Sundays are for Golf

        I was hurrying to get my things together for the first Sunday of golf season at the local course when Mom came upstairs to tell me I could stop getting ready. The windows were still dark with the blackness of early morning, and it was unusual for her to be up so early. Downstairs, Dad was assembling chicken salad sandwiches and putting them in the cooler with Gatorade. I could hear the ice pouring out of the fridge like coins from a slot machine and Rover’s nails sliding on the kitchen floor as he rushed to grab a stray cube.

            “You can stop getting ready.”

            “We have to be out of the house in ten minutes and I still haven’t found my shoes, Mom.”

            “Come here, Christopher.”

            She came over to give me a hug when I realized her eyes were wet and red, but I could tell she was wide awake. It felt strange holding her against my chest. I still wasn’t used to being taller than her, and normally she seemed larger than life. In the dimness of this morning, though, she seemed broken, helpless, and small. I could feel the logo on my oversized golf shirt getting damp as she heaved tears from her eyes into my heart.

            I told her to stop crying and that everything would be alright, even though I didn’t know what was wrong yet. She wouldn’t listen, and she grabbed the back of my shirt when I tried to push her away, so I decided to surrender and let her cry as much as she needed. I could still hear Rover chewing on ice when she finally pulled her face away to tell me what had happened to my brother, Anthony. He had been drinking with one of his girlfriends and they were both found in the front of a burning car on the side of a lonely road. I realized in that moment that I would never look into my brother’s eyes again.

            That was the first Sunday Dad and I missed golf in five years.

            Just one-week later Dad made a tee time at the local course for us to play a round of nine holes together. With the waves of grief still strong, he wasn’t sure if he would want to play a full eighteen. It turned out that getting away from the house was the best thing for him. While we were putting on the ninth green, Dad remarked how perfect the weather was that day for golf. He checked our scores as we walked back to the clubhouse and realized this was one of the best rounds he had played all season. His sadness felt so far away we ended up playing the back nine.

            The grief and stress of the past few days didn’t follow us to the golf course that day. For better or worse, we had escaped the weight of life’s problems, if only for a couple of hours. Playing golf was a spiritual experience for both of us from that day onwards. No matter what trouble waited for you back home, on the golf course your only obstacle was yourself. Everything else was a perfectly manicured garden. Earth sculpted for the sole enjoyment of the game. It wasn’t just a way to relax, but a communion with some splendor greater than ourselves.

            On the fifteenth hole, we managed to get a pair of birdies together. We cheered for each other and our praise for each other’s great putts echoed from the hills around us. Our voices stirred up a family of deer from the nearby woods, who came racing together across the fairway. Dad pointed them out to me and watched them with a mesmerized look I’d rarely seen replace his normally stoic expression.

            “Chris look! There’s the Mama deer, the Papa, baby deer one, and . . . baby deer two . . .”

            That fourth deer reminded us both of Anthony, and our jubilation was cut short by the sudden memory of the tragedy that had befallen our family just last week. As we watched the deer disappear into the next stretch of trees, I saw a single tear come from Dad’s eye as he looked to me and said, “Great hole, Christopher.” My dad was a man of little emotion when it came to anything besides sports. That was the only tear I ever saw him shed up until that moment in my life.

            By midsummer, Sunday golf had become a sacred time for the both of us. Occasionally, we would invite Mom out of politeness, but she would always find some reason not to come at the last minute. I asked her why she never joined us late one night on the back porch. She spent more and more time out there since Anthony had passed. She had taken up smoking again and would sit outside for hours talking to friends on the phone while she chased her words with a glass of scotch. In between calls, she told me that she didn’t want to ruin Dad’s alone time with me. I didn’t think she would ruin anything, but she knew Dad better than I did, so I took her word and left it at that.

            I think Mom aged ten years the day Anthony died. A parent should never live to bury one of their children, especially not a mother. Most nights, she would barely be seen around the house. Dinners became more and more simple, until eventually Dad or I had to cook or go out if we wanted something new. Frozen dinners and pizza became our normal family meals otherwise. Her grief made mine seem so small in comparison. She had known raised Anthony since he was a baby, while my earliest memories of him he was already a teenager. I can’t criticize her habits after she lost her son. I think she was doing everything she could to keep it together, probably for my sake. There was some deep, misplaced guilt from her because she had lost a child. She was trying her best to keep it together for her last remaining son, in whatever way she could.

