“Right. Here we go.”
Archie Baird took a deep breath.
“We’ll begin at the beginning. The first stick and ball game we know about was a Roman game called paganica, which came up through Europe, through France and Germany and into Holland, where the Dutch made the most of it, playing a game they called kolf. We have evidence the Dutch played something they called kolf going back to 1300. There is no evidence of golf in Scotland before 1450. Kolf, a game played on ice in winter and fields in summer, died out completely around 1700. It was probably Scottish wool merchants who brought the game back here. Scotland was a poor country, Holland was a rich country. The merchants took their wool across and sold it and sometimes encountered unfavorable winds, and so it was perhaps inevitable they would fill their time playing kolf. They brought the game home with them, and it was here the game changed forever and took root. Here, on the east coast of Scotland, with an abundance of land, we transformed the game from playing to a stake on ice to playing on natural land to a rabbit scrape…a hole. I truly believe the game as we know it today would never have evolved without rabbits. The rabbits, you see, would gather in the hollows and nibble the grass down smooth and prevented scrub vegetation like buckthorn and hawthorn bushes from overrunning the linksland. In the middle of the scrape, the buck rabbit would create a hole and urinate in it to mark his territory, and the early golfers played from one hollow to the next. The hole was usually marked with a gull feather. It was very simple golf.”
Baird paused, took another breath, and peered at us somewhat skeptically. “I can go on for hours and hours about this stuff. Are you sure you’re up for it?”
I nodded. “Fascinating,” said my father.
Archie Baird, former R.A.F. fighter pilot, retired fourth-generation small-animal vet, golf collector par excellence, and Muirfield’s redoubtable archivist, gave us a small proprietary grin. I’d heard about Archie and his dog Niblick for years from friends and always intended to look them up. Among other things, Baird’s wife Sheila’s great-grandfather was Willie Park, the famous club-maker who won the first British Open at Prestwick the year before the outbreak of the American Civil War. But more interesting to me was the fact that Baird operated the best private golf museum in the world.
Archie was a ruggedly fit seventy-year-old with rawly barbered hair and a brisk no-nonsense manner. Niblick was a small wiry-haired Border terrier whose face uncannily resembled Clement Atlee’s, the former prime minister. We were standing in Archie’s little museum, a small, damp, chilly room of artifacts housed in a former cart shed near the pro shop of Gullane Golf Club, on the west end of Main Street in the sleepy East Lothian village of the same name.
We’d been in town two days, and thanks to Archie, I’d already had a match I’d never forget. In fact, I was having difficulty devoting my proper attention to Archie’s history lesson because I was still thinking about it. The day before, while Dad rested and wrote some cards at Greywalls, the fine coaching inn located just off Muirfield’s tenth tee, I’d played Gullane Number I, at the opposite end of the town, with a charming rogue named Sandy Williamson.
Archie had arranged the match as a prelude to a trip around Muirfield with Dad, but he warned me to watch out for Sandy Williamson. “Sandy’s a sly one. His age is a bit advanced, but so’s his game. Best play with one hand firmly attached to your billfold.” I quickly learned why. A large, stoop-shouldered, white-haired man in his seventies, dressed in a frayed navy parka and baby-blue socks, there was nothing the least bit elderly about Sandy’s game. He’d been Gullane’s perennial club champion in the 1950s and 1960s and had me four holes down before we’d even reached, huffing and puffing, the brow of Gullane Hill at hole seven, a famous spot writer Jim Finegan says is one of the half-dozen “most enthralling spots in all the world of golf,” a spectacular rise from where you can see fourteen counties on a clear day, distant Edinburgh, the Forth Bridge, the Kingdom of Fife across the gray waters of the Forth, and the green fairways of Muirfield nestling against the village less than a mile away.
Gullane Golf Club, founded in 1882, offers its four hundred members three eighteens, not to mention a fine little six-hole children’s course in the center of the village that pretty well summarizes the place’s raison d’être. British golf architect Donald Steel is on record as saying that of all the world’s golfing centers, Gullane may be the most influential and natural. Among other things, the village environs are a leading bird sanctuary, though most of the birds you’ll see on the narrow main drag are golfers. On a high summer day, it’s said with great affection, there are more golfers than inhabitants in Gullane. The place is golf mad.
