Five months have passed and I have not stopped missing Jack. I have missed him so much that even when he was home at Christmas for five days, sitting beside me on the couch or at the dining room table, I never stopped missing him. This winter I have been spending a lot of time in front of the television, and that was where Colleen found me today watching an old British Open Championship at St. Andrews on the Golf Channel. “You’re wearing Jack’s shoes again,” she said as she sat down beside me.
“I just miss him,” I told her.
She looked at me a moment, then said, “You need to do something different. Go somewhere. Where would you like to go?”
I was staring at the TV screen when I answered her. “Right there.”
That’s how it began. I wrote to Jack that night and told him that I had decided to go to Scotland to learn to be a caddie so that in three years, when he finished college and played on a professional tour, I would be ready to meet my pledge to him to carry his bag. It was as if I were resurrecting a whimsical childhood dream, the kind that evaporates with the passage of time, but it suddenly seemed real and tangible to me.
Later he wrote back to me. “You go to St. Andrews, Daddy,” he said. “Learn all you can and we’ll meet up someday, before you know it.”