Walking with Jack (7 page)

Lying in bed, waiting for Jack to return, I recalled the nightly “knee football” games we used to play before his bedtime when he was little. He was still wearing the pajamas with feet, and I could almost hear the little scuffing sound they made on the floors. If you get that in your life—a little boy in your arms laughing as you tackle him to the floor, and then begging you to do it again, and then pleading with you to lie beside him in his bed until he falls asleep—you don’t have the right to ask for anything more. Even if you end up alone in the end, you’ve lived. You’ve really lived in this world, and you have no right to ask for more. But I had. I was always asking for more.

The final day of our trip, and it turned out that I had not lost Jack’s high school ball at Carnoustie. It had slipped inside the lining of my golf bag. I took a butter knife from breakfast to bury the ball on our last round at the Old Course.

As we walked up the 9th fairway, I told Jack that before we left home, I had spent an afternoon reading my old journals, and I’d found something I had written about him when he was four years old. “It went like this,” I said:

“I really said all that?” Jack asked.

“You did. You used to talk all the time, and I wanted to live forever to hear everything you ever had to say.”

Standing on the 10th tee, I looked around. “Finding my way to this place,” I said, “is something I’m always going to be thankful for. And now you know how to get here if you ever want to come back.”

We chose a spot off the 14th tee box along the base of the ancient stone wall that runs between the Old Course and the Eden Course to bury the ball. We both wrote our names on it, and then I handed Jack the knife and turned on the movie camera. He cut out a square of sod. “The past is past now,” I said to him. “You’re going to go as far as you want to go in this great game. And with some luck, someday I am going to caddie for you on your first pro tour.”

He nodded solemnly, and we shook hands on it.

We played our way in from there. Another good round for Jack, and he finished with a 75 to my 88. He wanted to get to a hotel at the airport in Edinburgh so we wouldn’t have to face the drive in the morning and risk missing our flight home and his hockey game Monday night.

I didn’t expect to ever return here and so, on the 18th green, I took one last look around to remember the ground while Jack waited for me to pick up my clubs. And then we started walking away together.

Flying home at forty thousand feet. Jack had a movie playing on the little screen attached to his seat, and I thought he was done talking
to me. But after a couple of vodka tonics, he wanted to know what else I wrote about him in the journal that chronicled his boyhood.

“Let me think for a minute,” I said. I had kept a journal for each of my children and I decided a long time ago that I was going to give the journals to them to take with them when they left home. “You were a great eater,” I told him. “There was one morning when you were six months old. We were letting Mommy sleep in, and you and your sisters were in the kitchen, where I was feeding all of you pancakes. You kept eating them as fast as I put them down in front of you. When your mother came downstairs, I said, ‘Look at your little boy wolfing down these pancakes.’ She said, ‘He doesn’t eat solid food yet, Don. Nothing but breast milk.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he sure loves pancakes.’ There was no turning back after that.”

His smile encouraged me to go on. “That winter when you were five years old and I was working construction, you waited at the door for me to come home each evening. You would take my carpenter’s belt and say, ‘I’ve got a knuckle sandwich with your name on it.’ ”

I laughed and closed my eyes, recalling how I had hurried home from work each day to see him. “You were a real character,” I said. “I was teaching you to ride a bike when you were four. The safest place was the beach at low tide when the sand was packed hard. The day you finally figured it out, you just rode straight into the Atlantic Ocean.”

“I remember that day,” he said.

“We had a lot of good times,” I said. “And look, I’m sorry about all my speeches on this trip. I really should be disqualified from talking so much. I’m going to try to stop making speeches as I grow old.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

He asked me what the highlight of the trip was for me.

“Finding your ball,” I said. “And seeing you walking those fairways. What about you?”

“Getting the car back without an accident.”

“Come on,” I said, “I had it under control.”

I listened to him laughing at this. I told him that it was good to
hear him laugh; we hadn’t had a lot of laughter between us in a long time. “Things slip away,” I said. “It’s no one’s fault. They just do.”

I asked him if he remembered our days in upstate New York when I was teaching at Colgate University and we would all go sledding down the big hill on campus.

“Not really,” he said.

“I never thought those days would end. We spent all winter sledding. I used to love pulling you and your sisters up the hill. I was forty-one, forty-two maybe; I guess it made me feel strong and young, you know? And then one time you wouldn’t let me pull you up the hill. You wanted to climb up yourself. You were all bundled up in your snowsuit and boots, so you could only take these tiny steps. It took you forever to get up the hill, and I kept trying to explain how much better it would be if you just let me pull you to the top because you could save all that time for going down. But you had made up your mind. And you just marched up like a little soldier. That was when I knew.”

“Knew what?” he asked me.

“Knew that I wouldn’t have you forever,” I said. “It was that way with your sisters too. There was a moment with each of you when I realized the same thing. Part of falling in love with all of you when you were babies was believing that I would have you forever. And then there was a moment when it came clear to me that I wouldn’t. I remember telling your mother how sad it made me feel. I said, ‘He’s starting off now, on his own.’ She didn’t understand. ‘He’s only four years old,’ she said, ‘we’ll have him a lot more years.’ Something like that. But I felt it. And it’s gone so fast, I’ll tell you that, Jack. So damned fast.”

