by James Dodson
It took a while for Kristin Cress to realize this. Four more years, in fact. How could I tell the love of my life that I’d won her heart in a cosmic putting match? The answer was, I couldn’t. So I admired her from afar, practiced my game, and helpfully grew several inches. Then one day, not long after I’d performed Lennon and McCartney’s “Yesterday” in a school assembly, as she and I were walking out of the senior high choir practice room, Kristin turned and asked me for a ride home.
As we sat in her parents’ driveway, she explained that she’d just broken up with her college boyfriend and out of the blue asked me if I wanted to go with her to the homecoming dance.
I never told her about the cosmic putting match because she thought golf was kind of silly, “Republican religion,” as she put it. “That’s why so many men worship it on Sunday morning.” Her love was drama. Still, after we began dating, she agreed to walk along and watch me play. She picked flowers, wrote in her journal, and studied her lines for Long Day’s Journey into Night while I took dead aim at the third green with my seven-iron. One afternoon near Christmas, I almost aced the Valley’s par-three fifth hole, a steep downhill shot. My ball bounced on the front apron of the green, kicked right, and followed the contour of the putting surface right up to the pin. One more half-rotation, and it would have dropped. I shouted, “Get in!” but this time there was no magic. Kristin looked up from her book. She’d missed the brilliant shot entirely. I was incensed. We quarreled, and she left me to finish the round alone. That night I called her to apologize and explained that an ace was every golfer’s dream. It was the perfect shot in golf.
“If it’s supposed to happen,” she replied, “it’ll happen.”
We dated until the beginning of my senior year, at which point Kristin went to a college in the mountains to study drama and I broke off the relationship because I didn’t wish to be “tied down.” The golf coach invited me to try out for the golf team, but I declined because a music store offered me a better deal teaching guitar for the princely fee of five dollars an hour.
I had a new girlfriend and a new gold Camaro. I played golf matches with my father or my best friend Pat, sang in the school madrigals, earned the musical lead in the Little Theater production of Spoon River Anthology, and won the city’s short story contest. I gave Kristin Cress no more than a passing thought. At Christmas, she sent me a card with a single star on it. Have you scored that hole-in-one yet? If not, keep the faith. Everything happens when it should. Miss you, K. I never wrote back. A year later, I heard she was getting married.
—
“Excuse me,” said the man ahead of me in the bathroom line. “I thought I heard you and your friend talking about the Old Course. Y’all must be golfers.”
I didn’t deny it, which would have been pointless since I was wearing a bright green U.S. Open cap.
“You ever played the Old Course?” he asked.
“A few times,” I admitted. “Never very well, I’m afraid. My father, though, says he birdied the Road Hole.”
“No foolin’?” He seemed genuinely pleased.
The plane hit an air pocket, and as we bounced together, the man extended his hand. “Name’s Bob Tanner.” We shook. Bob had an Auburn War Eagle cap on his head. He explained he was with a group of fellow dentists from Birmingham, en route to the golf vacation of a lifetime. “Fourteen days, no wives, and all the single malt whiskey we can legally stash in our golf bags. Two weeks of pure boy joy. How ’bout you?”
Without thinking, I explained I was taking my father back to England and Scotland, where he’d learned to play golf as an airman fifty years ago during the war. I realized, too late, I was probably telling Bob a lot more than he cared to know.
“That’s great,” said Bob enthusiastically. “I wish my old man and I had been like that. We always wanted to murder each other. He used to say there were only two ways in life—his way and no way.”
“Sorry to hear it. What did your father do?”
“High school football coach. Real hardass. He was sure I’d be a high school football coach like him.”
“You like being a dentist?” I had a picture of Bob going after some poor slob’s impacted wisdom tooth the way his old man kicked some lazy lineman’s rear end. His hands were massive.
“Sure. I mean, it’s okay. I don’t think I sat around as a kid thinking, ‘Hey, Bob, you oughta be a dentist when you grow up,’ but it’s kinda fun. Pays good. I get to play a lot of golf.” He gave a dopey grin. “That’s the important thing, isn’t it? How ’bout you?”
