It was a beautiful day for golf, but I was a bad, bad golfer. It had been too long since I last played, and I could come up with many more excuses if I really cared. Golf being what it is, though, there’s always something good that happens on the course to keep us coming back. Sometimes it’s that one great shot. Sometimes it’s an amazing view overlooking a lake. On this day it was both of those things, but mostly it was you.
Early in the round I’d bought a water, a beer and a candy bar from you, and you smiled and did your job as cart girl: look pretty, make the golfers comfortable, keep them hydrated and sell them just enough food so they still want to buy a burger at the turn or after the round. I didn’t think of you much after that, since I still was fairly focused on golf; I hadn’t yet begun to slide downhill to the point where I didn’t care where the ball went.Late in the round, on the fifteenth or sixteenth hole, I’d mostly given up, and after hitting two tee shots into the canyon, I hopped out of my partner’s cart at the bottom of the hill to walk. Maybe it was to punish myself, or to just walk and try to relax a bit. And there you were. Smiling again, looking amazing, cute, happy in the sunshine and dressed like the middle of summer though it was still a chilly spring. I gave you a peace sign and immediately felt like a dork for giving a peace sign.You stopped. “They left you,” you said, pouting for me.“I didn’t feel like I deserved to ride with them anymore,” I answered, perturbed with my game but suddenly feeling better about the whole thing.“Well, you can ride with me.” You patted the seat next to you.“How far you going?,” I asked, hitchikerlike.“Oh, just around. And around and around and around.” As you said this you rolled your head, and then we laughed at the perfection of our act, the synchronicity of our flirt.I wanted to jump in, to take the rest of the round off, and in my hesitation I processed so many variables it was like poker and you’d just raised my decent hand. I considered whether you’d get in trouble, if you’d really meant it, how old you were. I did this analysis, and then wondered whether or not there was a shot yet to come this round that could save me from selling my clubs. I pictured a perfect five iron as it arched across a ravine to land on the edge of the eighteenth green, and understood that it was more important that I give that shot life so I could return, someday, to this course to have another day like this, and to see you again, to have another moment with you and maybe make you, us, laugh. “Thank you, “ I said, “I’m going to try to finish this round. But no matter how badly I play these next couple holes, you’ve just made my day.” You blushed and smiled the satisfied smile of a job well done, and you drove off proudly in your refreshment cart towards the next group, where someone else, from the sounds of it, may have been having a pretty rough day of golf.
