View From a Par

It's been a tough couple of months on the family front. My brother is going through a rough divorce. Another of my beloved aunts has passed away. Issues from the past resurface and worries about the future nag. But golf is where the present lies, at least for me. Yesterday was an unseasonably warm day, the kind that had me wishing for more summer. But here it is, the fall, with the golden hues of autumn offered up as early compensation for the cold weather to come. I love fall golf. Fewer bugs, less sweating and lovely colors all around. It's even lovelier when you've just made a par and look back from the tee ground on the next hole and see, in the background, the colorful trees reflected on the reservoir, and, in the foreground, the tiniest flicker of a yellow flag waving at you, as if to say, "Till next time."

Balboa Park Golf Course

I know, it's the end of October and I still haven't finished writing about my September trip to SoCal, so here goes...Usually, when we visit San Diego, we like to play Coronado, which is one of the best and most beautiful bargains in public golf that I know of. But now I can add another San Diego city course to that list -- Balboa Park GC. At just $40 each for non-residents, hubby and I enjoyed a scenic and challenging round of golf in the heart of San Diego.

We had a Sunday morning tee time, and it wasn't particularly crowded. We had plenty of time to hit some practice balls at the cliff-side range, which gave hubby a case of vertigo every time he looked over the edge.

At the first tee, we were joined by two older gentlemen who actually belonged to local country clubs, but were playing Balboa Park that day for old time's sake. When hubby said he was playing from the blues, the guys looked askance at him and said, "Are you sure?" So he succumbed to peer pressure and played from the whites with the old fellas, which was probably a good idea because Balboa Park is one of those courses that plays longer than it is.

Here's the ramp down to the first tee, where the contrast between skyline and fairway is not subtle in the least. Of course, that scraggly asphalt and chain link fence is a clue that you're playing a city course.

 

Here's another lovely view, which was so distracting I couldn't keep my eye on my ball. Oh well, the picture was worth the penalty shot.

 

 

And yet another panorama:

 

 

The course was a challenge for me, what with forced carries from the red tees, like this:

 

And this:

 

But there were some cool features like this stairway framed by trees. If heaven turns out to be a golf course, then this could be the steps to the pearly gates.

    

On the back nine, you can't miss this carved shrubbery in the hillside. I thought the graphic on the flag was a picture of a rose, but it is actually a conquistador.

A memorable hole was this long par 5 bordering a ravine. Local knowledge would have come in handy here, but alas, I lost a ball because what looked like a safe landing spot turned out to be a grassy slope to nowhere.

The 18th is an intimidating uphill battle. Those thick trees on the left seem to have magnetic properties of some sort, judging from the way my ball seemed to cling to them.

When all was said and done, I shot a 100 by the skin of my teeth. In the ladies locker room, which has a "birdie tree" documenting all the local women's clubs birdies of the month with cute bird-shaped paper cut-outs, I stood looking out a window at the view one last time, wondering if I'd ever break 100 on this trip.

 

Thankfully, the answer would turn out to be yes, but that's a story for next time.

Matters of Golf and Death

My 93-year-old aunt passed away last Saturday. She’d had a stroke, and after 3 days in the hospital, she was taken home to my parents’ house where she lived. Because her stroke was large, her chances of rehabilitation were small, and because her advance medical directive stated that she wanted no feeding tube or other artificial measures taken to prolong her life, it was decided that she would enter home hospice. 

Watching her die is one of the most painful things I have ever experienced. Perhaps the hardest thing was watching her waste away, witnessing the slow biological process of her organs shutting down, her body consuming itself from the inside out. But her face was always beautiful; when you love someone, they remain beautiful no matter what, even if they are only skin and bones. 

The hospice nurses were there 24 hours a day. They changed her bedding and turned her body so she wouldn’t get pressure sores. And they administered morphine for her pain. I spent as much time as I could by her bedside, holding her hand and praying and sometimes just watching her breathe. 

When I was young, she had helped raise me and my three siblings. She changed our diapers and carried us and held our hands. She did our laundry and made our meals. She was the one I ran to when I was scared or hurt. She was like a mother to me. Watching her in her hospice bed, I cried for her like a baby cries for its mother. I missed her already, regretted not spending more time with her when I could have. 

I was scheduled to play in the annual Katipunan Golf Classic that Saturday after she came home. I debated whether or not to play, but my sister assured me that I should go and take a break. It was not that much fun, playing golf, all the while on the verge of tears. Before I left, I whispered to my aunt that I would win a trophy for her. I ended up winning two – one for low gross and one for longest drive. Hubby won a trophy for closest to the pin, too. I brought these to my aunt’s bedside that night, and I put each one into her hand, explaining what they were for. Then I told her how much she’d meant to me, how her love and nurturing had helped make me who I am today. The stroke had rendered her unable to talk, but she spoke with a gaze of understanding in her eyes, and by squeezing my hand. 

The next day she lapsed into a coma. After seven days, she passed from this world into heaven. It’s hard to explain the special love I have for her. I called her “auntie” but she was actually not related by blood. She’d been adopted by my mother’s family when she was in her teens. She’d helped raise my mother and her siblings, and later helped raise me and mine. Maybe that’s why my love for her feels purer than any love I’ve ever known. What bonded us was not blood, but our souls. Blood is thicker than water but soul is thicker than all.

The Usual Haunts

I  recently found out from a neighbor that someone died in the basement of the house where my husband and I live. We bought the house two years ago, and we knew a family lived in it before us, but before them it was a long-term rental for an elderly woman who died in her sleep while napping in a chair in the basement. I told my neighbor I wish she hadn’t told me that. The neighbor said, “All you need to know is she was a very sweet, kind lady.” 