I admitted I got to play a lot of golf, too.
He asked what I did for a living. I considered telling him I sold coffins. A curmudgeonly golf editor I knew sometimes did this to prevent people from asking him for swing tips or wanting to know what Jack Nicklaus was really like. I worked for the same magazine as Jack Nicklaus, had watched him play in person dozens of times over thirty years, and had even spoken to him a couple times on the telephone, but I basically had no clue what Jack Nicklaus was really like. As for swing tips, in my book it was better to receive than give them. Still, I enjoyed being a golf writer immensely—getting paid to watch golf on TV, as it were—and usually had no problem admitting it. I got to travel to a lot of swell places, test new equipment, hang out with tour players and meet the game’s living legends, eat free meals, sometimes even get free golf stuff. Who wouldn’t like that? One of my regular golf pals in Maine liked to say he couldn’t wait to see what kind of a real job I got when I finally grew up.
“I’m a golf writer.”
“I’ll be dogged.” Bob was impressed. “How do you get a job like that?”
I’d known he was going to ask me this. Unfortunately, I didn’t know quite what to say. The answer was either very complicated or pretty simple, either destiny or dumb luck. So I said what I always say.
“You know, Bob, I’m still trying to figure that one out.”
Bob the dentist laughed, and I laughed. The bathroom door opened. The plane bumped again. I guess he thought I was joking.
—
Dad was snoozing when I got back to my seat. I took the scotch glass out of his hand, removed his earphones and spectacles, lifted The Wall Street Journal from his chest and covered him with the blanket, then turned off his overhead light. I leaned forward and gazed out the window. The brilliant star was still there, guiding our little odyssey.
I sat back and stared at the front page of the Journal but didn’t really see what was written there. Kristin had been on my mind a lot lately, a bittersweet apparition that always seemed to come calling around the middle part of autumn. Some years the hauntings, as I thought of them, were worse than others. This year they were worse than most. Why was that? Had the stark reality of my father’s approaching date with death triggered an unexpected flood of thoughts and feelings about Kristin I thought I’d kept safely bottled up for years? It was possible. My father and Kristin had been so much alike in many ways. I’d lost one. Now I was losing the other.
Was that it? As passengers around me settled down under blankets to sleep, I tugged my father’s own blanket up to his chin and sat there wondering why the past is such a maze we never seem to escape. My mind slipped into that dangerous maze to try and find an answer.
I’d almost finished my English degree and decided to take extra semesters of religion and drama classes to kill time and figure out what I was supposed to do with my life. The problem, in some ways, was having too many options. I’d been offered a reporter’s job at the Greensboro Daily News, and the English teaching assistant’s position I’d applied for at a Virginia university looked as if it might pan out. To complicate matters, a drama professor had urged me to consider seriously graduate studies in theater up North, while somewhere in the back of my mind I even thought of going to a music conservatory to study classical guitar. Heck, maybe even striking off for Nashville.
Predictably, my father was elusive as fairway fog on the subject, of no help whatsoever i
n the parental advice department. My best friends, Pat and Frank, by stark comparison, had fathers who had no difficulty whatsoever rendering advice—in their case, proper assembly instructions was more like it—about what they should do with their lives. Frank was going to Duke graduate school and make a zillion bucks in finance, Pat was someday going to take over his old man’s thriving electrical supply company after he cut his hair, quit talking about impeaching Richard Nixon, and stopped dating the rock-and-roll singer (whom he eventually married).
When I posed some of these same questions, my old man merely smiled and came back with one of his maddeningly Socratic evasions: “What do you really want to do, Bo?” His response put the whole thing ridiculously back on my young shoulders. Finally, one afternoon when decision deadlines were looming and we were playing together at Green Valley, the subject came up again, and I snapped at him that all I really wanted to do was talk to Kristin Cress.
“Why don’t you call her up,” he said, as if that were all there was to it.
“Yeah, right, Dad. In case you forgot, she’s married.”