Sandy Williamson was clearly afflicted. He told me he managed only seven or eight rounds a week nowadays, which was nowhere near the pace he had maintained as a younger man. Playing as if he owned the place, Sandy had the peculiar casual habit of dropping his bag on the green, no matter where he happened to be putting from. Sandy’s putting routine was even brisker than my father’s, and I watched him spank several balls almost nonchalantly into the depths of the cup, including one forty-footer. Congratulating him on his birdie at the eleventh, aptly called Maggie’s Loup (so named after the legend of a brokenhearted local lass who tossed herself onto the rocks far below, perhaps during a mixed singles match with Sandy Williamson), I admitted I was a bit in awe of my elderly opponent’s game. He touched his flatcap and nodded. “It’s a fine combination—to be lucky and good, but I used to be quite a sensational putter back when I was the only bald Boys Open champion.”
Bald Boys Open champion? I swallowed the bait.
Sandy explained that he first won the Boys title in 1939, just before the war. No photos were taken of the winner that year, and the Boys champions were not rounded up again for a group photograph until 1946. “By then it was too late for me,” Sandy remembered solemnly, removing his wool flatcap with immaculate timing, revealing a bald dome surrounded by shaggy gray locks. “I was the only bald Boys champion Scotland ever produced.”
He gave me his first smile of the day, and I managed to give Gullane’s former Boys champ a decent game on the back side, somehow managing to draw the match even by sixteen, at which point Sandy fired off two consecutive birdies to dash my foolish hopes. My father joined us by the eighteenth green, and I introduced him to Britain’s only bald Boys Open champion. They shook hands, and Sandy invited us to come back for a rematch before he lost the rest of his hair.
—
“Very well,” Archie resumed his museum spiel. “Here we go again. A word or two, then, on historical golf equipment. We must mention the featherie ball. It took one man an entire day, and two top hats full of feathers, to make just two featherie golf balls. The ball would fly about 150 yards. It cost more to produce than a club. The first club heads, by the way, were made of apple, beech, and blackthorn, with a bit of lead in the back. The first iron clubs were made by blacksmiths. This was how the game was played for more than three hundred years. Obviously it was not a poor man’s game. In 1850 there were still only fifteen golf courses in the world—all but one of them in Scotland. That year the gutta-percha ball was introduced, and everything changed. Gutta-percha is a tropical gum-like material that acts like a thermoplastic. When it’s hot, you can mold it; when it’s cold, it goes hard. Dentists still use it to make temporary fillings. Gutta balls were cheap and durable as opposed to the fragile and expensive featherie balls. For that reason alone, golf suddenly exploded in popularity. By 1900 there were more than two thousand golf courses in the world. Next came the Haskell rubbercore ball, invented by a clever American in the early part of the century, but frankly a bit bouncy and erratic—so they started marking the face of clubs to put a bit of helpful spin on the ball. Control became a central part of the game. Club-makers replaced blacksmiths. The so-called modern game was born.”
Archie showed us a practice ball with a parachute, a metal-headed driver dating from 1900, a pitching iron with a hole cut into the face (“Meant for playing out of the water. Didn’t work, I’m sorry to say, which explains why they’re so rare.”), and a “flicker book”—a flip-action instruction manual that animated the swing of Bobby Jones, a sort of crude portable home golf video, “The Americans are a very simple people,” Archie said, handing me an odd-looking iron with a novel wooden face. “They knew their woods went farther than their irons, so they cleverly put wood on their irons. That didn’t work either, to no one’s great surprise.”
“What a place,” said my father, pausing to examine a print of a pale gentleman decked out in a lacy eighteenth-century waistcoat. He was swinging a crude golf club. “You must get lots of tourists in here.”
Archie shook his head. “Funny thing about that, Brax. When I opened this place, I thought that’s exactly what would happen—they’d come in droves. I thought they would be lined up to learn a wee bit of history. But you know? That’s not the case. The Golf Museum over in St. Andrews can’t seem to draw respectable crowds either. Difference is, theirs is a business enterprise while mine is purely a labor of love. I’m not so brokenhearted if only a few people come by asking for a tour each year. That means they’re really interested. You’d be surprised who’s been in here, lots of ordinary Americans and even some of your top American professionals. Ben Crenshaw always makes an effort to come by. Now there’s a man who loves his history.”
“This print looks very old,” my father said.
“That print is very interesting. The clothes are wrong. The club is wrong. And it’s a modern swing the man is using. The print’s a total fake, but there’s so much blessed mystery surrounding this game, you can make a handsome living peddling fake art and replicas of old clubs. On the other hand, I think the mystery is why we love it so much. Take, for instance, the mystery of the hole.”
