The Nine Lessons
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2009 by Kevin Alan Milne
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: May 2009
ISBN: 978-1-599-95218-5
Contents
Also by Kevin Alan Milne:
The Paper Bag Christmas
For my five caddies.
Swing hard and make the most of the course you play.
Golf is so popular simply because it is the best game in the world at which to be bad.
—A. A. Milne
G
olf
. It has been theorized by more than a few frustrated golf enthusiasts that the sport was so named because all of the other four-letter words were taken. In fact, I personally know a man who uses golf regularly as a
semi
profanity, along with colloquial favorites “fetch!” “heck!” and “dang it!” Other more sophisticated observers have speculated that golf’s inventors suffered from acute dyslexia, causing them to spell their new sport backward, suggesting that whacking a ball around in the grass is akin to corporal punishment.
Clearly, no one with such a dismal view of the game has ever met my father, Oswald “London” Witte. To him, golf is much more than just a hobby or a sport. It is, as he’s reminded me so many times,
life
(which, coincidentally, is also a four-letter word). “It has been my greatest teacher,” he once told me in quiet confidence when I was a boy. “Golf
is
life, lad, and life is golf.”
I didn’t have a clue what he meant, but I knew that he believed it with all his heart. For as long as I’ve known him, those words have defined and guided his every thought and action. When he’s not greeting customers at his golf-themed restaurant, you can be sure that he is either on a golf course, near a golf course, or watching a PGA tournament on the Golf Channel. Golf consumes him; it is and always has been the very essence that gives meaning to everything and everyone around him.
As parents often do, London desperately hoped that his own passion would become the center of my universe as well. From the day I came home from the hospital as an infant he began dressing me in golf clothes, as though miniature sweater-vests, knee-length pants, and argyle socks would magically infuse me with a burning desire to follow in his footsteps. When I was still just a toddler he began publicly forecasting my future as the next great golf prodigy. “Just you wait and see,” he would tell his friends. “It’s the second coming of Bobby Jones! Oh, yes, my little laddie has a bright future of beautiful fairways ahead of him.”
Unfortunately, my father overlooked several critical considerations while trying to pass his lifelong dream on to his only offspring. For starters, high expectations are a heavy weight for any child to bear, and the pressure I felt to succeed at golf was so overwhelming that anything short of perfection on the course was demoralizing to me, almost condemning me to failure from the very start. But even more than that, there was the simple fact that I lacked the athletic competence required to play the game. When I swung golf clubs as a child I was more likely to hit myself in the head than to make contact with the ball, and when I did hit the darn thing (the ball, not my head), only God could’ve guessed where it would go, and even then it would be a lucky guess at best.
By the time I was ten, London had seen enough of my embarrassing incompetence to persuade him to modify his grand prognostications about my future, but he still hadn’t given up hope that I would eventually come around. “It’s going to click sooner or later, right? He’ll blossom with a little more practice, and late bloomers can still enjoy the sweet, fragrant smell of success!” The reality, however, was that any fragrant success of mine on the golf course would be nothing more than an occasional lucky shot, like a whiff of cheap cologne trying to cover up the stink of my natural ability.
Youthful inexperience eventually gave way to teenage awkwardness, which only made my ineptitude at golf all the more obvious. It was then that my father was forced to admit that his son would never excel at his beloved pastime, a fact that would drive a serious wedge in our already tenuous relationship. London told me I should stop playing the game altogether and focus instead on whatever other as-yet-undiscovered skills I might possess. That was a devastating blow to a teenage boy who wanted to make his dad proud, but it at least verified something I’d suspected for quite some time: Because I couldn’t golf well, I was a complete and utter failure in the eyes of my father.
In response, I distanced myself from the man who had brought me into existence, and he, in turn, sank deeper and deeper into an isolated world of dimpled balls and lonely tees. I vowed to never touch a golf club again for as long as I lived, and promised myself, above all else, that when I grew up I would never be anything like London Witte. The thought of becoming like my father was a fate I could not bear to accept, and something I would do everything in my power to avoid.
What I didn’t realize back then is that fate, like the golf clubs of my youth, is a pendulum; the further we try to push it away, the harder it swings back to hit us in the head. It didn’t happen overnight, but eventually, through a series of fateful swings of the club, I would be forced to acknowledge that my father was right all along: Golf is life, and life is golf, and we are all just players trying our best to finish the round.
