Where I Am From - an exercise

I am from the golf course at Lochmoor where the sweaty green grass smells of fetid mosquito water and the men swish golf balls in a machine that reeks.

As with all things pre-Californian, I have no complete memories of events, just snippets of imagery and with the Lochmoor Golf & Country Club, a smell associated with it.  That remembered standing water smell is probably a common childhood snippet.  The heavy sweet smell of rotting lawn clippings from the fairways, dumped in the little streamlets along most fairways.  In the summer, there is not enough water to keep a flow going, but the daily watering of the fairways delivers its waters down to the edges and into marshy areas.  Mosquitoes abound.  It's worst on the back nine because it's a straight run along 11, 12, and 13, all slightly downhill and so the runoff accumulates and feeds little pools along the way.

I was only eight and nine years old, too young to be carrying a golf bag around the course.  My dad thought it good exercise just to walk four or five miles and so he had me go fetch him the proper club for his next shot.  I learned terms like, "approach shot,"  "the lie of the green."  I also learned words like "shit!" and "fuck!" because he always was playing in a foursome with three customers.  I learned that customers were evil men who gambled, swore, drank too much, and cheated on their wives.  But I also understood that customers were our bread and butter and we had to be nice to them at all times, let them win at cards and golf, provide them with liquor and, at times women.  When I was with golf people, I had to keep quiet, unlike with bowling people.

Playing a round of 18 holes with customers took about four hours for the golf and another two at the 19^th hole.  Liquor was available along the course from a little shack at the 6^th and the 11^th tees, where a black man would sell you beer or soft drinks.  I always ordered a Vernor's ginger ale at the 11^th.  Californians equate golf with thoughts of Pebble Beach.  It has those panoramic vistas.  Lochmoor was a classic wooded, hilly course with long fairways.  Teeing off at number one, the wooded forest envelopes you.

We don't have mosquitoes in California, but every now and then I get a whiff of fetid air from some standing pool and it reminds me of those days walking the hills of Lochmoor.  I'm sure my mother was happy to get me out of the house and doing something healthy.  I was a classic nerd, thinking about math and science most of the time.  My Dad's friend Rod Mindling posed a classic question to me at age eight.  "Is it better, to get $100 every day for a month or one cent the first day, than two cents the second, four cents the third, doubling each day for thirty days?"  When I went to bed at night, I would try, in my head, to compute thirty factorial.  After a week, I got it.

I got headaches and nightmares from this sort of cerebral nighttime activity, "How many miles could light travel in one year?"  186,000 X 365 X 24 X 60 X 60.  My parents were worried about the nightmares and I started in on wearing glasses at age five, they started out as Coke bottles.  But I think they were proud that I was a budding little genius.  This showed up in troublesome ways in Detroit.  I have always been, even at that young age, a ringleader, the guy who devised plots that would lead to fun and fireworks.  Richárd School sent me home on a three-day suspension in the third grade for organizing a group of boys to attack, at recess, a group of girls and pull their pants down in the snowy depths of a Michigan winter.  I organized a doctor's office in the basement of our house, where the neighbor girls would have to report for examination.

Just before we left Detroit in the spring of 1948, my sister and I attended the Lochmoor Easter Egg Hunt, an annual event for member’s kids.  I was nine at the time and my sister seven.  Easter was a formal event with elaborate baskets provided and wonderful chocolates scattered all around the clubhouse grounds on a clear blue-sky day.

 

I am from the land of snow a foot taller than I, where we sled all day and build forts for snowball wars all afternoon.  This is a time when I am so bundled up I can only waddle.

 

To be truthful, only rarely were the winter’s snowdrifts over my head.  But I do remember one school day when someone had plowed the sidewalks so the kids could go to school.  I had my sister in tow, must have been ’47 or ’48 and the snow was certainly over her head, about at my eye level.  One of the places I remember sledding was a new construction zone.  The nation built backlogged housing after the War and Detroit finished several streets before any houses were on them yet.  I remember one steep slope as 30° downhill for two blocks.  My father was with my sister and I and we all three went down the hill at first, and then I did it once on my own.  I think the time with my father was with a borrowed toboggan, but we had a sled as well.  My sister was scared of doing the run on the sled and actually so was I, but machismo made me do it solo.

The snowball wars were something I could really get into, sort of a precursor of playing football where “feel no pain” is the watchword.  My sister couldn’t throw, so I had her hide below and make snowballs for me to throw.  The forts became elaborate even though they were very transitory.

How we stood the severe cold, I don’t know.  Kids just generate their own heat.

 

I am from the streets that burn great piles of orange and red leaves, which smell like roasted nuts in the autumn evenings.

Autumn leaves have a magical attraction, at least to those of us who grew up in the Midwest or Northeast.  When I had the time and money, in my fifties, I would make an annual trek to New England in October.  I did half a dozen or more of these trips, mainly to see the pure splendor of the colored leaves.

New England trips took my mind back to Detroit days, raking and piling up the leaves.  My friends and I found running and jumping into the leaf piles were great fun.  I still have a scar over my left eye from where someone had left a rake in the pile of leaves and it came close to putting my eye out.  Sunday afternoon was the time for raking leaves and burning the piles just at twilight.  Everyone on the block lingered outside on these clear, crisp and sunny, but cold afternoons.  In those days, men still worked half-days on Saturdays; TV hadn’t invented professional football yet.  Yard work was a way for the men to meet with the neighborhood community.  The other six days a week, the women would exchange recipes, best buys, and gossip.  But on Sunday, in the Midwest, mom would be home cooking a major Sunday supper, eaten early.  We kids would try to roast acorns and potatoes in the burning leaves fire.  This was never very successful; mostly we forgot them until they had burned to a crisp.  This wasn't California, where men understood barbecuing.  At school, we would bring in specially gathered leaves and press them into books.  We learned to tell oak from maple.

 

I am from the city where kids roam in bands and gangs and plot how to steal candy from the corner store.

Gang meetings with school friends; older boys bullying us; chasing girls at recess; Dick Clark as my lead henchman; kicked out of school for teasing the girls; stealing silver dollars from coffee cans; leadership; the basement at Moran.

 

I am from the bowling alleys and boat docks where I help my father.

Bowling people were fun.  They were my dad's peers and friends.  When I was six or seven years old, his friends started me off as just a spectator.  Dickie bowled regularly with Jimmy Carson, Henry Bokram, and Ed Moran.  I was too young to bowl myself.  But, at some point, I graduated to score keeper.  I was good at the math part and loved constructing those perfect "X"s for strikes and "O"s for splits and slashes "/" for spares.  If they were going slow enough, after a few beers, I could fill in the "X"s like n and the spares with half-strikes, y's.

 

I am from those moments, which are a pleasure to remember now.