Tuesday, February 3, 2009

My Brush With Golf

I went golfing once. My husband and my friend Marty and my son rented a cart and headed out. Marty and my husband played fairly regularly and my son had had some lessons. They intended to play the game. I was baggage, the designated driver of the golf cart. It was fun to be with the people and there were some patches of prairie. I think golfers call those 'hazards'. To me they were the 'best part'. And the course bordered a forest preserve, so there was a nice perimeter of tall oak and maple trees. I think golfers call that 'extreme hazard'. To me it was 'wish I had my camera'.
There is a psychologist, Thom Hartmann, who says that regular people are 'farmers', content to do routine repetitive things over and over day after day year after year. He says people with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) are the 'hunter/gatherers', spontaneous, 'distractible', able to dash off after the prey with no notice, able to switch to bigger better prey should it present itself, yet able to hyper-focus on a task like gathering seasonal berries or nuts or shelter materials.
Soon enough, I had gone from driving the cart on the paved path and watching my party of golfers to driving about the grass just any old where I pleased, looking at the bugs on the leaves of the prairie plants and trying to find as many balls as I could at the edge of the ponds. I think golfers call those 'water hazards'. To me, they were 'potential ecosystem'; there might be frogs or little fish or mayfly larvae in there! The golfers got tired of yelling for me to come back when they needed a new club so pretty soon, they just carried the few they used most. After a while, I had my son more interested in helping fish balls out of the edge of the pond and I had Marty more interested in driving the cart as fast as we could.
I had a blast golfing that one time, but for some reason, we never did that again.

2 comments:

Chuckles said...

Golf has provided me with a variety of experiences, and I should probably write some of them down, but never the experience you've described. Well done! There is always more than one way to skin a moose, eh?

goprairie said...

I heard they have a list of people to never allow on the course again and my picture might be taped up there. They have a mighty fine restaurant there tho.