   “Did she have kids?” I asked.

    “Oh, yes, she had several,” said the neighbor.
    “Good,” I said, “because that means she’ll be haunting her kids, not hanging around here.”

I have always been, or claimed to be, sensitive to otherwordly “presences,” as I call them. My psychiatrist brother might say that this is a sign of insanity, as is overzealous religiosity. (And I would say that one need not look further than my golf addiction to see that I am crazy.) But I have only seen an actual ghost once. This was more than a decade ago, in New York, when I was visiting my aunt who lives in a historic pre-war condominium, the kind where Marilyn Monroe was rumored to have had a secret rendezvous with JFK. I was walking in the courtyard between the north and south wings of the condo complex. It was near midnight so I was surprised to see a young man dressed in a bellman’s uniform walking toward me. As we passed, he looked at me and smiled and said, “Good evening.” I nodded and replied with the same. I took a few more steps, then turned around to see if he was still there. But he was gone. 

Since I play a lot of golf, it was only a matter of time when I would experience this sort of thing on the course. This happened a few weeks ago. I was playing Pine Ridge with Bea and Seri and a single named Randy joined us. He was 62 but didn’t look it. While doing my routine neck stretches, I explained I’d had a herniated disc a few years ago and was back in physical therapy for a neck spasm. He revealed that he’d had a herniated disc in his lower back when he was a teenager, followed by back surgery in his twenties. Every few years, he’d move funny and end up with a muscle spasm. But he continued to play basketball into his 50s, and even now, in his 60s, continues to golf. His story made me feel hopeful.

I felt a friendly vibe from him, and we continued to chat here and there, and toward the end of the round, on a par 3, there was this moment when the wind seemed to die down and there was this quiet sense of calm surrounding everything. Maybe it was just because we were all marking our balls and focusing on our putting lines, but as I stood up to see who was away, I looked up at Randy and couldn’t remember his name. For some reason, the name “Stanley” popped into my head.

   Randy looked up from his putting line and said, “Am I away?”

   “Yes,” I said, “Randy. You know, I almost called you Stanley.”
   Randy’s eyes widened. “Funny you should say that,” he said. “My father’s name is Stanley. And today he would have been 91.”
   I felt goose bumps on my neck. “Did he play golf here?”
   Randy nodded. “Oh yeah, he played here a lot.”
   “Well, it seems that he’s here today,” I said. “He says to tell you that you’re a good son and you turned out okay.”
   Randy laughed. He knew that last part I said was just me joking around.
   As I took aim at my putt, I tried to listen for advice from Stanley or whatever other golf ghosts were hanging about. It was a long, straggly line, but somehow I made the putt for par. As we left the hole, I said, “Thanks, Stanley. Happy birthday.”

Disbelievers might say Randy and Stanley sound similar, so it’s not unreasonable to mistake one name for the other. But I believe it was more than coincidence that it was also one of the namesake’s birthdays. I know that I will be haunting some golf course some day, since my husband and I plan to retire near one, and I plan to play into my golden years. 

So, sometime far in the future, if you happen to be on a golf course, and you see an old lady shaking a 3-wood, hissing at you to pick up the pace, that will probably be the ghost of me, decades from now, after I’ve long since gone from earth, but will always and forever be, gone golfing.

The Future and Other Buzzkills

A few weeks ago, when I had first gotten my new driver, I was at the range breaking it in. It had taken me about half a bucket to figure out how to hold the grip so I wasn’t pulling every shot left. I had just hit one or two perfect, straight drives that flew at and over the 170-yard target mound when I heard someone say, “For such a little girl, you got a big swing!” I looked up to see an ancient old man with a face weathered by age and perhaps illness setting up his golf bag in the stall next to me. I was annoyed at the interruption and wasn’t sure what to make of the comment, so I smiled grudgingly and forced a whispered “hee hee” giggle out of my mouth, pretending I was a shy Korean who couldn’t speak English. A frown of confusion shadowed the old man’s face, and he left to go fetch a bucket of balls.

A wave of guilt immediately overcame me, but I rushed to refocus. I hit one or two more perfectly straight, long drives, and I was pleased that the old man hadn’t irreparably broken my reverie after all. So when he returned, I apologized. “Hey, I’m sorry if I was rude before. I had just figured something out with my swing and I didn’t want to forget it.” Then I went on to babble proudly about my new Ping G20 driver and how it was helping me gain extra yards off the tee.

Being an old man, he had also switched to game-improvement drivers recently, and I listened to him explain the benefits of the TaylorMade Rocketballz and Burner clubs he’d turned to. “I can’t swing like I used to, and these help a lot,” he said.

As we returned to our separate stalls, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad. I wondered how long I had at this game till I wouldn’t be able to swing like I used to. Then again, I feel so far from the apex of my game that I haven’t yet reached the point where I could imagine lamenting swinging “like I used to.”

But I know someday that point will come. I had just graduated from ladies’ flex shafts to regular mens’ flex. I thought I could donate my old ladies’ flex G2 to someone in need. But maybe the day will come when I’d regress and need that old thing again.

I looked at the old man, his back turned to me and his head lowered, gazing at his rubber tee, and I thought, “You’ve been where I am. Where you are now is where someday I will be.”

When I had finished my bucket of balls, I left quietly without saying goodbye to the old man. I had a feeling I’d see him around again, either at the range or sometime in the future, at the big golf course in the sky. There, everyone’s tee shots will fly straight and perfect, and it won’t matter what club you use.