My Private Wobegon

stories from home

It took three weeks to repair the water main. Three August weeks without sprinklers. That was the same three weeks the barometer needle made a home for itself at 5 percent, when the area's mercury exercised squatter's rights between one hundred and one hundred and ten degrees.

Now it was late winter and the two of us, my Dad and I, played our nine holes, the only nine holes we'd ever journeyed together, on a course still ravaged by those waterless days.

The greens had come back a bit. You could now actually call them greens without someone correcting you, saying, "You mean browns, don't you?"

However, the rest of the course was barely distinguishable from the desert surrounding it. Only a dirt road and a thin line of parched trees separated the golf course's hard pack of sand and stone from nature's hard pack of sand and stone.

Dad gets the good shots, great elevation, great distance. I don't do so well elevation-wise but elevation counts for little if nothing here. All that counts on this course is the roll. A low drive that touches down fifty yards from where the club spanked it can roll another seventy-five yards before air resistance, gravity, and the occasional obstacle, a pebble or a weed, finish their work, bringing the ball to a dead stop.

My work schedule, I was an MRI tech at a Los Angeles hospital, had given me some time off during the week, some of which I used to play golf with Dad.

It's unusual for he and I to spend time with each other. We don't share each other's interests, we don't have much in common except a familial responsibility to spend time together, holidays mostly. I had hopes that golf would mold the past relationship into something else.
The separateness that developed between my Dad and I probably started out with a great potential for growing apart, a tightly coiled spring waiting for rules and respect to ease up and so it could unwind. Some relationships never unwind, they manage to keep the thing bound up, keeping the tension, a good tension, friendly energy, as a source of nourishment. But Dad and I had unwieldy clockwork. It decoiled slowly and steadily.

The power behind the undoing, the unwinding of the coil, was a benign, American value; competitive spirit between two friends.

My Dad's best friend's name was Buggy. He was Clark for church and the social security card but he went by Buggy. Buggy's first born was Homer, Robert on the birth certificate. But he was, for all intents and purposes, Homer.

Homer showed an enormous aptitude for basketball. Buggy would let my Dad, a man who's first born, me, showed no aptitude for any of the high profile sports, know on a daily basis to what new heights Homer's skills had ascended. Could my dad respond with boasts of his own son's ability? Not likely. I was a long distance runner and only a fair one. High school cross country has never attracted much of a crowd. Most of the time it's just you, the guys you run with and the man holding a stopwatch at the finish line.

My Dad could've lied about me scoring a touchdown for the football team or hitting enough home runs to merit my own Lazyboy in the dugout. But Buggy was a junior high school coach and knew the other coaches in town, a small town at that. My Dad wouldn't have been able to keep up the lie for long.

I was never privy to any of these conversations between my Dad and Buggy. It hadn't occurred to me that they'd ever taken place. But one day, in a moment of clarity, whether it was clarity due to maturity or just one of those fluke inspirations, I realized those conversations would have had to take place.

It was a game of one-ups-manship that was, given the natures of the men, inevitable. But Dad never actually played in that game. My Dad could've played the game. He wanted to play the game. He had the strategies all planned, he knew the rules. He just didn't have any chips for the ante up.

That was the day I knew Dad included in his prayers the request that his son be more like Homer. Dare he hope that Homer and I had been switched at birth? He dared.

It's not that Dad hated me, he just wanted a little something to bring to the table, something to take the edge off Buggy's proud smile, the smile of a man who had all the chips and held the winning hand every time.

Judging by the decreasing frequency of our father/son talks and father/son things in general, these prayers must have begun about the time I entered the sixth grade. Homer was then a freshman in high school, already a basketball notable. Within the next year he would graduate to star, a big fish in an arid little pond.

When I was in seventh grade, Dad would always start the dinner conversations with the Homer report, giving us the latest developments in the illustrious one's prowess on the court. They lasted through my junior high years and into high school.

Homer was the star of the varsity team.

Homer received a basketball scholarship to three universities.

Homer was acclimating to college life like a champ.

I was half way through my sophomore year in high school when the stories stopped. No more Homer. Dad quit the habit cold turkey. The family never pursued the reason for this sudden change of conversational interests. We were all happy about the development, all tired of hearing about someone none of us really knew.

We got to the ninth hole. There was a slight breeze, the sky comfortably streaked with a light wash of cloud, a bit there and again over there.

The day was February 10th and two miles away in Barstow, California, it was seventy two degrees. 75% of America was a frozen white lump from under which were peering a hundred million eyes. The eyes were no doubt looking past Dad and I and onto the exotic California of Palm Springs and Laguna Beach. But even when you took into account the barren aspects of this golf course, those frozen eyes might have stopped here for a moment, just to feel the warm wind, feel the bright sun on their face, to hear nothing but the whish-whish of brittle tree limbs and wiry creosote.

Dad and I both hit decent drives. His would have been good no matter what the course. Mine went as far as it did because the ninth hole was barely more than a dry lake bed. My drive rolled like a ball bearing on sheet metal. The parched, lifeless fairway, absolutely frictionless, just let the little guy go and go.

"Bob has his work cut out for him," said Dad.

"Bob?"

"Bob Grant. He's the groundskeeper. One of them."

I should say at this point that Bob Grant's nickname, given to him in school about 30 years ago, was Homer. He was the guy. He's one I've been telling you about.

"The groundskeeper?" I asked.

"Yeah."

Was I just imagining this or did my Dad sound disappointed? No, he sounded more than that. Did my Dad sound disgusted? No, disgusted was too much to hope for. I stuck with disappointed.

"What's Bob doing now? I guess I kind of lost track of everybody."

