Walking with Jack by Don J. Snyder

Author:Don J. Snyder [Snyder, Don J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53636-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

SEPTEMBER 30, 2011

Of all things, my friend Charlie Woodworth invited me to play golf at the Country Club today. It was a summer day in Brookline. We had spoken for a couple of years about meeting up there, but one thing or another had always derailed our plans. He’d called me almost every day since I told him about Buddy’s death, and I knew that he had reserved this round of golf in his busy schedule to try to lift my spirits.

I don’t remember the drive down at all. I just kept thinking that a week had already passed since the wake, when I’d held Cara at the casket.

On the practice range we met the two fellows whom we would compete against in match play. John, from England, and Rob, from Houston, who couldn’t have been more welcoming. Charlie had told Rob that Jack and I would be there all winter on the tour, and he didn’t hesitate to offer up the names of some people in the city who might help us. I didn’t hear the names. I just stood there nodding like an idiot and thanking him.

Then I was alone with my clubs, which I had used twice in the past year. I took out my pitching wedge and dropped two balls at my feet. As I went through a few swings to loosen up, I glanced past the starter’s hut, across the lawn, to the caddie shed, painted that dark green of summer cottages, where a few boys drowsed in the warm sunlight, their morning newspapers in their laps, like well-heeled pensioners rather than refugees from the economy that had most certainly left them behind long ago. The thought ran through my mind that I would give almost anything to be caddying this morning instead of playing.

I stepped up to the first ball, locked the wedge across the palm of my left hand, took aim at the hundred-yard flag, and swung. The ball sailed high, then dropped out of the sky, hitting the stick squarely on the way down with a dull clank. A few of the other golfers to my right looked up. My second shot sailed off on an identical flight path, landed about five feet in front of the pin, then rattled it solidly on one bounce, with roughly the same clank. It was enough to make me think that Charlie was right, a round of golf was just what I needed.

But it was not meant to be of course. I played like an orphaned dog, struggling to find my way right from the first hooked tee shot. Characteristic of most people who play when their heart is not in the game, I missed all the easy shots and then somehow pulled off a couple of miraculous ones.

Charlie was standing beside me on the 11th tee, an endless par-5 carved like a dream through a valley of towering shade trees and rock outcroppings. I was trying to remember something that had transpired since those two wedge shots on the range, but all I could think of was Cara and her Buddy.

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