“The hole?” we both said in unison.
“Right. What you Americans sometimes unfortunately call a cup. We know the hole was invented by a Scot when the Dutch or Roman game came to these shores and became golf. The rabbits were critical to the process, but somewhere along the line someone had to come up with an actual hole. We just don’t know who that clever individual was.” Archie gave us a slow solemn look and then shook his head. Niblick sighed and leaned against my leg.
“It remains one of golf’s greatest mysteries—lost forever, I’m afraid, to the mists of time.”
—
Fourteen British Opens have been contested at Muirfield, home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. Descended from the “Gentlemen Golfers” who had played at Leith Links in Edinburgh since the fifteenth century, the Honourable Company’s “Rules of Golf” were adopted almost word for word in 1754 by the society destined to become the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews—rule-makers of the modern game.
Nicklaus made his Walker Cup debut at Muirfield at age nineteen in 1959 and captured his British Open here seven years later. Player, Trevino, Watson, and Faldo also took home the claret jug from history-steeped Muirfield, a linksland that sits well above the sea and features beautiful turf and a visual honesty better players find irresistible. There are no forced carries, no water hazards, no ruinous outcroppings of prickly gorse to speak of. “The good shot is consistently rewarded,” Jim Finegan writes, “the indifferent shot is just as consistently chastised.” Before Nicklaus and Watson won at Muirfield, Harry Vardon, James Braid, Walter Hagen, and Henry Cotton anointed its greatness.
For the good player, the primary challenge at Muirfield lies in the ever-daunting sea winds, a bearded rough that can resemble the wheatfields of Kansas before harvest, and far too many exquisitely constructed sod bunkers to make a passage round pain-free. My first drive hooked badly out of bounds left, prompting Archie Baird to recall fondly that the great James Braid of Elie, first born of the Great Triumvirate that included Vardon and J. H. Taylor, also miserably hooked his opening drive over the wall on the left the year he won the first of his two Open championships at Muirfield, in 1901. He seemed to be telling me there was always hope at Muirfield. My next swat from the tee found the fairway, but a subsequent poor long iron shot from the fairway left me facing a difficult fifth shot from the bottom of a bunker in front of the green. I staggered off the hole with a triple bogey.
Archie made par, Dad a surprisingly easy bogey.
“You seem to be off to a poor start,” said Archie, as they headed for the riding cart Archie had thoughtfully arranged for Dad. “I hope old Sandy didn’t exhaust all your good shots at Gullane yesterday. How much did he take you for?”
“Three pounds.”
“Aye. Could have been much worse.”
“Jim always starts late,” my father chipped in, smiling at me. The rest at Greywalls had done him good. I heard a lilt in his voice and saw renewed vigor in his swing. “Takes him a while to figure it out, but once he gets his head on straight, he can post fine numbers.”
This was nice of my father to say. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out to be the case. I played somewhat indifferent golf on the outward leg, which had nothing to do with the quality of the course. Muirfield was outstanding, a pleasure to play and an inspiration to behold. Something else was bothering me. Walking off the second tee alone while the two older men sped ahead to their balls in the cart, I realized what it was. I was keyed up and worrying again about the outcome. Not just the outcome of our round here at Muirfield—but of the trip. We’d been away thirteen days. Something told me Dad wasn’t planning to go much farther.
Muirfield’s second hole is considered a “breather,” a 351-yard par-four some players have a go at if the wind is favorable. I drove my ball into the right rough, shouldered my bag, and started after it. As the East Lothian sun shone down, my mind slipped back a few weeks to a useful “lesson” I had learned on another dramatic faraway coast in the company of a friend named Laird Small. Laird is the head professional at Spyglass Hill Golf Club, Pebble Beach’s famous sister course among the tall coastal pines of the Monterey Peninsula. He is also one of America’s finest young teachers, responsible for fine-tuning the games of several promising young tour players.
I also started miserably at Spyglass that day, double bogeying a fairly easy par-five opening hole. Another double followed at number two, a short par-four that was exactly the same length as Muirfield’s second. As we climbed the hill to the third tee, I was almost ready to give up and head back to the clubhouse. Laird suggested we sit on the grass of the third tee for a few moments and talk. The spot, he said, meant a lot to him, so we sat down. The tee sits high among the dunes where Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson supposedly used to walk, trying to get inspiration for his work, while living briefly in Monterey in the late 1800s. The green sits below, framed by a glorious panorama of the Pacific Ocean. Spyglass Hill takes its name from Treasure Island, and its majestic beauty and rugged difficulty make it one of the most admired—and feared—golf courses in America. I’d hoped to play so well there that day instead of so miserably. I apologized to Laird and admitted I was kind of rattled. This was mere days after my father had called to tell me he was dying of cancer and our trip to Britain would have to be postponed indefinitely.
