Golf

LMA and I are learning how to play golf.

We had our last group lesson the other night, but LMA wants to sign up for private lessons in a few weeks. The callous that had formed on my right ring finger below the first knuckle when we started somehow got torn away — I think the grips on the driver are different from those of the irons — and now another blister is brewing. If the old gone callous is a clock face, then the new blister is a pink cancer blooming at ten o’clock. Put another way, imagine Mickey Mouse’s tri-circular head minus the circle of his left ear (but small enough to fit in the space on my stubby ring finger between my palm and the finger’s first knuckle).

Golf so far doesn’t seem to have marked my body in any other way.

As I said, LMA is pulling for private lessons. I prefer group lessons. She says private lessons will be better because we’ll get more personal attention. I like group lessons for the same reason; I clamp up whenever the instructor stands behind and watches my stroke. “Now what do I keep saying about relaxing?” he says. Then he starts poking and prodding at me. He tells me to let my arms hang loose and relaxed before the take away, reminds me about my left elbow, reminds me to imagine my club head and the target shaking hands at the end of the release, reminds me about my hips and my head. He watches me battle it out with my stroke a few more times, golfballs dribbling left and right down the range.

“That’s it!”

But it isn’t IT until he steps away to coach someone else and I loosen up again and more than half my shots go where I want them to (up from none when class began). That’s why I’m against private lessons. We’ll sign up for them anyway, because LMA wants to, and because I figure they’ll teach me to relax when someone’s watching while I’m learning how to improve my stroke.

A couple of weeks ago while we were at the range practicing, LMA wondered out loud what happens to dead birds. There’s a lot of birds around; why don’t you ever see dead ones?

“Maybe they get eaten,” I said. “Neighborhood cats. Coyotes might get ‘em, too, wherever there are coyotes.” There are no coyotes in Long Beach, but we used to see lots of them in South Pasadena when we lived there. “But wouldn’t it be something if they dropped dead in mid-flight?”

“Gross,” she said.

“Funny,” I said. “Dead birds falling out of the sky.”

The next day during my morning break, I walked up to the liquor store for a pack of cigarettes. A block from the liquor store I saw a dead pigeon in the middle of the road. (Rock dove is the proper name for what we call pigeons in SoCal.) One wing was bent close to its body, the other was splayed out as if in flight. It was lying face down, it’s birdy chin tucked into its chest; it would be picking seeds out of the pavement if it wasn’t dead. The sky above was free of overhanging branches, so it didn’t die on its perch then tumble to the ground. I poked at it with my foot. There was no blood, no gaping wounds, no missing appendages. If it had been struck by a car, the collision was an immaculate one, the force so overwhelming as to kill without leaving a trace. The bird was whole. Dead and whole. I think it died of natural causes, in mid-flight, and fell to the ground a block away from the liquor store.

When I told LMA about it that night after we returned from hitting another couple of buckets of balls at the driving range she said, “Hmmm.”

I said, “I think it’s a sign. It means it’s gonna be a long time before we see any birds on the golf course.”

“I don’t need a dead pigeon to tell me that,” she said.