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...