Here’s what happens.
After four and a half years, probably at least one–maybe two–more than that, someone nice asks you to go play scramble golf for a good cause. Then you go to the storage unit, dig out your golf clubs, and wonder–not for the first time–whose woman’s name that is etched onto the backs of your woods.
Then you walk around a very nice, long, hilly, bunkery, water hazardy course, after being lead out to the back nine for the shotgun start. The drive to the twelfth hole took ten minutes, and we couldn’t hear the shotgun.
My boss and the mayor were very generous with their praise, and very kindly tossed a few worm-burners into the mix of their ringing long drives. On occasion my short game was almost not shameful, and I managed a few good putts. As usual by the time we got the sixteenth hole (which in this case was ninth) I was ready for a nap, and my elbows were constantly aquiver from the odd duff.
Anyway.
After all is said and done, when most of the participants have wrapped up and headed in for the thank-you dinner of serious steak and seriouser cake, you cruise across all the intervening fairways, roughs, paths and access roads, past the unlikely corral full of horses in the middle of the course, and squint into the setting sun.
Then you see the ducks landing in the hazards, and the pheasant strutting across the empty fairway, head bobbing like a plastic celebrity, and the piper scooting to the sand trap.
Grumble Flap 