            Golf had always been me and Dad’s thing. Anthony was almost ten years older than me, and by the time I had any real memory, I had never once seen him touch his set of clubs. My only memory of him playing sports was him wearing hockey gear, gliding across the ice. I think Anthony took up hockey because he knew it was the one sport Dad wouldn’t try to get involved with. I remember him telling me he had to beg our parents to get him the gear so ho could start playing in his freshman year of high school. Mom had told him that hockey was too dangerous, and Dad said that hockey players were all drunks and troublemakers. Anthony was stubborn enough, though, that after a couple Christmases of begging, Mom and Dad got him his first set of hockey gear. That was the same year I got a set of toy golf clubs when I was five years old. I think Dad was hedging his bets with his sons that year with what he left under the tree.

            From then on, Anthony identified first and foremost as a member of the hockey team. Dad tried to act like he didn’t care for the first few years, but by the time Anthony was a senior, he was one of the best starters on the team and ended up being the leading scorer for that year. I remember Dad being so proud of Anthony. He had found something he loved despite our parent’s discouragement. My brother was always so brave and independent. He loved to embody the tough-guy persona; listening to metal, smoking weed, and drinking beer with his teammates.    The only time I ever saw him pick up a golf club was a couple years after he graduated high school, he brought me along to his goalie’s family farm to shoot an old shotgun at some cans. I was only eleven years old at the time and the recoil of the old pump-action almost knocked me straight into the grass that surrounded the expanse of freshly plowed dirt. As Anthony and the goalie were drinking a couple of beers, I found a bag of old rusty golf clubs sitting in a shed and started to take a look at them. Anthony noticed me and called out to his friend.

            “Hey, bro! You ever seen Christopher hit a golf ball?”

            The goalie shook his head, a little confused.

            “Chris! Tee one up and hit it into the field!”

            “You sure?”

            “C’mon! Crush one for us!”

            I remember being nervous; these clubs looked way older than I was, and my shoulder still ached from the abuse of the twelve gauge. I didn’t want to disappoint my older brother, though and I grabbed a few balls, a couple of tees, and a rusty TaylorMade driver from the moldy bag. I set up in front of the two young men as they watched from the bed of a Chevy and hit a drive as straight as I could into the sunset. Solid contact. My ball flew straight and far enough that Anthony’s friend looked genuinely surprised. I felt so relieved I hadn’t let my brother down. Anthony hopped down from the back of the pickup truck and gave me a pat on the back.

            “Nice one, Chris! You’ll be hitting past the girl’s High School team in no time! Now, hand that thing over and I’ll show you how it’s done.”

            Anthony grabbed the rusty driver and set up a new ball on the tee. He took a few paces back and came towards the ball with a ferocity only seen from a true hockey player. He nailed the ball with a slapshot from the hip, sending it screaming nearly three times as far as my shot had gone. He looked back with a toothy smile before tossing me the driver and grabbing another beer from the goalie.

            I asked my father once, looking at Anthony’s cobwebbed golf bag in the corner of the garage, “Was Anthony ever any good at golf?”

            The words felt sour after they left my mouth. The question felt blasphemous. I half expected Dad to ask me what kind of question is that? He looked down at the ground before taking a deep, tired breath.

            “Anthony never had the temper for golf.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “He always wanted to hit shots like Tiger or Phil. He would get so frustrated not being able to hit it like the pros. Eventually whenever I invited him out, he would say golf is a boring game for rich old men. Anthony had more exciting things to chase around town than to look for a ball he had sliced into the woods somewhere.”

            “You mean like chasing girls?”

            “And other things too, Christopher.”

            “He sure did know how to party.”

            “Yes, he did . . . now put your clubs in the car. I’m not your caddie.”

