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Learning
to Play, Playing to Learn
My saving grace the year I graduated from college was becoming friends with my brother Mark. Mark is third from the top. I’m sixth and last. He was eleven when I was born. He says he remembers the day my parents brought me home from the hospital. He says he remembers touching my ears and wondering how anything in the world could be so soft. He taught me to speed skate and showed me the Grand Canyon. He badgered my other brothers when they took to teasing me too much, and he bought me books for my birthday and Christmas. He used to send me down the street with a note giving me permission to buy cigarettes for him at the corner drugstore. He told me to read Jane Eyre and listen to The Rolling Stones and Beethoven. He got so close to being drafted that we could feel almost feel the wings of the angel as it passed by our house. I was a bridesmaid in Mark’s first wedding. None of us attended the second one. After his second divorce, the year I graduated from college, he moved into an apartment not far from my parents’ house. I had moved back home, not yet having figured out how to leverage an English degree into a paycheck that could cover both food and rent. I enrolled in a tech school and learned to make clean solder joints and wire a circuit that could turn on green, yellow, and red LEDs in succession. The year I graduated from college, Mark and I went to movies and skied and read and talked and talked and talked. He always paid my way because I had no money, just government loans for tuition and books. My job at the hospital covered gas and insurance on my car. My parents gave me room and board. Mark gave me something to look forward to. One of the movies Mark treated me to was Ordinary People. Afterwards I told him that I wanted to learn to play golf. In the movie, the Mary Tyler Moore character makes a putt, looks into the camera and declares, “it feels so good.” I didn’t doubt her for a minute. So Mark and I started playing. We rented clubs at first, but it wasn’t long before Mark bought himself a set. I found my set at a garage sale. I looked to Mark as the expert because he had caddied in high school and had played a little on the side. He picked me up for early morning and late afternoon tee times, always specified down to the minute. We bought golf magazines and studied the diagrams that showed grip and stance positions. Mark even bought golf shoes and a glove. I laughed at him when he insisted they took a couple of strokes off his game. Mark and I were a twosome, which meant that we were often paired up with strangers to create a foursome. Mark is a genial type and I left most of the chit-chat to him. I was happiest, though, when we could golf together, just us two, walking the links and talking and making up dumb jokes about eagles and birdies and bogies. Stewart joined us mid-year. Stewart is fourth in the family lineup. Six years older than me, five years younger than Mark. Mark and I agreed that he had the weirdest swing we’d ever seen, but it worked. After the first couple of games, during which he was the champion duffer, Stewart could almost always outdrive Mark, but Mark’s shots were usually straighter. Stewart is the one who found Golf in the Kingdom, Michael Murphy’s novel about the metaphysical side of the game. We all read it, and for weeks afterwards we talked about Shivas Irons and Seamus MacDuff and Scotland’s Burningbush course. The year I graduated from college Stewart was just hitting his stride as a freelance photographer and writer. He decided to do an article on high-altitude golfing and Mark and I went along for the ride. We drove up to the mountains and played a couple of courses—Buena Vista in the morning and Leadville in the afternoon. I don’t remember much about the Buena Vista course except that it was completely covered with enormous oak leaves. It was late fall and play was slow because we kept losing our balls in mounds of brown leaves. Playing the Mt. Massive course in Leadville was, I think, the closest I’ve ever come to playing golf as it was intended. Golf is a game that was born in the wind and dunes along rough coasts that link ocean to land. Mark and Stewart and I played nine holes at ten-thousand feet above sea-level in October. When we started after lunch we were still enjoying Indian summer heat, but by the third hole the wind had picked up, sweeping down off the Collegiate Peaks and freezing our faces and chapping our hands. By the seventh hole we were playing in flurries of swirling snow pellets. We finished the round, though, because we always finished the round. Stewart has never let me quit at anything. When we were children, Stewart and my brother Eric, who is four years my senior, played an endless army game in which Stewart was the general, Eric the colonel, and I the designated ‘gutter.’ As gutter, I served as the general’s servant, scapegoat, and scout. If Eric or I became discouraged with our lots in life, Stewart would rally us with Scotland the Brave and Keep Right On to the End of the Road, songs he picked up from my mother’s Harry Lauder records. Fifteen years later Stewart once again invoked Harry Lauder to keep me going until we all holed out on the ninth green, just below timberline in the snow. Just over a year after I graduated from college I landed a job as a marketing editor in the high-tech company for which I still work. Three months later I met the man I would marry. Slowly, my life filled up with things that edged out golf games with my brothers. It’s been years since I played, but I still like the sound of the club hitting the ball. I like the way the ball arcs through the air, its power and grace making it a pure, if fleeting, mark in time. I like taking mulligans—my brothers were always very generous with me—but there was a time when I hit five balls into the lake rather than take a drop on the other side. I like the smell of the world in the morning, when you’re the first group out on the course and there’s a snap in the air and a flicker of frost on the grass that preserves your footprints until the sun melts them away. I like the soft, warm light in the evening when twilight closes fast and you have to strain to pick out your ball in the gloaming. I like being reminded to keep my head down and my arms straight and my knees bent. But most of all, I like walking and talking and listening and laughing with my brothers. They were my saving grace, the year I graduated from college, when we all learned to play golf together.
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