Friday, August 28, 2009

Gowf Chronicles 8/27/09

Played nine holes on a local course. Played horribly, but I still have beginner's status to fall back on for consolation. My game is pretty much summed up by "whack, 'dammit', trudge, whack, trudge, whack, 'dammit', trudge." I try not to let the golf spoil the "good walk" and the fun of being with a friend. Nice little course though (in Pelham NH) sort of backwoodsy, obviously a "neighborhood course" if there's such a thing, I'm sure there's a gowfish term for it, there's one for everything else. The fairways were kinda narrow & constricted. I suspect that "it's not an easy course" carried less consolation for me than was intended, but while not terrifically satisfactory as a golf outing, it wasn't the one that will make me decide not to play again. Nor did "the shot that'll bring you back" happen, so next time depends entirely on camaraderie & fellowship, I guess. That's strong enough.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Drove up to Salisbury Beach last night; pilgrimagically.

For certain folks of a certain age living in a certain part of New England, Salisbury Beach was always part of summer. Not necessarily the best part, but the greasy pizza (cheese extra at Cristy's) and fries and onion rings, followed by ice cream and a walk up the midway was a necessity of summer. When we were kids, there were rides and lots of games and arcades; when our kids were kids there were still a few rides & arcades, still some hurly-burly, noise and of course the dirty sand. Salisbury Beach midway was never a place to actually go "to the beach" though, at least not for us. Beach-sitting (or prowling & ogling when we got a little older) was for Hampton or Plum Island or Rye. Salisbury Beach was for honky-tonk and horrid food and chintzy games & rides.

Salisbury Beach is not quite dead & gone; the rides are all gone, and most of the game booths, there's a couple of arcades left, as well as Cristy's and Tripoly's pizza stands and a few ice cream stands, and fried dough, and some really sleazy bars (there have always been sleazy bars of course, but they weren't part of my growing up so they're sorta wallpaper to this little reverie). But last night there weren't any people there. In the middle of the last week in August, we expected stragglers galore, as in summers of yore, wringing the last drops out of the summer before Labor Day rang the gong. But there were very few folks around, and they were indeed clearly stragglers, some of them may even have been fall move-ins, the folks who live at the beach in the winter because the rents are very cheap in some of the older "cottages." I make no comment about the new, year-round condos that developers have slapped up in attempts to cash in on a longed-for gentrification. But Salisbury Beach is pretty much gone - no Frolics, no Normandy Hotel, no rides, no people.

Hampton Beach, on the other hand, was exactly as we'd expected - as rowdy as ever but cleaner, and with slightly less honk to its tonk, crowded with people sucking the last juices out of August-by-the-sea. Good to know. And Cristy's Pizza now has a stand in Hampton. Old Sam's heirs & assigns have obviously seen the writing on the wall. Adios Salisbury Beach.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

I played golf with my best bud today

and my first point of insecurity has nothing to do with golf but with whether the guy I've known since 1962, and have been pals with since 1964, and who has in fact been my "best bud" since about 1966, should be referred to with more capitalization. I dunno. Played golf with Huz today. I haven't played golf since about 1963, when Dana Parker and Mike Robinson and I hiked (literally) to the Sagamore course in Lynnfield and whacked balls around mercilessly (and totally unproductively, in golf terms). I was about 16 or 17, and we played about five or six times, it being summer and we being headed into our senior years in high school, and more or less unemployed, and it was something to do. I sucked at it, as I recall, but no one was any good, so who cares.

So today I was a duffer wannabe out on the course with another slightly more experienced duffer wannabe, and another somewhat more experienced (and talented) duffer and his teenaged son who was doing his best not to embarrass Dad (and he succeeded, he wasn't horrible). Somewhere around the middle of hole two I realized we weren't really counting strokes so I stopped counting strokes and it instantly became more fun. I have no idea what my final stroke count might have been ( I do know that on more than one hole I said "Ah fuckit" rather than keep trying to putt the ball into the cup) but I had fun, and at the end of nine holes there was a place to have a snort of Jameson's.

What could be bad? I suspect I'll play golf (or as Wodehouse has it "the gowf") again.