I have never been able to play golf. The few times when my parents were able to get me on a course, I would last about three holes before my attention began to wander. Admittedly, I was never very good, which makes playing quite difficult.
When I realized that I would have almost three weeks in Florida over J-Term, I decided that it was time to give it another try (the weather also happened to be unseasonably cold, so there wasn’t really much else to do). My first game of nine holes was interesting, to say the least. While the sporadic golf lessons of my youth served me well, the game was not exactly a success. Randomly I would make a great shot, which would cause my mother to emit a siren-like sound—“Whoowhoo!”—to let me know that I was on fire. However, more often than not, my game was catastrophic.
At one point I made a lovely drive onto the fairway of the hole next to the one that I was playing. My mother noted with amusement that I had interrupted the game of the Ladies Club Champion, who gave me a polite smile when I went to retrieve my ball. My worst hole involved my ball landing in the trees off the side of the fairway.
Since I had spent the day with my ball going in any direction other than the one in which I intended it, my mother suggested that I simply aim for the tree and the ball would probably end up on the fairway. Of course, that was when my aim suddenly became accurate; I had to take four swings, and hit four trees, before I managed to make it out of the woods. Yet by the end of J-Term, after putting in a lot of hard work, I did successfully manage to play a few full rounds of 18 holes without embarrassing myself.