I rationalized my poor start by admitting I’d hoped a memorable round at Spyglass would take my mind off my problems. Laird smiled and said he understood. That’s why many folks played golf. Unfortunately, their mind usually was the problem.
As we sat looking at the view, he proposed a little experiment. He asked me for the scorecard, and I handed it over. He tore it up and said, “Let’s see if we can get you into NATO.”
“NATO?”
“That stands for Not Attached To Outcome.”
He said the idea wasn’t original with him—a blind golfer pal had thought of it—but that every good teacher knew that the more you pushed against the game of golf, the more the game tended to elude you.
I told him he sounded like my own father, with his talk of “everything contains its opposite” and how trying to “create the magic makes it vanish.”
“There’re really no new ideas, are there?” Laird agreed. “It’s all how we choose to look at things.” He suggested that we look at the rest of the round differently, proposing that we play merely for the simple pleasure of each other’s company and the opportunity to be out on such a fine morning, unburdened by thinking about our scores and trying to determine the outcome.
A memorable round did indeed follow, though I can’t remember exactly how I did on most of Spyglass Hill’s romantically named holes. We walked along striking shots and talking about our wives and my children and the baby he and his wife Honor hoped to soon be adopting. I recall us stopping to watch seabirds and listen to the way the wind soughed through the famous Monterey pines. A fog rolled in on the back nine. Deer crossed our paths, pausing to wiggle their noses at us. I vaguely recall, in the midst of all this, a string of pars and even a couple birdies happening. It may have been the finest round of my life, but I’ll never know for sure.
It was an exercise worthy of Opti the Mystic. I’d come to Spyglass tense and worried, hoping to bury my sadness by beating a great golf course into submission. Instead, I’d submitted and left relaxed and reminded once again of things I’d known since I was a boy, lying on the soft green fairway of my father’s golf club.
—
At Muirfield’s tenth hole, one of Nicklaus’s all-time favorite holes, a mammoth 475-yard par-four, I unleashed my best drive of the day, a three-hundred-yarder that Archie Baird said compared favorably to anything the Golden Bear had done on the hole.
He and Dad rolled down the fairway in their sputtering cart, with Niblick trotting importantly just ahead and slightly to starboard. Golf didn’t seem to be the particular aim of either man. The weather was mild and sunny, the tall rough leaning beautifully in the slight breeze off Aberlady Bay. It was a day, in some respects, that eerily recalled my lovely day with Laird Small at Spyglass Hill.
I took out my scorecard and tore it up, immediately feeling better. I looked at Dad. He was laughing and obviously having a good time. In the honorable company of Archie Baird, a voluble host and a fellow veteran of the air war, sharing stories and reminiscences that had little or nothing to do with golf or the greats who had trampled this turf, my father seemed thoroughly in his element at last. In Archie, he’d met a Scottish version of himself.
I lagged back a bit, noting the solemn beauty of the turf (the best in the world, according to Nicklaus, for making iron shots with the kind of spin you want) and the geometrically perfect bunkers, which my worry had made me too blind to appreciate on the front side.
We came at last to seventeen, the difficult par-five where Roberto de Vicenzo once holed a two-iron for an albatross, and a hole that possibly altered the playing career of Tony Jacklin. In the final round of the ’72 Open, Lee Trevino and Jacklin approached the hole tied for the lead, just one stroke ahead of the ever-present Nicklaus. Jacklin played two solid shots within a few yards of the green, but Trevino sprayed his shots all over the place. First he drove into a bunker, was forced to play a second “safe” shot out, then trap-hooked his third to the deep rough in front of the green. Discouraged, certain he’d handed Jacklin the tournament, Trevino slapped an indifferent shot over the green. Jacklin chipped his third shot to within fifteen feet of the cup. Trevino went to his ball and hastily struck another poor shot—which raced across the green and jumped into the hole for par. It was the Merry Mex’s third “miracle” shot that week.