            Life continued as it does, and Mom stopped bringing up Anthony’s memory every time we went to dinner together. That year, our dog Rover followed Anthony into the afterlife. Our home felt so silent for weeks. I remember waking up in the blueness of the early morning with nothing but stillness as my friend as I descended the lonely stairs to the kitchen.

            Mom redecorated Anthony’s bedroom to be a place for guests to stay when we had family over. I thought about what it must have been like for her, moving his things one by one into the basement. She cleaned it all out in a day by herself while Dad was at work, and I was at school. I came home and she had already put on new bedsheets and was vacuuming the nearly empty room. She went to bed early that night. We ordered pizza for delivery, and she was asleep before the sun was even fully set. After all the lights in the house were out, I went down to the basement to see what Mom found in Anthony’s room.

            In the corner of an unfinished room, new boxes were haphazardly stacked, spilling out clothes along the with occasional jersey or hockey stick. I dug through the memories, tossing aside thing that each told their own piece of a much lager story. A Wayne Gretzky rookie card in a plastic case, a zippo lighter with our High School logo on it, and a cigar box shut tight with a brass latch. The box made me pause. I could tell whatever was in here was important to Anthony. I doubt Mom even opened it in her rush to get everything out of his room. I clicked open the latch and the first thing I saw was Winston’s old collar. Some of the dog’s gray hair was still stuck between the gaps in the fabric. I remembered Winston just barely; he had passed away when I was only a toddler. Most of what I remembered about him was through old family photos. Anthony must’ve held on to this collar for years. In the box, there was also a picture of my brother when he was only ten years old holding a newborn baby. He looked nervous to be holding something so fragile, but in his eyes, you could see the excitement he had to grow up with a brother. I thought about keeping the picture for myself, but it didn’t feel right. It felt like stealing from a grave. I put everything back in the box the way it was and went to bed with a new image in my mind of who Anthony was before I got the chance to know him.

            A couple more years passed, I graduated High School with decent enough grades, and soon I was in college pursuing a degree in psychology. I hadn’t always been the best student, but I was great at testing and was able to get into a good school in Chicago. I was only eighteen, and I thought being a psychologist would be a great way to help people and earn a good living for my family. I told everyone my dream was to help people work through the kinds of dark times my family had faced. In truth, my dream was to make enough money to maybe be a member of a country club. I wanted to be able to golf in the splendor of a beautiful location any time I pleased. To be able to escape from the troubles of the real world and make communion with that higher power I felt only on the golf course.  I had the opportunity to play a tournament at the esteemed Ridgemoor Country Club, and its serene architecture which echoed of the rich history of the game never left my memory. I kept the yardage book above my desk at school as a reminder of what kind of life I was chasing. Despite my resolution to stay dedicated to a life of golf, the classes got harder, and in my sophomore year I started to cancel Sundays with Dad to make up the long hours my assignments demanded. After a month of no visits home and no Sunday golf, Mom called.

            “Christopher, what’s going on with your father?”

            “I don’t know Mom. I haven’t talked to him since last time I was home.”

            “I can tell he misses you.”

            “Well, it’s finals week, Mom. I promise I’ll be home over summer break.”

            “Oh, please do. He’s unbearable when he gets like this.”

            Going without golf was like going without food for Dad. I decided I would do my best to make it up to him over the summer. Between semesters, Dad and I probably golfed more days of the week than we didn’t, and both of our games improved together. We started entering tournaments together, even winning a handful. I remember Dad won one tournament by making a thirty-five-foot roll with his ancient Bulls Eye putter. I always made fun of him for that ugly brass thing. I told him it looked like a hotdog on a stick. After that tournament, he proudly nicknamed that putter his “mace”. Dad could hit a ball better than anything else he did in life. That year we made the most money in the history of our professional golf careers together, a grand total of six-hundred dollars between the two of us. We agreed to put it on the Bears first playoff game that year. In classic Bears fashion, they lost the game, and our bet with it. At first, we felt dumb for losing the money in such a frivolous way, but we both knew it wasn’t the money that mattered. The real prize was the time we had spent together winning it.

