GOLF BALL
Maybe it’s because I am wearing my coach shirt, but my place of escape is the golf course. I can drop everything and have golf be the only thing on my mind. The cares of teaching and fatherhood all seem to fade to black as the lush green of the course takes over all thoughts.
It doesn’t come without trials and tribulations as anyone who has perpetually chased the “little white one” will tell you. But these aggravations never seem to linger. I never worry about what the golf ball is going to grow up to be like, or what the golf ball wants me to work on around the house today, or whether or not the ball did his homework last night. As it sails away in some seemingly random direction, usually toward the trees, there is still the hope the golfing gods will allow things to work in my favor.
Home for a golf ball is the hole. As much as it seems to not want to go there, I still think it might. They say in a round of golf your club only contacts the ball for less than a second total. Yet that contact can be the most pure thing in the world. I think it has to be the purest shot ever struck until that split second later when I look up and realize I aimed too far right, or the wind switched, or I ate too many Wheaties that morning, or someone moved the green, or the air was warmer or colder than I thought, or the pin was father back than it was supposed to be, or I had the wrong club, or I hit the wrong ball, or the grass was too high.
Did I mention a lot can go wrong with a golf shot? Even with all these possibilities, or perhaps because of them, golf is the most relaxing, unbelievably complicated experience I can imagine.
