Man and Boy
Two villages away there was a golf course. I didn’t play golf as a child but sometimes I’d venture there with my friends to look for lost balls. The horizons of my life were nearer in those days. The far reaches of our own village felt a little risky, as if we were getting perilously close to the edge of the world, so a bike ride to the next-but-one village was like setting off for a distant planet. I remember being intrigued by what was going on out on the golf course. I was a wide-eyed alien wanting to connect but knowing that I couldn't because I was a child outsider looking into a different world, a world that I was not destined for, a world that was for someone else. My place was in the rough, on the edge, within the margins, where I could hide and watch. It's often still where I find myself, where I feel at ease.
But now I’m a man, a pilgrim, a golfer - and I’m playing that same golf course. I’ve come to look for the past and on the fifteenth green I see it. It’s a shortish par 3 but you have to carry the ball over a small quarry which stretches from the front around the right side of the green and away beyond. After I've putted I wander over to look down into the ravine and a thought pops into my head: wouldn't it be great to find a golf ball. I find golf balls in the rough all the time and often I leave them where they lie because they're old and cut up. But today a fragment of my childhood mind is awakened and I feel again the not-yet blemished thrill of the search for something lost, and as I look into the quarry I see a vivid image of me down there forty-five years ago. It is so clear it's as if I'm having a vision. A scruffy, unsophisticated boy with a mop of fair hair, a dirty face, runny nose and chapped hands, scrabbling about in the hope of feeling the buzz of discovery. I'm not a husband or father, an employee, a home-owner, a bill-payer or a driver. I'm just a boy with a simple life and no responsibilities, not trying to understand anything, lost in the moment and living for the day.
As I watch my young self my eyes begin to well up. I want to tell that searching boy so much - not about what is to come but about what to look for and what to leave alone, what to keep and guard and what to allow himself to lose. I want to tell him to keep looking for old golf balls with their marks and scuffs and scars and not to transfer his affections to money which shuts down his searching spirit because he can just buy the bright and shiny and new instead. I want that boy to know that losing himself to a moment is a fine use of time and that the legacy he leaves will not be in what he achieves, but in who he is. But I don't say any of these things.
I watch the boy in the ravine a little longer and I don't want to leave. I want to stay in a kind of vigil over this boy's life, but I know I've seen what I was here to see: a glimpse of the past. So reluctantly I turn and walk away leaving the innocent, naive, unsullied boy to be himself in the time and place where he belongs. I'm not sure I'll ever see him again so clearly for so long, and that makes me sad.