I am Augusta Witte, named by my father in honor of Augusta National golf course, home of the legendary Masters tournament. I dropped the blatant “golfiness” from my name as soon as I was old enough to recognize how unfitting it was. London is the only person in the world who persists in calling me by my given name. To everyone else, I am simply August.
If you call on God to improve the results of a shot while it is still in motion, you are using “an outside agency” and subject to appropriate penalties under the rules of golf.
—Henry Longhurst
S
ome people
cringe openly when I tell them that my wife and I were engaged by our third date and tied the matrimonial knot just one month later. I can tell exactly what those people are thinking during that semiconcealed flash of a moment when their eyebrows jut up in dismay:
Idiots! That’s not nearly enough time to get to know the person you intend to spend forever with!
I’d like to say that those people are all wrong—that they wouldn’t recognize true love if it bit them in the rear—but the truth is that although my wife and I were deeply in love, and remain so to this day, there is at least one teeny tiny topic that never came up during our abbreviated courtship (assuming a handful of dinners and three frames of bowling qualifies as such), and that might have had some bearing on her willingness to marry me at all.
Children.
Before you jump to any conclusions about my character or personality, let me assure you that I’ve never had an issue with children in general. It was just the thought of passing along my own inadequacies, combined with the reality of being wholly responsible for the development and well-being of another human being, that I found frightening. Having grown up without a mother, and with a father who was anything but nurturing, how could I possibly be expected to be a successful parent myself? It seemed self-evident to me that I was not, nor would I ever be, good parent material.
After we were pronounced husband and wife, the subject of starting a family took about as long to surface as an earthworm on a bent-grass tee box after a warm summer rain. Somewhere between the wedding reception in Burlington, Vermont, and our honeymoon hotel on the slopes of Sugarbush ski resort about thirty miles away, my blushing bride leaned in and kissed me gently on the cheek, then asked, “So do you want to start trying right away, or do you want to wait a while?”
I thought I knew exactly what she was referring to, but rather than risk saying something inappropriate I just turned it around and put the matter back in her hands. “Well, I don’t want to rush you, so whenever you want to start is fine with me, Schatzi.” (For the record, Schatzi is not my wife’s name. Her name is Erin, but on our second date I uttered the last vestiges of my high school German vocabulary during the tender moments immediately following our first kiss, calling her
mein Schatz,
meaning “my treasure.” Just like that an endearment term was born. It soon morphed into the cutesier, lovey-dovey form of the word,
Schatzi.
)
She was glowing, and I knew instantly that I’d answered wisely. “I love you SOOO much!” she said dreamily. “I’m so glad I married you.” Erin leaned in and kissed me again. “You’re such a wonderful man, and I know you’re going to be a terrific father. I want to start trying to get pregnant right away!”
Erin was giddy with delight, and I knew instantly that I’d answered
unwisely.
“Pregnant!” My foot slammed on the brakes impulsively, locking all four wheels and sending the car sliding right into an icy snowbank. I didn’t bother to get out of the car to check for damage, but instead began immediately debriefing her on the many virtues of having cute and cuddly pets as permanent replacements for progeny. Twenty minutes later, when another vehicle stopped to see if we were all right, I was still spelling out exactly why I never wanted to have kids, how I’d be a terrible father, and, most important, how I could not risk becoming just like London Witte—a man obsessed with forcing his own unachievable dreams upon his posterity. No, I would not “start trying.” Not then, not in a few months, not ever.
Erin was sobbing uncontrollably when our slightly dented vehicle pulled into the hotel’s snowy parking lot. Much of the remainder of that first night was spent debating our conflicting positions on children, mixed here and there with awkward silent moments that gave us both time to contemplate whether the vows we’d made just hours before would even last until dawn.
When morning arrived, our marriage was still intact, but only because Erin is an extraordinarily patient woman. She broke a three-hour silence over breakfast by announcing that she loved me enough to postpone having children until I was ready, thinking perhaps that I’d change my mind sooner or later. Little did she know how long she would have to wait.
Months and months passed, then years. She never stopped reminding me that she wanted children, but neither did she force my hand or make me feel guilty for not sharing her desire. Instead, she just kept hoping that something would happen to convince me to give in and let her be a mother, which was the one thing in life she wanted more than anything else.