            That Fall, I changed my major from psychology to English. I knew the classes would be easier, and I could graduate two years sooner. I soon discovered my love for reading and writing. I learned about the greatest literary golfers like Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and Arthur Conan Doyle. I took the Ridgemoor range book from above my desk and put it away. Maybe if I was lucky one day, I could join a more reasonable country club. My new dream was to be the best example of a man I could for students who weren’t lucky enough to have a dad like mine. I spent as much time as I could with my father, trying to understand what it was that made me keep looking up to him so far into my life. Until I graduated, I didn’t miss a single Sunday for the rest of golf season.

            I finished school with decent grades and had job offers from a publisher in New York, an ad agency in LA, and was even offered a job with a video-game company in Austin. Mom was so thrilled to hear of all the amazing opportunities as they came in one by one. One night around the dinner table, I told them I had gotten a local teaching job in Chicago and Dad smiled more deeply than I had ever seen him smile in my entire life. Mom just looked down at her food and quietly said, “That sounds great, Christopher.”

            She didn’t need to voice her disappointment. She knew why I didn’t want to go away from home. Being gone for those four years in college taught me what was most important in life. Being close to my parents felt like the right thing to do. In a few short years, they would be old and there wouldn’t be anyone else but me to help them in those twilight years. My mom smiled at me with her crow’s feet eyes, creased from decades of laughing late into the night. I looked at my dad, whose hair had grayed so much since I was in High School.

            “Mom, you should come golfing with me and Dad tomorrow.”

            “Christopher, are you sure?”

            With a mouthful of dinner, Dad gave me an expression of shock.

            “C’mon, Dad! It’ll be fun!”

            Dad shrugged his shoulders and gave a muffled message of approval through his half-chewed bite of meatloaf.

            “Okay!?” I looked at both of them.

            “Okay boys, but don’t be surprised if I’m not very good. It’s been years since I’ve golfed. I hope I can find a polo that still fits!”

            “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m sure you’ll keep up. We wont even keep score if you don’t want to. It’ll be good just to be out there and spend some time together.”

            By time we were on the third hole, Mom was back in stride with her golf game. She couldn’t hit it far at all off the tee, but around the greens she was a devil. Time and time again she would make puts that would be a miracle for me or Dad. Her short game was so good that soon, Dad was having her read the greens for him and tell him how far to let the ball break and how hard to hit it. Even off the green, she was the best caddie my dad could ask for, reminding him of hazards and giving him accurate ranges to the pin. It was amazing to watch as a son. My parents bickered and fought like any other old married couple, but every once in a while, they were a team like no one else. So many of my friend’s parents were divorced, it felt like the norm. But here were my mom and dad, laughing and playing together like they were still falling in love. I felt so lucky to be able to see them together like this.

            “Mom! Dad! You guys are too much together, I’ve never seen you have this much fun!”

            “Thanks for inviting me out!”

            “Well, blame Chris. Honestly, I didn’t think you could still play like that.”

            She slapped him on the chest with her golf glove, “I can still out putt your ass all day, old man! But seriously, thank you so much for getting me out here. I really enjoyed it.”

            “No problem, Mom. It was so nice having the whole family out here.”

            Mom’s face got dark. “Well, it’s not the whole family without Anthony, is it?”

            Dad’s face echoed the same frustration I had. What was Mom doing invoking that name out here where it had no place to belong? We came here to enjoy ourselves, not to remember the dark times. We both shook our heads at the ground. In one utterance, Mom had changed the mood of the entire day.

            “No, Mom. It’s not the same, I guess. It was so nice finally getting to golf together with you and Dad.”

            Soon after that trip, I started my first year of teaching High School English. I knew it was going to be hard getting into it, but I faced challenges I never imagined. From parents who wanted nothing to do with their kids complaining when I marked them as absent, to helicopter moms who scrutinized every mark I made on their child’s paper, it felt like I had gotten into something way over my head. Occasionally, though there were moments where I could see I was making a real impact on a few of my students. Even if it was just getting a student to read one book just for fun, sharing my love of literature kept me content at my otherwise thankless job. The only thing that kept me at that school besides the love for my students was a young art teacher across from the hall. She had also found herself alone in her late twenties in the rusty loneliness that can only be found in a small midwestern town.

