Bad Golfer

 My old buddy Calvin, who was my college roommate 100 years ago, is one of my regular golf partners. He comes to Brattleboro once a month on business and we usually try to squeeze in a round if the weather's pleasant. He's a pretty good-golfer, or at least a slightly less bad-golfer than myself, and we always have a good time.  Last month he had no business to tend to in Brattleboro but made the 90-minute drive to town anyway just to play golf with me, so yesterday I returned the favor and got in my sporty little Mazda Miata (a gift from my friend Adam, ha ha) and drove to Concord, NH,  just to play golf with Calvin. We met at his nice little house, on which he works industriously doing small jobs like replacing the roof and siding, things I couldn't do in a hundred years, then drove over to Beaver Meadow Golf Club to play eighteen.  It was quite a day. The weather was warm but not too unpleasantly so, so we stocked up on fluids and made sure we had a couple of spare...

 I was surprised as anyone when I had what was, for me, a not-too-awful, pretty decent round of golf yesterday. Mind you, for a good-golfer it would be an embarrassment, but for this bad-golfer it was a pretty enjoyable day.  The day started out inauspiciously. I decided it would be fun to go somewhere I hadn't been in a while, and set off on I-91 south to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Thought I'd go to a place I hadn't been to since accompanying my dad there some 35 years ago, the little Oak Ridge Course in Gill, Mass. After a couple of wrong turns I finally found it, on a little rural road. As I pulled in, it seemed awfully quiet, and there was a notable lack of golf carts outside the humble little clubhouse. Well, turned out that Richard and Janet Giverson, the course's owners since 2003, went bankrupt in 2018 and bailed out of the golf business (not before they sold a bunch of memberships for the 2018 season and promptly split with the money.) Anyway, when I pu...

 Among bad-golfers, it's scripted that when you complain about how terrible, how stinking bad, how horrendous you're playing, you look at the beauty of the golf course and the pretty white clouds scudding across the lovely blue sky, and say "Well, the important thing is that it's beautiful out and we're having fun." This is bullshit.  Okay, it's a nice day. The clouds are ever so pretty, and the green of the course is indeed attractive. But who gives a flying fatootie, really? I care about playing well. I want to hit satisfying thwacks and see the ball flying in a nice straight line towards the green. I want to not 3-putt. Sure, it's a nice day, but it would be a nice day if I was mowing my lawn, too, but that doesn't make it fun to mow my lawn.  Thursday was one of those lovely days. And my bad-golfing reached new levels of stench and rottonness. I started out with two sleeves of new balls. I thought that would be enough. After completing the firs...

 I hadn't been golfing with my best buddie, Calvin, all season. He's been feeling under the weather with a sore elbow for a few weeks now and using this so-called injury as a handy excuse not to come play golf with his old roomie. Poor bubbie. Cry me a river. You and I both know he was just afraid of being humiliated on the golf course by my shining, stunning golf skills.  So I sent him an email the other day, ordering him to man up already, eat a whole bottle of ibuprofen and come play golf with me! And that's an order! To my immense surprise, he obediently wrote back, "Yes sir. Book a tee time." What he didn't say is that he was already planning to be in Brattleboro anyway. Ha ha.  So, wearing our very smart and almost-matching coral-colored golf shirts, we headed over to the Brattleboro Country Club to play nine.  It seems to me that every time I play, a brand-new weakness in my game pops up to bedevil me. Sometimes it's the putting, resulting in my pin...

 Well, not exactly. First of all Mr. Kipling is dead these 85 years, so it would be a dull game. Though the way I play, he might be a good partner for me.  Nevertheless, my wife and I had the good fortune to attend an open house and garden tour of a house that Kipling lived in right here in Brattleboro. Called "Naulakha," after the book he co-wrote with his father-in-law (now there's a good son-in-law), it's a marvelous mansion that sits atop a hill in Dummerston. Owned by The Landmark Trust USA, the house is rented to well-to-do vacationers who can thrill to live for a weekend in the house where Kipling wrote "Captains Courageous," The Jungle Book (parts 1 and 2) and many of the "Just So" stories, which he read aloud to his little daughter on the very deck where we sipped an ice-cold lemonade.  This being a bad-golf blog, it would be remiss of me not to inform you, gentle reader, that there's a golf angle in my accounting of our visit to Naula...

 It was on the fairway of the ninth hole at the Bellows Falls Country Club, after another average round of bad-golf.  I'd hit a pretty decent shot off the tee, which got me just shy of the trees you see on the right side of the fairway. Picked up my 6-iron, my favorite iron these days for fairway work. Addressed the ball, took a breath, emptied my mind (never a difficult job) and thought only about hitting through the ball. Took what felt like a normal backswing, low and slow, and let fly. Simply, modestly and truthfully put, it was the single greatest golf shot in the history of the game. Perfectly shaped, long, straight as an arrow, absolutely gorgeous. Landed just shy of the green, just where I'd hoped to place it. It was not only the best shot of my round, it was probably the best shot of my entire golf journey. Man, it felt wonderful. Sounded great off the club, got a good followthrough, and the ball just arced and arced and flew and bounced perfectly. It was perfection....