After nearly seven years of wedlock, with no visible signs that my opinion on being a father had changed, Erin stopped simply hoping, and escalated the matter to a higher authority. She did this through regular, audible prayer, as loudly and fervently as she could, peeking occasionally during her pleadings with the Almighty to make sure I was listening.
“Dear God,” she would say, “please soften the heart of my stubborn husband. I want to have children
so
bad, and I’m growing tired of waiting for him. But, if his heart cannot be softened, well… then I give thee thanks for the imperfections of birth control.”
In response, I also started praying aloud, notwithstanding the fact that I hadn’t uttered so much as a single “amen” since I was a small boy. “Dear Lord, I’m sure you’re as tired of my wife’s prayers as I am, so please help her to give it a rest already!”
God, it seems, found greater merit in Erin’s prayerful utterances (or was penalizing me for mine), because a couple of months later the unthinkable happened. On the third Friday of April, when I arrived home from the veterinary hospital where I worked, my wife was lying on the bathroom floor, laughing and crying hysterically, holding a pregnancy test in one hand and wiping away tears with the other. For her, they were tears of joy and thanksgiving that her maternal drought was finally over.
I nearly vomited when I figured out what was going on. Instinctively, I grabbed the pregnancy test from her grip, and then stood there dumbfounded, gazing upon the pee-stained results. “What the—!” I blurted out as I came back to my senses. “How did this happen?”
She snorted a little giggle. “Do I really need to explain it? It’s called the birds and the bees, dear. As a veterinarian you should understand these things better than most.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean
HOW
? We were precautious to a fault! An eighty-year-old nun should have had better odds of getting pregnant than you!”
Erin stood up. “Nothing is
fool
proof, dear.” She patted me lightly on the chest. Then she smiled shrewdly and clasped her hands together as if to pray. “I guess God works in mysterious ways.”
“You did this!” I shouted. “I don’t know how, but I know you did!”
She winked. “Not just me. You helped, too.”
I was almost too flabbergasted to put together a coherent sentence. “But… I… I mean… what? Well…?” As shocked as I was at that moment, I should have just stopped talking altogether and walked away until I could sort out my thoughts. But I didn’t stop talking and I didn’t walk away. I just opened up my mouth and let it run its course. “Well you… er… we… I mean, you know how I feel about this, right? So what are our options? Do you think we can find someone to adopt it? I hear it’s a seller’s market for that sort of thing.”
Even though I was partially joking, it was just about the worst thing I could have said, given my wife’s abundant zeal to have kids. I knew I had crossed a line, and there would be repercussions. Erin had never previously struck me, nor I her, but on this one occasion her open hand was swift and sure. I saw it coming all the way, heading right for my face, backed by seven years of pent-up frustration and at least three weeks of pregnancy hormones. Had I wanted to, I could have ducked to avoid it, but I knew I deserved what was coming, so I just stood there and closed my eyes.
SMACK!
The sound of her hand on my cheek echoed throughout the bathroom.
Erin huffed defiantly, fuming as I’d never seen before, like a bomb waiting to explode. “Watch your mouth, Augusta Nicklaus Witte! I’m not putting this baby up for adoption! What you should be worried about is whether or not I’m going to keep
you
! I’m as surprised by this as you are, but thrilled beyond belief, and I won’t let you spoil it! So it’s about time you get over yourself and get ready for fatherhood, because like it or not, it’s coming!” She shoved me aside, stomped out of the bathroom, veered down the hallway to the bedroom, then slammed the door shut and locked it behind her.
I believe it was the great eighteenth-century writer Alexander Pope who said, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” Erin has her own little adaptation of Pope’s famous saying, which she recites under her breath from time to time: “To err is
husband,
to really screw things up is
my
husband, and to forgive takes time.” I had really screwed things up, and I knew it would be a while before my wife would even consider forgiving me, so I went out to the living room to think on the couch.
After a few hours spent mulling over the statistical likelihood of a false positive pregnancy test, I knocked on the bedroom door to see how she was doing, but there was no response.
Two hours later all I got was, “Go away, August! I’m not speaking to you!” By then it was nearing midnight, and I was beginning to worry that I might have caused irreparable damage to our otherwise happy marriage. So I did what any sensible, well-adjusted twenty-seven-year-old man would do in the middle of the night with his wife locked away, his worst nightmare coming true, and his world reeling as if it might fall apart at any moment.
I drove to my dad’s house and blamed him.