Recently, while visiting with Jacklin at the home he was selling in the Scottish border country to prepare for life on the Senior Tour in America, he told me that Trevino’s “lucky” shot at Muirfield had effectively ended his career. Shaken by what he’d witnessed, Jacklin, never the best of putters to begin with, missed his birdie at seventeen that day—and then missed his par. The wild reversal of fortune handed Trevino his second consecutive British Open title. “I’m convinced my own confidence died on the spot,” Jacklin reflected quietly. “I mean, I’d played the best I could, I’d done everything required of a champion…only to lose it all on a man’s careless lucky shot. My God, that broke my spirit.”
My father finished with a 93, which made him visibly happy. I finished with…who can say? I was happy, too.
—
Buoyed by our bonny trip around Muirfield, Archie drove us through the village and explained a bit more about the history of East Lothian, then whizzed us up a residential lane in his little Ford Fiesta very nearly to the crown of Gullane Hill. He wanted to show Dad the grand view and even gave us a snippet of verse for the occasion.
“It’s up the hill,” he recited, “and doon the hill,
And roond the hill and a’man;
And ye should come to Gullane Hill
If you can golf at a’man.
We’ll cure you of a summer’s cold
Or of a winter’s cough,
We’ll make you young even though you’re old,
So come and play at golf.”
We applauded, Archie bowed slightly. We climbed back into his cramped car and sped down the hill with Archie telling us how he met and courted his wife Sheila, about the years he spent studying in America prior to the war, and how he’d given up his veterinary practice due to the changing nature of that trade. We parted with a drink at the Old Club House Pub, which overlooked the children’s links, where several future Sandy Williamsons were out shooting at red flags. Archie wanted to know where we were putting up that night.
I mentioned we had a couple rooms at Greywalls, right next door to the hole where I drove a ball like the Golden Bear.
“Oh, splendid,” Archie said. “If there’s a good moon tonight, be sure and look out at the golf course. It can be quite an extraordinary sight.”
My father thanked him for his hospitality. I added my hear-hear.
We touched our glasses, drinking to Trevino’s luck and Jacklin’s misfortune and the eternal mystery of the hole, whoever invented it.
“That’s why we love this game, you know,” said Archie. “The bittersweet mystery of it all. The uncertainty of what we shall discover….”
“It’s new every time you go out,” agreed my father. “Wasn’t it de Vicenzo who said golf is like love—one day you feel too old, the next you want to do it again?”
“Right you are, Brax.” Baird felt his own familiar quotation coming on, “ ‘A tolerable day, a tolerable green, and a tolerable opponent supply, or ought to supply, all that any reasonably constituted human being can expect in the way of entertainment,’ ” Archie recited. “That’s Lord Balfour. The rest of the quote goes thus: ‘With a clear course and fine sea view the golfer may be excused if he imagines that golf, even though it be indifferent golf, is the ultimate end of man’s existence.’ ” He looked at me and said, “He was thinking of Gullane Hill when he said that.”
I started to raise my glass to Spyglass Hill and Gullane Hill, both of which had cured something in me, and to Laird Small and the laird of Gullane Archie Baird, genuine custodians of the game, but I wasn’t sure anyone in the Old Club House Pub but me would get the connection. I simply hoisted my glass and said thank you to Archie.
Several hours later, I had a clear view of the course and the sea beyond from my room at Greywalls, a cozy cell overlooking Muirfield’s tenth. The moon, shining on the water, made me think of a Zen belief that enlightenment is like the moon reflected on water: The moon does not get wet nor the water broken; the light is wide, but a whole sky can be reflected in a single drop.
True to Archie’s word, I could see a great deal of the linksland, washed blue by the moon and stars. My room had green wallpaper and floral drapes, a small reading lamp, five prints of soldiers on the walls, a single bed, a Finlandia TV, and a slipcovered chair. I sat in the chair and flipped on the TV, just to see if there was still a world beyond Muirfield. The late news was on. A woman who hadn’t spoken in seventeen years had finally broken her silence, asking for a ham sandwich. Britain’s oldest chicken had died after a ripe old age. The fratricidal factions in Bosnia were at least talking about talking again. Mu‘ammar Gadhafi had graciously repeated his offer to have his son marry Chelsea Clinton to improve diplomatic relations with the United States. On the local front, former president George Bush was visiting St. Andrews to attend the annual autumn meetings of the Royal and Ancient and play a little golf.
Thinking what an ironic twist that was, I turned off the set and walked down the narrow hallway to my father’s room to see if he wanted to go down for a nightcap in the bar, but he wasn’t in his room.
