Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden

The other day was writing, I heard an unfamiliar sound, as if something had hit the house. I really didn’t think about it until the kid from across the street was out on the front sidewalk looking a little confused. After a minute or so, I went out and asked him if he was looking for something.

“Yes. A golf ball,” he told me.

Well, we looked for his golf ball, finding it on a corner of the property. He took it back to his place and all was well.

If we didn’t find it, I was willing to give up one of the golf balls I have in my garage. I have a small collection of the things, gathered years ago when I was living with the first wife and the kids in Allen. The high school student living across the street from us would go into his back yard which overlooked a former cotton field and smack golf balls into the field as practice for his high school golf team. After he hit a bunch of balls, he would go out into the field to gather as many of the balls as he could find so he could hit them out again.

He didn’t find all of them. I would regularly go into the same field with my son and/or our dog at the time and gather what the person hitting the balls couldn’t find. I told my son (who was four at the time) that the golf balls grew there naturally, calling it the “Golf Ball Field.”

I took the notion that since I was collecting the neighbor’s left-over golf balls, I wouldn’t mind having a club and smacking a few of them out into the field myself. I requested a club for Christmas. The wife complied, bought a club and showed it to our son.

Fast forward a week or two. It’s a Saturday morning, less than a week before Christmas, and there was a man at our door asking if I would be interested in joining the local Country Club as a Christmas gift to myself. I politely declined, saying that I wasn’t interested in joining as I did not golf.

As I was explaining my position to the gentleman, my son was right behind me, tugging at my trousers: “But Dad… But Dad…”

Now, I didn’t tell him directly that I knew about the club his mother bought for me as a Christmas present, but he did get the idea that one should not spoil a Christmas surprise.

For a few years after that, we would occasionally go out to the “Golf Ball Field,” hit a few balls, and usually find more balls than we hit.

I still have the club and a few of the balls I’ve collected.

Funny thing is, I had a physical education requirement in college – so, I took golf lessons at the college golf course. We learned technique, smacked balls around for a bit, and had loads of fun. Since I was never well funded, most of my golfing experience after college was at one of several local putting greens. A couple of my college classmates are still regular golfers to this day. They love the game. Me, well, I would likely be the guy who would get frustrated at every turn, eventually tossing my bag and all the clubs in it in some water hazard (after mangling a club or two on the way there).

I still have my club. I use it every once in a while to fish out the dog Filbrix’s tennis balls out from under the furniture. As for the golf balls in my collection, the kid across the street is welcome to them if and when he discovers I have them.

Be Seeing You!