wellness returning

Hallelujah! I have played golf, and my arm didn’t break when I hit the ball 🙂 I’m tired and my arm feels like it weighs a ton, but I didn’t feel any pain and I played reasonably well considering it was the first time I’ve been out since last year. I even finished all nine holes, though the last couple were a struggle.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get out two or three more times this week and next, and play in my regular league next week.

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watched by a heron

I took this photo with my cellphone, so it’s not the best of quality. I should remember to stick my camera into my golf bag.

A great blue heron watched us tee off on the 12th hole while he probed for frogs in the mud.

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Thursday golf league

Golf is such an odd sport. I played as well as I can play — the best I’ve played since I took up the sport several years ago — on the hardest part of the course. And my score was two strokes worse than last week, when I played relatively poorly. Go figure.

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Golf day

Today was the Marlborough Golf League, which plays at Juniper Hill in Northborough, a pretty but somewhat difficult course just down the road from us. I was a sub last year, but this year spouse’s regular partner has taken a new job, so I’ve been pressed into regular play. I anticipate disaster.

Good things about today:

We were prepared to be rained upon, but it didn’t rain. It wasn’t even very cold.
We played against Art and Joe, who are very nice people and always fun to play with.
It was golf 🙂

Bad things:

I played like crap and so did Neil. Art and Joe both played very well. We lost.
It was golf 😀

So all in all, I guess it was good. I’m hitting the ball better this year even though my scores don’t reflect it yet. And it’s fun, which is the most important thing.

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lessons from a round of golf

Over the recent holiday weekend, Neil took an extra day off and we went out early to play a full round of golf. Normally we play nine holes for our league or for our weekend outings; we don’t have the time for a full eighteen holes and until recently I haven’t been good enough for it, either.

But this time I did fine — scored 75 for the front 9 and 74 for the back 9, comparable to my recent league scores. I had some pretty bad holes and some excellent ones. It was hot, but that didn’t stop me.

I noticed several differences between playing 9 holes and playing 18. The biggest one was that after 6 holes, I usually start to count down to the end. After 6 holes in this round, I was barely started.

For 9 holes, I usually have either a good day or a bad day. Sometimes I start out poorly and manage to get my act together, but usually it’s all of a piece. Eighteen holes, on the other hand, gave me plenty of time to start poorly, then go up for several holes, and down for several more, and back up at the end.

At about 14 holes, it didn’t feel like we were getting close to the end. It felt like we were going to be playing golf for the rest of eternity. I just wanted to give up and go home. But I didn’t, and the last few holes were some of my best of the round.

And it struck me as we were heading back to the car that there were a lot of similarities between 9 and 18 holes and between writing a short story and writing a novel.

You can just push through a short story. You can’t do that with a novel. It’s too big to hold onto and you have to pace yourself.

The novel will have its ups and downs. There will be times your words are flying straight and true like a great drive, and times when you’re taking five shots to get out of a sand trap.

There will be times when you can’t see the end and you just want to quit.

But if you keep going, you will finish.

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Monday night golf

Neil and I signed up for a golf league Monday night. I am not that good a golfer, but I’m at the point where the only way to improve is to play more regularly. The league director assured us it was a beginner’s league, nobody very serious, lots of weak golfers. So I let Neil talk me into it, and mostly it’s been fun.

We start after work, when the sun is already sliding down the sky. We play at Stow Acres, which has two 18-hole courses. We only play 9 holes each time, front or back on the north or south courses. The north course is the tougher of the two, reputed to be one of the tougher public courses in the area, so of course that’s where we’ve been playing for the first three weeks. On top of that, I haven’t been playing well. I’m the worst golfer in the league by 10 or 15 strokes.

But I’m having a good time anyway. The courses are lovely and peaceful. The people we’ve played with have been really nice. We’ve seen a raccoon, lots of birds, ducks, and geese, and some interesting frogs. We thought we saw a fox Monday, but it turned out to be a statue of a coyote they put out to keep the geese off one of the greens.

Not to mention it’s good exercise *g*

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