because each one tells a story. On June 15th if I hadn’t duck hooked that tee shot on 17 and three putted 18 I would have broken 90 two days in a row. See on the 14th of June I carded an 89. Yessir birdied 18 to break 90. My boys said they’d never seen a ricochet like that before. 

  Let me tell you about the boys. The four of us have played at 9:10 every Saturday morning for the last seven years. We’ve played through births, deaths, divorces (mine), medical problems, financial problems, recessions, depressions, booms and busts. We’ve whiffed, shanked, topped, pulled, pushed, hooked, sliced, crushed, and busted with each other. All the time spent bearing witness to each other’s foibles has bonded us as close as brothers. Still every Saturday morning we show up wanting to beat each other’s brains in.  

  First up, Dr. Jerry Fleckstein. The doctor is a little quirky; he wears a white glove on each hand when he plays and only uses orange golf balls. Try playing with him in the fall when the leaves are on the ground. He is a pretty good player, the best in our group, but he sports an eight handicap which he maintains as meticulously as he does his ‘98 Miata, the one with the license plate that reads 8 HNDCP. None of us have ever seen him break 80 and for that reason he is hard to win with. He is helpful though, when I had plantar fasciitis in my right foot he recommended soaking the foot in a mixture of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. My wife was skeptical, “He’s not even a doctor.” she was fond of saying. “That’s a recipe for salad dressing”. I honestly don’t know when we started calling him doctor, but the plantar fasciitis cleared right up. 

  Stu “Ronco” Watson is also a founding member of our group. His nickname comes from the famous food processor, it chops, it slices, it dices. You guessed it he has one ugly swing. He always plays a slice, so he aims to the left to accommodate his ball flight. His swing complete with a grunt is an angry slash that resembles a man trying to put out a fire with a broom. Last week off the first tee he found himself double crossed aiming severely left; he had connected on a massive blast that went straight as an arrow over the clubhouse roof. We found it on the veranda next to the pool which, upon review, is not out of bounds. So, while the Doctor ordered drinks at the pool bar Stu hit the ball back in play, a massive slice that started out over the tennis courts and curved sixty yards back into the fairway. “That’s better,” he said. 

  The third member of our group is Shooter McGavin or that’s what we call him. His real name is Dave McGavin so he shares the same last name as the golfing legend, but that’s not why we call him shooter. We call him shooter because of his obsession with his range finder. He shoots everything. I mean everything, drives, approach shots, chips, pitches and putts. Who shoots putts? He will shoot the target, chunk his shot five yards and then shoot it again. The man has the distance control of a squirrel meaning none at all. The whole process is a time-consuming relentless disaster that none of us like, but Shooter has spotted the cart girl and she is three hundred yards out and heading our way. Now that is useful information. 

  At the end of the season after all the Saturdays, the season ending “Frost on the Pumpkin” tournament where you play dressed like a lumberjack in flannel shirt and jeans, after the golf trip to Myrtle Beach we gather. We sit in the study, raise four glasses of Old Grouse and toast each other, the past year, and the years to come. Four men bonded by a passion for a game they can never perfect, but the friendship is perfect and that’s what counts. The leaves are falling on last year’s leaves, the backyard needs to be raked. It will have to wait. You see, I live in a golfer’s house.