Miracle on the 17th Green (2 page)

In a panic, I fished my watch out of my bag. It turns out time hadn’t stood still at all. It had kept right on ticking.

As I stood marooned in the middle of the course, a brisk fifteen-minute walk from my Jeep, a reckless fifteen-minute ride from my home, I was already
two hours and twenty minutes late for my own Christmas dinner
. Throwing the bag over my shoulder, I took off across the empty course like a Yellowstone camper pursued by a nasty bear looking for
its
Christmas dinner.

Or a man who had just seen a ghost. The ghost of Christmas past.

My family is not the kind that any man in his right mind stands up for Christmas dinner, or any other meal or occasion. But then whose is?

Sarah, my wife, is generous, funny, frighteningly accomplished, and stunning, and I have been hopelessly in love with her for thirty years. She is the leading obstetrician in Winnetka, and for the past eight years has been an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago Medical School. She has always earned more than I have as a sort of midlevel advertising copywriter for Leo Burnett, but, at least until recently, neither one of us seemed to mind.

Our kids, to use one of Noah’s current favorite words are “the bomb.” That’s
good
, by the way. They are also sensitive, caring, beautiful, and brilliant. They take after Sarah.

Elizabeth, born the year after we got married, is really only a kid to
me. That she is in fact twenty-seven now is something I always have a hard time believing. It doesn’t fit with the indelible image of the first time I held her, seconds after her birth. Then again, neither did her first date, her second, her third, and her high school and college graduations. A doctor herself now, she is in her second year of a radiology internship at Yale.

Simon, a junior in high school, is probably my closest friend in the world — though we’ve been testing that relationship lately. The kid is just so alive and honest. He’s a pure flame. Although he has never been interested in golf, he’s also the family’s only other jock. One of the top high school soccer players in the state, he has been invited to travel with the National Junior Team next fall.

Last, but definitely not least, is our great philosopher-king, Noah, who arrived unexpectedly four years ago, and whose absurd verbal precociousness has been causing jaws to drop practically ever since. Statistically, I guess he’s a genius, but what really kills me about him is his ferocious loyalty to his older brother.

One day last fall, Simon surprised us at supper by arriving with three gold loops dangling from his right earlobe. His mother and I were not exactly congratulating him on his new look.

After about five minutes, Noah stood up and announced, “If you two don’t stop it, I’m eating in my room.” Then he looked at us, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Besides, what’s the big deal? He’s a teenager.” I’m not making this up. He’s four years old.

Of course, Simon feels the same way about Noah. In fact, we’re all pretty much crazy about one another, with the very possible exception
lately of Sarah toward me. What’s caused her to lose affection for me? I can’t say for sure. She refuses to talk about it anymore.

If I don’t get it by now I never will, she says.

What I do understand is that I’ve been in a rut, a rut that keeps getting deeper and deeper, and she’s tired of what must seem like the Sisyphean task of pulling me out of it. As she put it once, “I already have three kids. I don’t want to be married to one.” The fact is she’s doing great, and I’m not doing much of anything, I guess, except bringing her down. She also says I’m cynical about her friends, and she’s probably right.

On the other hand, maybe I never deserved her in the first place, and it just took her twenty-eight years to figure that out.

At any rate, what I had just done on Christmas afternoon wasn’t likely to heal and soothe.

When I finally walked into the kitchen, I was actually met by
five
pairs of angry eyes. I don’t believe I mentioned Boris, our black-and-brown Welsh terrier, who also joined the group scowl, and may even have growled. This wasn’t the first time I had faced this particular mob. I had let them down before, so much so that Simon had dubbed me the “late” Travis McKinley.

“Merry Christmas,” offered Sarah, with exactly as much warmth and genuine Yuletide spirit as I deserved.

“I know it’s inexcusable,” I blurted, “I’m sorry. When I looked at my watch, I swear I couldn’t believe it.”

“No big deal, Old Man,” said Elizabeth, who had flown in from New Haven the night before. “All you did is miss Christmas dinner.”

“You’re being too hard on the guy, Liz,” said Simon, bristling with
the kind of wounded sarcasm only a seventeen-year-old can muster, “He’s just in that mild funk again. You know, the one he’s been in since Armstrong walked on the moon.”

Because we identified with each other so closely, I realize now that my long slump had hurt Simon at least as much as me. If I’d got my act together a little sooner, maybe he wouldn’t have three holes in his right ear. Maybe he wouldn’t have been suspended two days this fall for getting in a fistfight in the hallway with some goon on the football team. But Simon’s going to be all right, I swear it.

