Remembering love and laughter on the golf course, a quarter of a century ago.
BY CLINT MARTIN
SOMETIMES, OUT OF NOWHERE, I’ll just remember that flower of a day when Grandpa Norman and I were golfing. It was Grandpa’s turn, so he hopped off the cart that he’d just parked parallel to his ball on the edge of the fairway. He grabbed a metal wood from his brown leather golf bag, stood behind his ball, and frowned.
Grandpa’s tee shot was smack dab in the middle of the fairway. It was also smack dab behind two immense red pines. About fifteen yards in front of the settled Titleist ball, the twin trees stood about twenty feet apart and were both thick enough that it would take three Grandpas to form a hand-holding ring around each. The limbs closest to earth were about twenty feet off the ground and so long that they overlapped each other. Covered in puffy bursts of green needles, these two trees stretched and rose to form the signature image of this rickety nine-hole course named The Sandtrap.
Through his glasses, Grandpa surveyed the tunnel of an opening. He needed to thread his next shot between the two trunks and below all those green-needled branches. It was a difficult task, one that required a straight and low flight of the ball, but it was certainly possible. Still frowning beneath his beige golf cap, he asked if I thought he could do it. Being 16, and at an age where aggressiveness is quickly favored over caution, I cheered from the cart’s passenger seat, “Absolutely Grandpa. You got this.”
Grandpa exhaled and approached his ball. He aligned his body, took aim between the two pine towers, pulled his club back three-quarters of the way, and swung with as much force as his octogenarian body could unleash. The face of his 3-wood—smack!—caught the dimpled white ball flush and sent the mini-orb skyrocketing from its lie atop the closely cropped green grass. The ball careened headfirst toward the tunnel in a straight line. Then—crack!—right into the belly of the red pine on the left. A forearm-sized piece of bark toppled like an extra in an Old Western gunfight scene who’d been shot off the rooftop of a saloon. As the bark dove headfirst from the place of impact, the bullet of a ball screamed back our way at eye-level. The Titleist split the five feet of air between Grandpa’s face and the roof of our cart on its rocketing sprint back toward the tee box, away from the hole. When it finally came to a rolling halt, the little white ball was still smack dab in the middle of the fairway. Now a good 30 yards behind us.
Between the adrenaline that rises from a narrow escape—I’d barely had time to cringe—and the jolt that comes from the comedy of the unexpected, I wanted to erupt. Had I been with my buddies, I would’ve been rolling on the grass. Not wanting to hurt Grandpa’s feelings, I swallowed my laugh. My belly spasmed and my cheeks pinched as a result.
Grandpa, on the other hand, stood stoic and silent. After a quiet moment of reflection, he climbed back aboard our cart, his club still in hand. His creased brow was wrinkled. He looked quite perplexed, as if trying to calculate some absurd algebra problem whose answer inexplicably expressed that his dimpled ball now rested further from the hole than it had less than a minute ago.
“Man, I thought you had that Grandpa,” I said as he pushed on the gas. The locked brake clicked into its disengaged position, and the electric whine of the cart increased in pitch. Grandpa made a hard U-turn. We both leaned way to the left.
“You know, Clint,” he began, our bodies rebalancing to an upright position and his face still looking as if it was double-checking the answer. “I just couldn’t get comfortable on that swing.”
To convey my sincere sympathy but also to cover my smile, I dropped my head slightly and shook it softly from side to side. As a result, my eyes were cast toward the cart’s rubber black floorboard. Grandpa’s beige right golf shoe was bulls-eye in my line of sight. Stuck to the bottom of his driving foot, spanning the perpendicular space between his left knee and my left calf was stick. A decent-sized stick that was nearly an inch in diameter and practically eighteen inches long. The baby branch was splintered near one end where the last three inches of its right half hung limp. I leaned in closer and noticed that the little log was fastened to Grandpa’s heel. The limb had been double pierced by two of the metal spikes on the bottom of the beige shoe.
Before saying anything, I looked again. More closely. The stick was teasing Grandpa’s trousers and practically jabbing my leg’s skin. Some of its bark was molting away. How in the hell a person could step on a stick that size, hit a golf shot, take four steps, and then start driving without noticing a piece of tree like that clung to the bottom of his foot, well that idea grabbed my earlier stifled laugh, doubled and tripled its strength, then shoved it out into the air.
With barely enough air for myself to speak, I managed to say, “Grandpa, look!” Half-choking on my own efforts of expression, I pointed. Then somehow squeezed out, “No wonder you weren’t comfortable… there’s a tree stuck to your shoe.”
The cart slowed as Grandpa looked at his foot. Then the cart stopped as Grandpa looked at me. Then his foot. Then me. Foot. Me. Then, smack dab in the middle of the sixth fairway, his silver brows raised, his blue eyes outgrew his bifocaled glasses, and the corners of his mouth sprung from soil-ward to sun-ward. His entire face ballooned from frustrated math student to amused and amazed man. And even though this moment bloomed nearly 25 years ago, every once in a while, from seemingly out of nowhere, the absolutely perfect rose that was Grandpa Norman’s face at that moment of understanding will sprout into my head and root in my belly with the muscle memory of how the two of us just laughed and laughed.
Clint Martin splits his time between Kentucky and Iowa, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in various places such as Kenyon Review, Talon Review, Sycamore Review, and Motherwell magazine. When he’s not writing or teaching, Clint enjoys transcendental mediation and identifying the birds visiting the backyard.
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