“So? Doesn’t mean she won’t be pleased to hear from you.”
I took his advice and called her up. Kristin’s marriage had ended, and she was living in a small house on the outskirts of Hickory, a town in the Smoky Mountains, working as a social worker and part-time steakhouse hostess, and acting with a highly respected Equity rep company at a mountain playhouse on weekends. She invited me up to visit.
We stayed up all night, that first night, talking and catching up. In the morning we went out to watch the sun come up over a quarry lake. There was a high rock where Kristin went on Sunday mornings. She called it Sabbath Rock because she no longer believed in “any one church.” Her interest was in the religions of the East, Buddhism and Hinduism mainly. I learned she’d done a play off-Broadway and was saving money for a long trip to India. Meanwhile, she was rehearsing for a Bertolt Brecht play called The Good Woman of Szechwan and working with a black woman named Elsie who was trying to raise her three grandchildren in a shack near the ice plant.
We took Elsie’s kids bowling at the college, then for chili dogs at Tastee Freeze. Kristin, the only vegetarian steakhouse hostess in America, had to work later, so I went back to her house and put on a Chopin record and started making bouillabaisse for a midnight supper. I practiced my guitar, talked to her cat Omar, then browsed her bookshelf—a translation of Tao Te Ching, Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen, The Collected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, a modern translation of The Upanishads.
When my head was sufficiently full of this mystical soup, I went outside and practiced sand-wedge shots over her gorgeous rosebeds, causing an old lady across the street to visit her porch and glare at me. It was a balmy evening in late September, but Kristin’s red roses still had blossoms as large as grapefruits, and I was suddenly incalculably, almost unbelievably happy.
I went back to see her four weekends in a row, a five-hour haul down the interstate each way, falling more under the spell of my first love, I believed, each time. I gave her my spare classical guitar and taught her beginner chords. We sat on Sabbath Rock and read books or sometimes said nothing until I couldn’t stand the meaningful silence any longer and started cracking jokes. She told me I should learn to meditate because silence “quieted the soul” and made true speech possible. I told her she should learn to play golf because reaching a par-five in two was a religious experience. She said golf and music might be my yanas—rafts to enlightened consciousness. I wondered if you had to pay green fees when you got to Heaven.
“The great spiritual teachers of almost every tradition say that Heaven is right here and now, all around us, every second. We only have to wake up to that fact in order to see it,” she said. “The only sin is ignorance of that awareness.”
I asked why she was so hot to go to India, and she said spiritual journeys always revealed things—not always pleasant but true realities. I said this might explain why I’d always wanted to go visit St. Andrews. Been dreaming of it since I was a kid, I admitted. Every man has his India. Mine just came with caddies, tee boxes, and yellow flags.
She looked at me and, smiling, shook her head. She said I would probably never grow up. Unfortunately, as I shot back at her, growing up was precisely the problem. Her remark gave me the perfect opening to ask her what she thought I should do with my life. Take the reporter’s job? Go to drama school? Study classical guitar? Jump off this cliff?
Like my father, Kristin maddeningly resisted giving a straight answer. She said I would find my dharma—life’s purpose—when I quit searching for it. I told her she sounded just like Opti the Mystic, my old man and his famous less is more spiel.
“Your dad’s always been very cool,” she said, “for a Republican and a golfer.”
She suggested that we meditate. I asked if this meant we were going to take our clothes off, but she only smiled. We put our legs in the lotus position, tilted our faces to the blue sky. I felt incredibly self-conscious, like the time my father had made me lie down on the golf course, wondering if some hiker across the pond was laughing his hindquarters off at us. I closed my eyes and began to snore, making my usual mockery of her daily ritual.
Two days later, Kristin was dead.
My father drove down to school to break the news to me. On the Tuesday after we parted, she’d gone to work at the steakhouse, and three young men had strolled in to clean out the cash register. One of them put a gun to the pretty hostess’s head, and terrified patrons later recounted to authorities that they heard her speaking consolingly to the guy, reassuring him. He pulled the trigger anyway. The killer had just turned seventeen, a baby robber.
