Views like this make it tempting

We were having a glass at Carol’s daughter and son-in-law’s golf club. The patio features a wonderful view of the course that routes through a valley with the purple and sage saddleback range in the distance. I commented on the panoramic view and the course’s deep green under the fading sunlight. Carol looked at me, smiled hopefully and said, “Doesn’t it make you want to get out and play again?” This is what my spudlike home life has spawned: a partner who willfully wants to turn herself into a golf widow, just to see me get off the couch once in awhile.

But not with this backswing

Regarding the couch itself, Carol has rearranged it recently in order to better balance out the crater that forms on the spot where I consistently park my tuckus, and which I refer to as my office. I suppose a few expansive words of explanation are in order, though I may have written on this subject previously. (I don’t keep track of these things, and may explain why my daughter’s nickname for me is “Johnny Two Times.”)

This relaxed means I haven’t started yet

First, as I’ve said, the couch is my office. Here I compose (or decompose, depending on one’s point of view) my blogs, deliver my podcasts, read and what I like to call imagineering, but that Carol refers to “staring aimlessly into space as if you are dead.” (Which may explain her occasional mirror check under my nose.) And, yes, it’s where I occasionally catnap to recharge my creative juices, juices which do tend to pool up around the corners of my mouth.

As you can see, golf would be a wholesale disruption of such a smooth-functioning, well-oiled creative machine. First is the tee time, which adds a strict structure to the day. You have to change shoes four times, shop for balls and tees, and perhaps worst of all, introduce yourself to upwards of three total strangers, at least one of whom probably voted for Trump and plans to do so again.

I used to write about golf. I reviewed courses and equipment. I might as well have been reviewing neurosurgery for all I knew about those subjects. I once attended a golf equipment show as a “reporter.” I examined and tested gear designed to improve your game. I tested a device that analyzed my swing using laser technology. The equipment representative had nothing to say about my swing, save that its outside-in, reverse-pivot, chicken-winged hack probably wouldn’t work on a golf course, but I might have inadvertently given myself LASIK surgery in the process.

I am glad that Carol likes to drive

Carol has offered to take lessons and join me on the links should I decide to take the game up again. She’s never played, but believes, having read my experiences as a golfer, “it shouldn’t take that long to get up to speed.” I took that as a positive statement of her commitment and aspirations, though I’m not altogether sure she meant it that way.

Well, so much for that for now. Time to move to the other side of the couch. New house rules.