            After a few years, I had gotten married to that woman. She was smarter than I was and knew more about the Bears than Dad did. I think he might have loved her more than I did for that. She loved sports, but I never asked her to go golfing. Like Mom, she understood that was me and Dad’s thing and she respected it. She always supported me and my hobbies, though. Every Christmas I was guaranteed something new to bring out to the golf course in the spring.

In the meantime, I supported her art. Eventually she left the High School and started painting full time. At first it was the seldom sale from a coffee shop, but soon she was presenting in galleries and building a name for herself among the art traders in Chicago.

            More years passed and I started to get my first gray hairs. When Dad retired from his job, we were able to golf almost every day during summer breaks for a few years. Over the summer, whenever he wasn’t golfing or watching the Cubs, Dad would be in the back yard tending to his pepper and tomato gardens that had replaced most of his lawn. Dad loved cooking, and he found a rare type of satisfaction making his own pasta sauce. The only Sunday we missed during that time was the day my son was born. I was held my baby boy in my arms for the first time. I remember the wetness of his freshly born head soaking into the chest of my old polo.

            The next year for Father’s Day my wife wanted to give me and Dad a real surprise. She had sold her first painting for some real money and spent the extra funds on a trip for the both of us to golf the Old Course at St. Andrews. It was the closest thing either of us ever experienced to a religious pilgrimage. Neither of us had ever been to Scotland, and here we were at the birthplace of golf on one of the most iconic courses in the world. There were more golf shops than restaurants in the town and our hotel room had a perfect view of the eighteenth green. Our last day of the trip, the freezing wind of the North Sea swept across St. Andrews and brought with it a pouring rain that chilled any inch of exposed skin. I remember how frigid and red Dad’s old hands looked as he teed off with his six-iron on the eleventh hole. I could barely make out the flight of his ball as it cut through the thick sheets of rain, but when it bounced on the green its path was unmistakable. Slowly but surely, his ball crawled away from the pitch mark it had left behind it and made its way softly into to hole.

            I screamed “Yes!”, my voice was carried by the bitter wind across the Old Course.

            I looked over and Dad through his rain-soaked face I could see he was crying.

            “That was the first hole in one of your life?”

            “Yeah, and it wasn’t even that good of a shot.”

            “Dad, please. Just enjoy it.”

            I hugged him there on the eleventh tee and started to cry too.

            I still think that was the most perfect moment we ever shared together.

            Dad framed that scorecard and put on a wall in the house next to the wedding photo of him and Mom. She hated that. Dad’s favorite part of telling that story was that I made double bogey on the same hole he’d aced. I tell everybody there’s a reason the locals call it “the shortest par five in golf.”

            As the years went on, Dad’s hair went silver and we started playing from the white tees again, just like we did back when Anthony still lived in the house. He couldn’t drive the ball as far as he used to, and his bad knee made him use a cart. He hated not being able to walk straight off the tee box to his ball, but he wasn’t going to let his age let him stop golfing. As his body deteriorated, his mind soon followed. Eventually, I had to start keeping score for both of us. Ever since I could remember, that had always been his job. I did by best to fudge his numbers to keep his score in the eighties. I never let his score be higher than his age. His love of the game never faded. On trips to Dad’s house, he would show my son the St. Andrews scorecard and tell my boy how much of a better golfer he would be than me when he grew up. My son loved those trips, hitting wedge shots in the back yard between the rows of pepper and tomato gardens as Dad gave him tips and my wife and I would watch from that same back porch where Mom used to drink her scotch every night. Now, she spent her days doing jigsaw puzzles and learning new cookie recipes to give out as gifts. Every Christmas, our kitchen counter would be filled with her creations. Each cookie was a token of love, perfectly spiced with icing piped in careful perfection to form a hundred little pieces of art

            One summer day, Mom found Dad face down in a patch of tomatoes. He was tending to his plants on a too-hot day and had suffered a fatal heart attack. On the day of Dad’s funeral, I left a sleeve of Titleist balls in the casket and gave his ancient Bulls Eye putter to my ten-year-old son. The next Sunday, I took him golfing.