Road Trip

 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 shirts (I brought three, and two extra caps) and we hit the Beav. (First sexual reference on TV: "Ward, don't you think you're being a little hard on the Beaver?") We made a few lame beaver jokes and set out. 

The first hole I was full of beans and enthusiasm and hit a picture perfect tee shot, a nice second shot and finished with a not-too shabby 6 on the hole, felt pretty good about myself. "This will be a good day of golf," I told myself. Hah. 

On we went. The course is quite different from the hilly and narrow Brattleboro course that I'm used to, it's more like a real golf course like you see on TV, with fairly flat fairways that sort of run parallel with each other and wander about aimlessly. Several times we almost got beaned by stray golf balls hit from adjacent fairways, and more than once we almost beaned some innocent golfers who made the dreadful mistake of playing near us. 

Like I said, it was warm, and I hadn't slept at all well the night before, so I began to tire around the seventh hole. I wondered to myself how the hell I was going to make it through 18. Whose idea was it, anyway, to play 18? Hmm. Mine. We got to eight and I whipped out an energy bar that I had purchased; I want my money back, because it gave me no energy at all. 

We finish the front nine, take a momentary break to relieve ourselves and regroup, and out we went for the back. I was tired. My feet already hurt. Interestingly, my spiffy golf shoes that I got over the winter seem to have shrunk, or my feet have grown in my old age, because by the 10th hole my dogs were in serious discomfort. 

I was not playing very well, either. Once again the yips kept yipping on the tee boxes and I couldn't hit a decent drive since the first hole. So frustrating. We let a couple of guys play through on one hole, and they smacked the balls with this amazing, extraterrestrial authority and the balls went a mile. Calvin and I looked at each other, "so that's how it's done?" I was barely able to drive it 30 yards. Pathetic. 

I did hit some decent shots, though. My hybrids, after a long period of irrelevance, have become my best friends, and I was hitting good long shots with them all day. Did some pretty fair putting as well. Putting is so nice. You only have to hit it a few feet. That's my speed these days. Hit it a few feet, walk five or six steps and gently hit it again. Maybe I should shift my focus to mini-golf. 

So we play on. By this time I'm absolutely beat, knackered, spent, depleted, pooped, shagged, done-zo, out of it. I began to hallucinate. As I addressed the ball it looked up at me with big sad eyes and begged me to not hit it too hard, and I obliged. We got to a hole where you had to hit it over the Indian Ocean to reach the fairway on the faraway yonder coast, and in the briny deep I saw dragons, and borogoves,  and slithy toves gyring and gimbling in the wabe. 

The trees began talking to me, cursed trees, with whom I'd argued all day long, doing my best to bruise them with my wayward golf shots. But by the 15th, the tables had turned, and they were hurling pine cones and epithets at me, daring me to hit the ball close to them so their evil roots could hide the ball and their malevolent rustling could unnerve me as I began my backswing. 

I've never been so tired in all my life. My feet were wailing in agony. My hips and knees were on fire. I limped from the golf cart, glared at the ball, cursed and swore at virtually every shot, crawled back to the comfort of the cart after pounding the ball another nine feet, guzzled blue Gatorade, vowed never to ever play this stupid, stupid game ever again. 

But it was a beautiful day. And my best friend and I had a great time, except for the golf, and chuckled and laughed all day and made lots of stupid jokes about beavers, and after our tortuous attempts at golf we had a terrific, sloppy, delicious hamburger at a packed downtown burger joint, where I had nine or ten beers to gird myself for the long drive home. I did eventually make it home, whereupon I threw myself into my comfortable bed and slept the slumber of the dead. 

All in all, a great outing to Concord.