I strolled downstairs, past the empty front desk and the photo wall where Greg Norman was giving a Greywalls chef a midnight golf lesson. I found my father in the library, playing old war records on an old wind-up record player sitting on the piano.
“Look at this,” he said, as I entered. “Great stuff here.”
He showed me several 78-RPM records from the war years and reminded me for the umpteenth time how he’d met my mother in the record department of McCrory’s, how he’d gone back for weeks to buy classical and big-band records and hadn’t even owned a record player. Then he told me another story I’d never heard: that my mother made a recording of “I’ll Walk Alone” and had it sent to him overseas. During the war he used to take the record to village libraries and play it on their record players.
He handed me one of the records. “Look. Tony Martin singing ‘To Each His Own.’ ”
“Who’s Tony Martin?”
“Big Hollywood star in the thirties and forties. Not much of a soldier, though.” I asked how he knew this.
Dad smiled. “Because he was in my outfit at Chanute Field. Funny guy. Used to flirt with your mother a lot. Told her she looked like Alice Faye, the movie star. I think Alice Faye might have just divorced him. Your mother sold cigarettes at the Buckingham Palace PX—that was the name of the place, believe it or not—and I was teaching at the parachute training school. We lived off base. Martin was the kind of guy who wasn’t above having other buck privates shine his boots and make his bunk. Guess they thought they’d get into the movies or something. I can’t say I ever really knew the man, though I might have yelled at him a few times.”
We played the Tony Martin record. Tony Martin had a superb voice. I pictured slinky women with cigarette holders and eyelashes that could wound.
“So how was Mom?” I knew he had vanished to his room after dinner to call my mother. I’d stayed downstairs chatting with a young newlywed couple from Phoenix whose parents had mysteriously given them a trip to Scotland for a honeymoon. Neither played golf. “I guess I’ll have to learn to play golf now,” the bride complained with a note of doomed resignation. “Kevin wouldn’t know which end of the club to hold.” She indicated the groom, who had his nose safely buried in a copy of Country Life.
“Your mom is fine,” Dad said. “She’s having a man come and waterproof the wooden fence in back. I told her she ought to go buy Thompson’s because that’s the best water sealer, but she said the man at the hardware store suggested Olympic because it has sunblock in it. So she bought the Olympic.” He held another record up to the light and squinted at the title. “I guess she’s learning she doesn’t need me around quite as much as she first thought.”
I started to say something but didn’t, either because my tongue wouldn’t get out of the way or because I simply couldn’t think what to say. So I said I was going to walk out and stand on Muirfield’s tenth tee in the moonlight and admire the hole where I’d made my Nicklausian blast earlier that day. He said he might join me in a minute or two. As I left him, Tony Martin was crooning that he’d found his one and only love.
I walked out back and stood on the little stone wall above the tee, looking out at the Muirfield links, thinking about the Mystery of the Hole. The hole was critical to golf, yet a hole was really nothing more than ten ounces of air, a divine nothingness. The object of the game was to reach this place of nothingness as economically as possible, to pass through nature with as much grace and dignity as we could muster. Less really was more, and even if golf wasn’t the ultimate end of man’s existence, it struck me that a small, ever-shifting, mysterious nothingness was precisely what gave the game its essential glimmer, balance, and allure, impregnated it with a power that was simultaneously as visible and elusive as moonlight on the water.
I decided to step down onto the grass and, stepping forward off the wall, kept going, falling about four feet. I landed directly on my back and lay there, the wind knocked out of me, on a pillowy pad of fragrant grass, feeling really dumb but far more startled than injured, staring up at the moon.
So much, I thought, for Buddhist woolgathering. After a few minutes I got up, rubbed my backside, climbed back over the wall, and went inside. My father was just heading up the stairs and paused to wait for me.
“How was the golf course?” he asked mildly.
“Very comfortable.”
He smiled and slipped his hand through my arm, mostly to give his knees a bit of support as we slowly climbed the steep stairs together. I started to say something about my mother being brave under the circumstances, but he seemed to read my mind and spared me the effort.
“Your mother will be all right,” he said as we neared the top. “Change is difficult for her, but she’s a surprisingly tough lady.”
The corners of his mouth turned up slyly.
“You know, it’s only been the past five years I’ve gotten her to sleep in the nude. You sleep much better in the nude. I’ve told her that for years. I think she’s finally beginning to believe me.”