He didn’t say anything more. I had my eyes closed, and I was dreaming back that sledding hill and him in his powder-blue snowsuit.

Five months have passed since Carnoustie. A former student of mine from when I was teaching at Colgate for four years in the early 1990s, Jim White, had grown up in Toledo, Ohio, and he had opened a door for Jack to work for the summer at the fabled Inverness golf club, with the goal of trying to make the University of Toledo golf team in the fall as a walk-on.

Three months after we returned from Scotland, Jack flew to Jim’s home in Columbus to begin a golf trip that few people ever get to take. They played the famous Scioto Country Club, then the world’s greatest golf course, Pine Valley, then Jack Nicklaus’s course at Muirfield Village, and then Inverness, where Nicklaus played his first U.S. Open when he was seventeen years old. The head pro there, David Graf, offered Jack a job for the summer working in the bag room.

Jim White grew up just a few miles from the course, and while they were in town, he set up a meeting for Jack with the golf coach at the University of Toledo.

“Day of Days,” Jack wrote to me in an e-mail from there. The coach couldn’t offer Jack a place on his Division I golf team, but he walked him around campus and told him if he was willing to play in some collegiate golf tournaments that summer and managed to hold his own against the Division I players, he would give him a shot.

“I’m going to do it, Daddy,” Jack said to me. “This is my chance.”

And so he applied to the University of Toledo, was accepted, and began making plans to leave home on June 14, three days after his graduation from high school. He spent the spring at the practice range, and in the evenings he and I would walk a few holes together
at Prouts Neck, sneaking onto the course there again as we had when he was four years old with his puddle boots on the wrong feet.

It came down to last night—Jack’s last night at home. We played five holes as the sun went down.

“Why do some people want more?” he asked me. “Why can’t I just stay here?”

“This isn’t about you wanting more, Jack,” I told him. “It’s about finding out what you want so that you don’t have to wonder for the rest of your life. It’s going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.”

“It already is,” he said.

I told him to remember two things when he played in his first tournaments in Ohio. “First, don’t hold anything back. And second, you are a person who can make par from anywhere.”

This morning before he awoke I slipped a letter into his golf bag and a scorecard from our first round at Carnoustie that I had laminated for good luck. In the letter I wrote what I had told him once before: “Just don’t ever do anything that will break your mother’s heart. It’s simple. I believe in you, Jack.”

We were at the airport at 5:30 a.m. waiting for his early flight to Ohio. In the next five days he is going to have to start his new job, move into a room he has rented in Toledo, sight unseen over the Internet, buy a used car, and drive to his first college tournament four hours from Toledo in upper Michigan. I told him that when he felt weak or scared, he should think about all the boys his age who were flying out of airports for the war.

I shook his hand and let him have a few minutes with his girlfriend to say good-bye. I could feel myself already waiting for him to return home.

I bought Jack new golf shoes for his graduation present, and when I got back home from the airport the morning he left, I hung his old pair in the garage, over the doorway to the living room. I soon made it my habit to reach up and touch them each time I passed through the threshold. I fell off the wagon for a stretch in early July, when I missed him so much I began wearing his shoes each day, though they were four sizes too big for me. And though I had promised myself not to visit our old stomping ground at the Prouts Neck golf course, from time to time I would weaken and go out there and search for balls in the woods as he and I had done so many times when he was little. I was really searching for him, but whenever I found a dozen good-as-new Pro V1s, I put them in an egg carton and mailed them out to Ohio.

I was wearing his shoes, looking for golf balls, when he called me on my cell one evening. He was driving home from his tournament in the car he had bought. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m not going to make it, Daddy,” he said. “I can’t get my game going.”

He had finished near last place, he told me. For the third time in as many weeks.

“It takes time, Jack,” I said. “It’s going to take some time.”

I knew he must be wondering why he was putting himself through this disappointment when all he had to do was come home and have his old, comfortable life reinstated, everyone and everything waiting for him exactly as it had always been.

“How’s work?” I asked.

“Work’s fine.”

“How far did you have to drive for this tournament?”

“Four hours. I left at three in the morning.”

“Well, it’s tough to play well when you don’t get any sleep, Jack.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Have you spoken to your father?”

“I’ve been writing him letters,” I said. “It’s a start.”

“Good. I’ve got another tournament next week. I’ll call you.”

I thanked him and told him to keep fighting as hard as he could.

Jack was sky-high when he called this afternoon just before 5:00. He finished another tournament, this time in seventh place in a field of sixty-seven college players.

“I could have won the damned thing if I hadn’t putted like an idiot,” he said.

I could hear the confidence in his voice as we talked. A few minutes after we said good-bye, he called again.

“Day of days, Daddy,” he said. “The coach at the University of Toledo just called me. He saw the results of the tournament. He said, ‘Congratulations, Jack. What size shirt do you wear? I want you on my team.’ ”

Tonight I wrote Jack a letter and told him what I had not dared to tell him in Scotland:

Colleen and I are planning to fly out to Ohio in August, the day he moves into his dormitory. She wants to meet him at the house where he’s been living all summer so she can finally answer the one question she’s been asking since he left home: “Where is he doing his laundry?”