Snippets | The Golfer
It was a strange sight. Almost ninety — white hair, with the slight hunch that senescence brings — he was trudging down the street carrying a golf club. An elder walking down the street isn’t something one finds queer. Neither someone carrying around a golf club. I guess it was the juxtaposition that got me. Why was he carrying around that? It didn’t look like it was just something he randomly picked up. He was holding it with a familiar air as if holding hands with an old companion.
That set my imagination rolling. I saw him in his living room, the club in his hand, ready to send a golf ball into an empty bottle of Horlicks placed on the other side of the room. He swings gently, without moving his back.
Then I see him in his fifties, at an indoor golf course, teaching his granddaughter. She isn’t picking it up well but has a tenacity about her, a will to learn. He smiles.
He is in his thirties now, in this Kopfkino of mine, and as he swings and hits the ball, sending it off into the distant fairway, his son is watching on with delight and so is the love of his life standing beside him.
Now he is a teenager, sneaking into the local golf course with his friends who, reluctant and uninterested in golf, he had to convince to come along with him. There he is: a Romeo walking into his Juliet’s garden.
And finally, he is eight. On a dazzling summer day, his father takes him to the golf course near their home, gives him a club and points to the ball on that green green field and then to the flag looming over the hole fifty meters away. He positions himself sidelong, trying to mimic his father, raises the club, swings with all his might. And misses the ball completely. His father bursts into a hearty laugh. So does he.
A laugh that still echoes in the chambers of his heart.
