Last Day of August--Let's tee up September

By now everyone 'round these parts realizes summer's long gone.  Fall is picking up steam and it's namesake month starts tomorrow.  Hard to believe the year is officially 66% finished--only four months to Year 2011.
Yesterday Susun and I paused to scratch our collective heads at the blinding speed with which our time here has passed.  We showed up from Arizona on April 30, precisely 4 months ago from yesterday.  If the upcoming four months passes as fast as the previous four months, well, we better be breaking out the New Year's Eve party stuff.  Amazing!

Geeze, I did something really weird yesterday.  It was totally out of character but, luckily, it didn't cost much and I didn't get arrested or ticketed or booed out of town.  Are you ready?  I bought a set of golf clubs!  (Say it ain't so.)  Yes, I really did. I'm sitting here this morning with a golf club hangover.  How could I have stepped out and purchased implements and tools for a game I don't care for and won't play?  It makes absolutely no sense as we have come to know the word "sense."  But there they sit, mute testimony to a brain gone awry yesterday.  I think I need to go through the Thrift Store 12 Step Program.  It's called TSA (Thrift Shoppers Anonymous).

What actually happened?  I was in the Idaho Youth Ranch T-store looking for a carrying bag for our motel coffee maker.  I had never looked at bags in the Youth Ranch so I had to ask directions on how to find them.  As I started walking over towards bags, I passed a big barrel full of golf clubs and my eye somehow caught the reality that there was a matched set of left-handed clubs sitting in the barrel.  You NEVER see used left handed clubs for sale anywhere ever.  I don't know what it is about left handed people but they never get rid of their golf clubs.  Ever.  Well, that caught my eye.  So, I started looking at them and found the 1, 3 and 5 woods and the 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 irons.  I got to thinking and sometimes that's not a good thing.  So, I called up Houn Dawg.,  He's a golfer and his son is a PGA-certified professional.  I asked Houn Dawg about the clubs and, well, Houn Dawg laid into this real serious sales pitch about how I ought to buy them.  Oh, how he laid it on real thick and slick like.  He was like a television evangelist.  Why, pretty soon, I felt ready to get out of the audience and step forward to the tee and be saved by the healing powers of the Golf Guru.  The more Houn Dawg talked, the more those clubs glowed brighter and soon they became irresistible. Oh, the magic doors they would open--at least if I believed Houn Dawg.  Pretty soon I was hooked and walked in a trance to the checkout counter and paid a whopping $11 total for all the clubs, two bucks each for the woods and a buck a pop for the irons.  I took them over to the Golf Guru and he sprinkled some holy water on them and gave them the solemn nod of approval while noting the 9 iron wasn't quite kosher.  So I dutifully trudged off to Deseret Industries hoping to get lucky and I did, scoring a perfect left handed 9 iron and the missing 8 iron, too!  I came within an eyelash of buying a golf bag but, by then, Houn Dawg's spell was beginning to wear off.

I took the clubs home and and, sure enough, you should have seen Susun's crestfallen face when I showed them to her.  She was NOT all smiles and "atta-boy" about my purchases.  Nope, she was sad.  Well, then I took them out in the backyard and took a few swings.  It didn't take long to realize if I actually attempted to USE those clubs, I would destroy my spine and become an wheelchair bound invalid.  What was I thinking?

Meanwhile, Susun rallied up and suggested I check eBay to see if the clubs were worth anything.  Sure enough, this particular brand and vintage can sometimes sell for as much as $10 a club.  They are old Wilson Sam Snead clubs.  Snead started playing in 1937 back when my Mom would have been 13 years old.  Yeah, so you know these clubs are pretty old, I'm guessing maybe late 1950's or early 1960's.

Here's a little known factiod about my past life--I was actually on my high school's golf team for awhile.  Back in the first half of the 1960's I was an avid golfer and played every chance I could get.  The hippie daze of the latter half of the 1960's brought a permanent end to that phase of my life and golf totally disappeared from my radar.  When I moved to the Sonoran Desert, I simply could see no reason whatsoever for the existence of water-sucking golf courses.  I've often blamed golf courses for the demise of Arizona's rivers and for the excesses of her ridiculous state of overpopulation.  Who knows what happened to me yesterday?  I guess I drank the kool-aide.

Well, Thanks, Houn Dawg, you sure created a real conundrum commotion.  So when do you wanna go hit a bucket of balls, buddy?

Cheers, jp