"He doesn't spend any money. Buggy says Bob has 4 out of every 5 cents
he's ever earned."

That was weird. A non-answer. But then Dad has always been good at authoritative non-answers. Comes from teaching High School, I guess.

I dug into my brain and pulled up whatever information I could remember about post-basketball Homer.

"Didn't he become an engineer or something?" I thought that sounded right.

"They took him on as a consultant."

"Who did?"

"The golf course," said Dad. "He says the crew working for him is brain dead."

He was looking at his shoes. It may not have meant anything. I just thought I'd throw that in.

"So he's the groundskeeper? So he's moved back to Barstow?"

"He's always lived in Barstow."

I remembered our two families, the Nyborgs and the Grants gathering for a handful of picnics and camping trips. This was a good twenty five, thirty years ago. Homer was at his peak, big man on campus.

I tried talking to Homer on a couple of those trips. But Dad's stories, Dad's unspoken earnest wish that I become the popular basketball player was an electric cloud wafting through my brain, interrupting thoughts the way a fog bank stops traffic, or lighting bolts striking the TV abruptly end the soap opera.

Homer's quick sentences, his delivery practiced repeatedly on tough audiences composed of jocks and their cohort of devotees, slammed at me like cold water, they were fluid and they shocked.

"Dude, whatcha stupid or somethin'?" he would say, to which I would respond, given my brain cloud, with something like, "Oh yeah?" Even that simple pairing of words came out crippled, tripping over the nearest dime and falling face down on the pavement.

"Dude, I know you're gonna say something dumb so go ahead and get it over with," he would say. And he was right. You try to say something clever with a brain cloud in the way. Go ahead, try it. Not easy, huh?

This kept up until my name became a synonym for characterizations of the
feeble or ignorant.

"Nyborg?...." he said once. It had been four families camping that time, lots of teenagers, the adults at their fire ring, the young people at their's.

"Nyborg?..." There was a pause, a moment to let the adolescent fireside audience, seemingly massive, anticipate what was to come. I was hoping for nothing very creative, nothing terribly original. No more than a "you're such an idiot" or a "you're so stupid" would have done the trick. There would be a brief chuckle, hopefully nothing too jovial or drawn out, and we could move on.

So there was a beat.

"I mean that's about all I have to say, isn't it?"

And there was a lot of laughter. A lot. And he was right, we were all anticipating his saying the thing he didn't have to say.

As we got to the green, I saw Bob Grant standing in the doorway of the pro shop, maybe a 100 feet away. Sometimes the past comes up all at once and slaps you on the back. Or the face. I wasn't quite sure where I was being hit. But I was being hit, I knew that much.
He wore a baseball cap and windbreaker, his six foot seven frame hunched over a railing designed for people a few heads shorter.

"Groundskeeping Consultant at the Barstow, California Municipal Golf Course," I thought. I said the title to myself a few times.

The pro shop was a converted double wide mobile home on risers, high enough to keep the desert and it's various constituents, sand, animals, debris of the nearby freeway, from defiling the lounge where participants in this sport of kings took their repose. Homer went back inside.

I sunk my putt, my Dad sunk his and that was our nine holes. We walked towards the pro shop on the way to the car.

Dad stopped inside for a second and I kept walking. I wondered what it would be like to talk to Bob Grant now.

He'd stayed in Barstow?

I'd been living in Los Angeles. Not a great distance, but certainly a couple of mind sets removed. How would our conversation unfold given our changes in character over the years?
I had a feeling that no brain cloud would interfere with my conversational skills now. Maybe I could toss in a zinger or two about how the sorry state of the course had improved my golf game. Or we could commiserate about how our life's dreams had never quite materialized. What would it be, a little revenge or a "how you been after all these years"?

But I walked passed and to the car. The Fall of Homer, from pretentious star to just one of the boys, was a new one on me. I needed to let the new dynamic percolate in my grey matter for a bit.

This new slant on Bob Grant meant that, as far as I was concerned, Dad didn't pray the same prayers anymore. And why would he? Now he had just as many chips as Buggy. He even held a good hand once in a while, if the retired men still played those games.

We drove back to town, the windows open halfway, the four cylinders of Dad's little pick-up roaring like a muffler challenged engine twice its size. The sun was just about to the mountains and the landscape started to put on its evening things. The muddy browns and off browns of the desert bloomed into rich oranges, reds and purples. There was even some blue in the shadows.

"You don't have to go back tonight, do you?" asked Dad.

"I've made some plans for tomorrow morning." I hadn't. I just liked the feel of my own bed.

"We could go out for breakfast tomorrow. Mom said she'd make up the spare room," he said.

Los Angeles was only two hours away. But the words, "I'd better be getting back," implied to the locals not just the miles to be traveled, but the frame of mind to be thrust back into. The transcendence implied in getting from Barstow's point A to Los Angeles' point B made "I'd better be getting back" sound like a journey not to be delayed or taken lightly. There was also the fact that, even though my present social life consisted of 90% books and 10% miscellaneous, I still liked to give my folks the impression that I had things to do and people to see.

I took in another breath and felt the warm desert air, the air I'd grown up in, the air that bathed you in thirsty tenderness.

"Sure, I can go back tomorrow."

"Hey, great!"

It was a terrific "great" that Dad let loose. It's nice to hear a "great" like that. It seems in our world people seldom say "great" in that good, boisterous, big-smile-across-the-face manner. They might utter one as an expletive when a mistake is made, when a goof has been delivered into the world, the love child of you and your brain cloud. "Oh, great! Now I have to start all over again!" You might hear the word in that context. That's the way I hear it most of the time.

But that's not how Dad said it. He said "great" and he meant "great."

Glen can be reached at gknyinla@aol.com.