I do not feel like a good man. I feel emptied out, stuck on a nine-year-old showing off a scar like a trophy instead of a thing doctors had done so he could keep breathing.
I have spent years being good at the photographed version of this.
This one costs me something, and no one will ever see it.
Ryan
Ishould go home.
I drive west instead.
There is a municipal course on the west side with a cracked parking lot, sunburned grass, and a driving range that looks like nobody has expected greatness from it in thirty years.
Perfect.
I pay for a bucket of balls from a teenager who does not look up from his phone.
“Large?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
He slides the token across the counter.
The machine coughs up a hundred white balls into a wire basket. I carry them to the far end of the range where nobody is close enough to talk. A retired guy in a bucket hat is working through a slice three stalls down. Two kids in polos are trying to outdrive each other and failing loudly.
Normal people wasting a morning.
I set the first ball on the mat.
No skates. No boards. No bench. No room watching to see what I do next.
Just a club in my hands and a ball too small to blame.
I swing too hard.
The ball hooks left and dies ugly.
I stare after it.
“Subtle,” I mutter.
I set another one down.
Same result.
Third one, worse.
By the fifth, my shoulders are tight enough to ache and the bucket-hat guy is pretending not to notice. Good for him. Survival instinct.
I step back.
Breathe once.
Golf is stupid because force is not enough.
That is probably why my father likes it.
We used to hit balls on the farm, Dad and me. Out past the barn, where the pasture went flat enough to pretend it was a range. He kept a bucket of old balls in the tack room and a seven iron with tape around the grip.