“DON’T MOVE,” SAYS SIMON.
Simon’s voice brings me back to the present, but the loss of balance, blinding light, and jarring impact, not to mention the intergalactic time travel, disoriented me sufficiently that it takes a few seconds to realize that I’ve been delivered back not to a beach, but to Tucson. Only after I’ve connected a few additional dots do I realize that I’m in a fairway bunker, which is on the 18th hole of Tucson National Golf Course, and that it’s the final hole and round of Q-School. Oh, yeah, and I’m flat on my back.
As instructed, I lie frozen in the sand, little black circles floating in my eyes until they readjust to the light. When I finally turn my head, I’m staring eyeball to ball at the black script logo of my Titleist 3, which rests in a perfect lie on top of the sand two inches below my outstretched arm. It’s great to see my ball again but the crucial question is “What do I lie?”
Very carefully, so as not to touch it or cause it to move, I lift my arm and roll away from the ball and onto my stomach and then up to my knees. Then Simon pulls me out and brushes off the sand and squeezes my shoulder. “You all right?”
“That depends. Did the ball hit me?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“It was very close but I didn’t see or hear anything. Did you?”
“No.”
“Did you feel anything?”
“No.”
“Then we dodged a bullet and we’re still in the hole. Take care of this next shot and we can get out of here in one piece.”
Adding to my good fortune, the ball is now at least a yard farther back in the trap, which makes the lip less of an issue, and considering all my gyrations and flailing, the lie is a minor miracle. Although I’m still a bit wobbly, my 7-iron clears the lip with room to spare and rolls onto the front edge twenty-two feet below the ball. It’s the perfect leave, straight and uphill. Even in my discombobulated state, I know I can two-putt from there, and I do, but rather than relief and elation, all I feel is the red-hot shame from forty-seven summers ago.
“Dad, you just got your card back. What’s the matter?”
“It’s that lie in the bunker. It was just too good. On a ball coming straight down from that height, the ball should have plugged or buried, but it was sitting up like someone had placed it there. I don’t see how that could have happened if I hadn’t broken its fall.”
“Dad, the ball didn’t hit you. You would have felt it.”
“Probably, but between the fall and sun and impact”—I don’t mention my round-trip flight to Memory Lane—“a second or two are unaccounted for. Plus, my shirt came untucked as I fell so the ball could have hit my shirt without me feeling it.”
“The ball didn’t hit you.”
“Maybe not, but you’re not completely sure of that, and neither am I.”
What I didn’t do forty-seven years ago as a seven-year-old marred what should have been a wonderful carefree summer. I’m not going to get melodramatic and say it robbed me of my youth, but you get the idea. If I get this wrong as an adult, it could cast a shadow over the rest of my days, and between Simon’s potential pro career, Sharoz and Elizabeth’s biscuit in the oven, Noah’s decade or so left at home, and what I hope will be another wonderful quarter century or more with Sarah, I have way too much to look forward to to risk that.
“Simon, I got to take a seven.”
“Suit yourself, old man.”