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What my musings are all about...

Blogging might well be the 21st century's form of journaling. As a writing teacher, I have always advised my students to keep a daily journal as a way of organizing their thoughts for future writing projects, a discipline I have unfortunately never consistently practiced myself. By blogging, I might finally be able to follow my own good advice.

The difference between journaling and blogging is that the blogger opens his or her writing to the public, something journal- writers are usually reluctant to do. I am not so reticent.

The trick for me will be to avoid cluttering the internet with more blather, something none of us need more of. If I stick to subjects I know: sports and literature, I believe I can avoid that pitfall. I can't promise that I'll not stray from time to time to comment on ancillary subjects, but I will make every attempt to be interesting and perhaps even insightful.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Master's Weekend

I watched amazed as Louis Oosthuizen's 4 iron shot from the fairway on the second hole traveled 253 yards, hit the front of the green, rolled to the back and dropped into the cup for a double eagle.

I've never been a golfer, and only recently in my old age took up the game, with reservations and trepidation. It's embarrassing after years of dissing golf as a non-sport to admit it's not only a sport, it's one of the most demanding and thoroughly frustrating sporting endeavors. To all my golfing friends I ridiculed, I apologize.

Okay, enough with the mea culpas and back to Oosthuizen's shot. It rolled and it rolled. The ball had eyes is an old basketball saying attributed to great shooters - Ray Allan, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, for example, when they're hot. The same can be said for this fantastic history making shot. It had eyes. And speaking of eyes, how in the world did Bubba Watson hit out of the pine needles onto the green during the sudden death playoff? It's a total mystery, like when a poem comes to you all at once and surprises the hell out of you. The spontaneous and miraculous is what makes sports and art so compelling.

Here's a poem about golf

Hitting Golfballs off the Bluff  by Jeffrey Harrison

They come back now, those nights my friend and I
hit golfballs off the bluff behind his house.
We were sixteen and had our learner's permits
but no grilfreinds, unlike the football jocks
we couldn't stand but secretly envied.
Neither of us actually played golf,
but late one night we took his father's clubs
and started what became a ritual.
A Freudian would have a field day with it:
the clubs, the balls, the deep ravine below
with train tracks and a river running through it.
But for us it was pure exhilaration:
the sure feel of a good connection, zing
of the white ball disappearing into blackness,
then silence as we waited for the thud
against the ground below, splash in the river,
or bang against the roof of a freight car.
That drawn-out moment when we only listened,
holding our laughter back, seemed never-ending
and one time was: no sound came back at all,
as if we'd sent the golfball into orbit
like a new planet - one we might still see
moving across the sky on any night,
pocked like the moon, but smaller, shining green
with envy now, now deep red with desire.

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