The Fine Green Line by John Newport

Author:John Newport
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767908955
Publisher: Crown

AS FRUSTRATING AS my little injury was, I didn’t lack for things to do as the rib healed. For one thing I had to buy a car. Over the next six months I anticipated driving more than fifteen thousand miles, and my current car, a 1966 Chrysler with roughly 170,000 miles on it (the precise mileage was unknowable since the odometer had broken years before at 138,770), was clearly not up to the task. Our good car, the nine-year-old Honda with 110,000 miles, would obviously have to stay with Polly and Anna.

Over the years I had had good luck with used cars. The Chrysler, for instance, had served me well as a summer car for a decade, despite my only having paid $16.50 to buy it. (The seller and I had actually agreed on fifteen dollars, but in consummating the deal we discovered I had nothing smaller than a twenty and he had only $3.50 in change.) So I wasn’t looking for anything fancy. And that’s what I found in the parking lot at Island’s End one afternoon: a pitiful-looking 1988 Olds Cutlass with a For Sale sign in the rear window. My heart leaped. The owner, I knew, could not possibly be asking much for this heap: the finish, formerly black, had half disappeared, revealing the white undercoating; upholstery sagged from the ceiling; the hubcaps were missing. Just as I had my face pressed to the window to read the odometer (123,000 miles), the owner walked up. He was a New York City cop who had used the car daily for his 120-mile round-trip commute from Long Island where he lived to his station house in Fort Apache, the Bronx. I drove the car, detected no major problems, and bought it for five hundred dollars even.

Something about the Olds made me supremely happy. Its disreputable paint job bespoke danger, yet the car rode as smoothly and decadently as a good American car should. A friend of Polly’s who had once owned a similar vehicle bestowed the gift of a name: Mr. Lucky. He said he had always felt lucky to get where he was going in his old car, and so should I.

I also busied myself with putting during the interregnum, which I could do without pain. In fact, the time off gave me a chance to radically alter my regime. I had read somewhere in a book that practice strokes over the ball interfere with the intense pre-shot visualizations of a putt going into the hole. So I tried dispensing with my practice strokes over the ball and found I made more putts. The change required working out an entirely new pre-putt routine (I now took a few practice strokes while visualizing the line from behind the ball) but I had plenty of time to do so.

Other than that I spent my time doing painless tasks around the house and yard, in a (probably vain) attempt to accumulate a backlog of brownie points with Polly for the time

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