Golf

Those of you who were subjected to Larry Mohr's fanciful recounting of our two rounds of golf in Jamaica are probably puzzled why he has not further honed his reportorial craft recounting the most recent golf road trips he's taken. 

I'm kidding. 

Of course there are reasons, hundreds and hundreds of reasons he hasn't brought up two rounds in southern Arizona nor, most recently, still another embarassing drubbing, this time deep in the heart of Texas.

Settle back then, gentle reader, that I may bring the record current.

The man can hit a golf ball a long way, I've got to say that.  But it seems like every time he hits one of those magnificent drives, "up jump de debil." 

At Tucson's Del Ulrich course on the beautiful Randolph golf complex, Lar drove the green on a pitiably short 4 par, and barely escaped with a par.  At Star Ranch, north of Austin, he powered what may have been a 320 yard drive, right down the center of the fairway.  My drive was only about 290 and slightly right of the cart path.  Be that as it may, both of us hit our second shots exactly the same distance, mine lightly coming to rest like a butterfly, 12 feet short of the pin, from where I two-putted for my par.  After much coarse language and flying sod from somewhere beyond and below the putting surface, Mohr eventually holed out with an 8.

Even though I was off my usual game due to what in any mere mortal would be considered a crippling foot injury, and even though he suspiciously "lost sight of" my fairway-splitting drive on the first hole, I easily took both sides at Star Ranch.  His drive on the 18th hole was followed by a 90 degree shank out of bounds, then by a scuff into a trap, after which I again lost sight of him for a while.  He finally showed up at the green, spitting sand with little wisps of saliva at the corners of his mouth, and took a 9 that so benumbed him that he passed up a free lunch - you read that right, we're talking about our Larry here - that came with our round.

But I gotta say, that guy can really hit the ball.  Sometimes.

The Second Amendment

I wonder which part of "well regulated militia" I've never understood.

Virginia has some of the most lax gun laws in the country, and that's saying something.  But to the outrage of the NRA, the state does limit you to purchasing just one firearm per month.  Presumably with all the ammo you can carry.

Unwise Purchases by George Bilgere

They sit around the house
not doing much of anything: the boxed set
of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread:

The French-cut silk shirts
which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet
and make me look exactly
like the kind of middle-aged man
who would wear a French-cut silk shirt:

The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
the mysteries of the heavens
but which I only used once or twice
to try to find something heavenly
in the windows of the high-rise down the road,
and which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
when it could be examining the Crab Nebula:

The 30-day course in Spanish
whose text I never opened,
whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,

save for Tape One, where I never learned
whether the suave American
conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
at a Madrid hotel about the possibility
of obtaining a room
actually managed to check in.

I like to think
that one thing led to another between them
and that by Tape Six or so
they're happily married
and raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.

But I'll never know.
Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
for a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,

and I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
there lives a woman with, say,
a fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints
drying in their tubes

on the table where the violin
she bought on a whim
lies entombed in the permanent darkness
of its locked case
next to the abandoned chess set,

a woman who has always dreamed of becoming
the kind of woman the man I've always dreamed of becoming
has always dreamed of meeting.

And while the two of them discuss star clusters
and Cézanne, while they fence delicately
in Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,

she and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
fixing up a little risotto,
enjoying a modest cabernet,
while talking over a day so ordinary
as to seem miraculous.