It began last weekend: a spate of mild weather heralding spring. Laid up with bronchitis, I watched each day dawn with a bright, sunny sky. Prostrate on the couch, I’d laze and gaze outside as the hours passed and the day eventually faded to dusk. All week, through the window, it looked as beautiful as a summer day. The Weather Channel boasted of temperatures in the sixties and seventies. In truth, here on Cape Cod, it wasn’t quite that nice. A stiff ocean breeze blows here, and surrounded by the chilly ocean waters of the winter, it can look a lot nicer than it actually feels. I admit that I took a little selfish pleasure in the daily reports from friends and family that it was still a bit cool on the course.
All week, the beautiful weather brought people out in droves to secure their yearly memberships and bag tag numbers for the coming season. I huddled at home, in seclusion. I started to feel like an illegal alien, an outsider; no identification tag, no number, no game. I almost ceased to exist; I golf, therefore I am.
I was living in an alternate plane, and that was mostly horizontal; medicine lined up like General Hospital, as the Days of Our Lives passed before me. From my den, my little window on the world was reduced to a twenty seven inch screen and, thankfully, three large south facing windows. It was wrenching enough to see the sun and imagine my friends out on the course; the Golf Channel was out of the question. I couldn’t bare to watch, to actually view a swing, the flight of the ball, the great expanses of green. The best weather in months had arrived and I was a prisoner, with but a peep hole on the real world.
Well, that was that. Five lovely late winter days. A Nor’Easter is blustering in, and with it, any thought of spring we’ve had is being blown right out of the water. This afternoon I mustered up the energy to bring the dog to the course for a Frisbee run. The grounds lay obscured under a thin blanket of white and the wind blew as fierce as mid winter. The parking lot was vacant. Whatever activity it had seen over the last few days was unapparent, as if I’d never missed a thing. This recent window of opportunity to play golf proved to be quite small, seemingly as tiny as the basement window through which I once had to crawl, years ago, when I found myself locked out of my house. Then, I landed in the coal bin; now, the days ahead seem just about as grey and dreary as that coal bin.
In actuality, take hope. Spring is only five days away. And I know, because I’ve spent the last five days watching the Weather Channel.