I drove home to Greensboro in silence with my father, numb to the bone. I told him I couldn’t bear to visit the funeral home, or see Kristin’s family, or face any of my friends, or even attend the funeral. He said he understood these feelings but thought I should make myself go anyway. Addled with grief, seething with anger, I said nothing. I’d finally shut up.
“I have an idea,” said my old man. “Let’s play a straight-up match. No strokes given either way. If you win, you choose whether to go or not. If I win, you go whether you want to or not. And I’ll go with you.”
I looked at him as if he were crazy, searching his pale gray eyes for the reason he was pushing me on this. It was so unlike Opti. Didn’t he understand what the hell I was going through? Hadn’t he ever felt so goddamned miserable, all he wanted to do was find a hole to crawl in and hide? Public grieving, I said emphatically, wasn’t my style. Besides, if I went to that funeral, people who knew what Kristin meant to me might sit there and feel sorry for me. I didn’t want or need their damned pity. Even worse, I might sit there and feel sorry for myself. And who wanted that? Feeling sorry, I insisted, wouldn’t do anybody any good, and most of all it wouldn’t bring Kristin back.
“No,” he agreed, “but a long time ago I learned it may help you go on.”
I looked at him. We were sitting in his office off Battleground Avenue near the end of the workday. I remember hearing a clock ticking faintly in the outer office and the sigh of Friday afternoon traffic outside.
“What are you talking about?”
He shrugged, slowly turning a paper clip in his fingers, and smiled a bit. “Something that happened long before you were born, Sport. A little girl I knew died. I probably should have gone to her funeral, but I didn’t. I regretted it later. It’s what stays with you.” He fell silent. Then: “Shall we get our spikes?”
“You don’t have a chance,” I snorted. My handicap was probably nine strokes better than his.
“We’ll see.”
He had me dormy by the sixteenth hole, shut-out one hole later.
“You knew you’d win,” I said to him as we climbed the eighteenth fairway toward our second shots. The hike had done me good. My mind felt clearer, my troubled soul a bit more at ease. At least the entire world was no longer lining up against me.
&nbs
p; “No,” he replied. “But I knew you’d go.”
I sent roses and a small note to Kristin’s parents that said, She gave to all and showed us how to give. I don’t know why I wrote those words. I also didn’t know until many years later—because I never went back to her grave—that Abe and Alice Cress had those words engraved on their youngest daughter’s headstone.
All I knew for sure at that moment was that Kristin had given me something powerful and nurturing, and some kid with a handgun had taken it away from me forever.
The church was packed—her old cheerleader pals, kids we’d known from catechism class and choir, lots of her professors and acting mates from college. Even her ex-husband showed up, taking a seat somewhere at the back. It was very possibly Greensboro’s saddest public occasion that year. I sat through the service without uttering a peep, my father’s hand resting helpfully on my left shoulder throughout.
—
Out the window of the plane, I realized, the sun was coming up. A new dawn was on the horizon. Patches of green below the swirling mass of clouds would be Ireland or maybe even Scotland itself. Our descent, our trip, was finally beginning.
My father was still sleeping, mouth open, snoring lightly. I unfolded his Wall Street Journal and tried to read a story about a bank megamerger deal, hoping to chase away the phantoms of that terrible far-off autumn.
That’s when it came to me: It was now twenty years since Kristin died.
We stand against fate, Emerson said, as a child stands against the wall of his father’s house, notching his growth year by year. A biblical generation had passed since my first love’s incomprehensible death. I’d grown up entirely since that sorrowful autumn, moved south and then north, got on with things nicely, found a career I loved, started a new life, married a wonderful woman, became a father, and planted roses of my own. Like a mature rosebush, I had plenty of visible notches of growth to show. Yet apparently I hadn’t entirely outrun every demon of anger and grief. Once upon a time Opti had simply asked me to grieve. And I’d done the best I could, and then I’d gotten on with living my life. Wasn’t that enough?