“Don’t worry,” said Noah, who hates to see anyone looking miserable, “there’ll be another one in exactly three hundred sixty-five days.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Sarah. “At least not one that you’re invited to.”

I stood there with my face covered with mud and sweat, and dried blood where a branch had scraped my chin as I sprinted back through
the woods. I stared hopelessly at Sarah, who was wearing a simple black dress and had her hair pulled back. She kept shaking her head, and the look on her face was about as pure as disgust can get.

“I know no one is going to believe this or be interested,” I said, “but I was having a semireligious experience out there.”

“What? You finally sunk a few putts?” snorted Elizabeth, provoking laughter all around and a particularly merry approving glance from her mom.

When am I going to learn to keep my moronic mouth shut? I asked myself in despair. The only good news was that my mad sprint through the woods had got me home in time to do the dishes and clean up. Noah, good soul that he is, stayed in the kitchen to help me dry. The work, and his company, temporarily took my mind off the paralyzing fear that I might eventually screw up one time too many and lose my place in this family.

Or maybe I already had.

That night, the Midwest got blitzed by the first real snowstorm of the winter. The town Billy Sunday couldn’t shut down, was.

Although I welcomed the closed offices and the temporary interruption in the flow of junk mail and bills, I was dying to get back on the course and find out if I could still see the line on my putts. Was my improvement permanent, or just a blip in the cosmos, a one-day Christmas gift from God?

It was five days before the snow had melted enough for me and my regular golfing buddies, Ron Claiborne, Joe Barreiro, and Charles Hall, to drive out to Medinah, one of the best courses in the country, where Ron’s father-in-law was a member.

Medinah is a long, narrow, nasty test of golf. When it hosted the U.S. Open in 1990, the best score all week was a 67 by Hale Irwin.

That’s exactly what I shot. With all the bonus payouts for greenies, birdies, sandies, presses, and double presses, my winnings were more than enough to buy lunch and drinks in the Men’s Grill.

That afternoon, we had the place to ourselves. As we sat in one corner of the huge wood-paneled room, shooting the breeze and stewing in our ripe middle age, I picked up a spoon and banged it on Ron’s half-empty Amstel Light.

“Gentlemen, I’m glad all of you are sitting down, because I have a rather shocking announcement,” I said.

“You’re getting a vasectomy,” said Ron. “Congratulations.”

“Talk about flogging a dead horse,” said Joe.

“I’m going to the Senior Tour Qualifying School.” I said, interrupting the high hilarity. “Starts two weeks from today in Tallahassee.”

The silence was deafening. I’d been playing with these guys for twenty-five years. They were all top local amateurs and former college players, and until the sudden improvement in my putting, I don’t even know if I was the best player at the table.

“It takes more than one sixty-seven to go up against Lee Trevino and Jimmy Colbert every week,” said Ron finally. “You’re completely out of your fucking mind, and that’s putting it politely.” It was almost as if he was angry.

“I appreciate your confidence,” I said. “Really, I’m touched. I’ve broken par six nines in a row, and something wild has happened with my putting.”

“No shit,” said Joe.

“But that’s not the point,” I said. “The point is it’s what I want to do, and for once before it’s too late I’d like to know what it feels like to at least try to do what I want.”

“You’ve already got the cushiest job in the Western World,” said Joe. “You rotate the superlatives in McDonald’s jingles. I mean, how many things can you come up with that rhyme with ‘sesame seed bun’?”

“I hate it,” I said with a vehemence that surprised even me. “And I’ve hated it every day for twenty-three years.”

“Time sure does fly when you’re having fun,” said Charles.

“Listen,” Joe said as he put a hand on my shoulder, “if you’re really in trouble at the agency, call Stan Isaacs at the
Tribune
. He’d hire you in a second.”

I groaned out loud. “I am in trouble at the agency. The word is they’re canning twenty percent of the department. They’re just waiting till after Christmas. But that still isn’t the goddamn point.”

“We can’t seem to get the point, fellas,” said Charles.

“I’m tired of groveling for the right to go on doing something I don’t want to do in the first place. The other day I walked by Simon’s room, where he was listening to some CD, and this angry grunge chant was coming through the door. Maybe I’m destined to be stuck in adolescence forever, but I knew
exactly
what those teenage mutant slackers meant. I know the life they’re all afraid of — I’m living it.”

“It’s turtles,” said Joe, “and by the way, Travis, what does the lovely and talented Sarah have to say about your sudden athletic ambitions?”

“Actually, I haven’t told her,” I said.
Confided
is probably the word I should have used.

Suddenly, three middle-aged men started laughing so hard that tears were soon streaming down their grizzled cheeks.

Not a word from any of them — just laughter. Not a believer in the bunch.