Walking with Jack by Don J. Snyder

by the Eden Course to get out of the rain, where I have just been putting for more than four hours after taking the bus into town again early this morning. I stopped at the pro shop on Market Street with the blue door, and a gregarious fellow named Jamie sold me a proper set of waterproofs. Gore-Tex. Tops and bottoms. Black pants with a black-and-white jacket manufactured by Callaway, for which I paid just under £300. A lot of money. Setting aside £460 for next month’s rent due on the fifteenth, I have just over £100 left. My goal is to never use credit cards or have money wired to me from home. Meaning I cannot spend a dime outside rent and food. With this in mind, I brought my coffee with me this morning in the small thermos that Nell got me for Christmas from Starbucks.And two peanut butter sandwiches to last me through the day. Breakfast was oatmeal and shall always be oatmeal and a half glass of orange juice. Supper last night was a can of pea soup for seventy pence and two hard rolls for fifty pence. I find that I am not hungry. I think I miss Colleen too much to be hungry.
    As for the BlackBerry, I can send and receive unlimited e-mails, and since I arrived, I have kept it in my shirt pocket, right over my heart, so that when it buzzes, I imagine it is a message from someone who cares about me, going straight into my heart. No calls are allowed and no texting because of the prohibitive price. A few minutes ago I wrote to Jack asking him if he could actually believe that in twenty-four hours I was going to be reporting to the Old Course to begin my training as a caddie. I am five hours ahead of him, but he was up for his early class and wrote back, “Sweet, Daddy.” He’s a man of few words, though as a little boy he never stopped talking and he spoke with such enthusiasm that he stuttered. I know that his golf season has begun at UT, but I am not going to ask him how it is going. I don’t want to put pressure on him. When it starts going well, he will tell me, I’m sure. Each Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the team of ten players has challenge matches with only the top five making the weekend tournament. So far, though Jack has been in the top five after every first and second round, he has always collapsed in the final round and finished just out of the running. Whenever he brings this up in an e-mail, I just keep telling him that he will get there. It all takes time.
    10:00 p.m. Jack, you won’t understand this for another forty years, but in the hours I spent the past few days at the Old Course, I have felt for the first time in my life that I know where I want to grow old. Standing outside the caddie pavilion with the caddies, I felt like I had finally found my tribe. Hard to explain really. Deep inside, it feels as if I have been returning here my whole life. Enough of that, though. The important thing I wanted to write to you about is that I knowI have come to the right place to learn to be a caddie so I can be of use to you when we meet up someday on a pro tour. If you are going to learn to be a caddie in this world, you have to learn here in all the Scottish weather so that you can learn how to play the game in the worst possible conditions that you and I will ever encounter. Truth is, it has rained ever since I arrived, and the wind! Well, you remember the wind at Carnoustie last winter. I was out in a gale the other day playing the Elie Course. I was about 130 yards from the green, dead into the wind. I hit the best five-iron I’ve ever hit, and the ball went on a straight line to the flag, then, halfway there, started blowing back toward me. Amazing. It reminds me of when I was first learning to sail a small boat in Frenchman’s Bay in Maine. George Shepherd, the old skipper from across the road, told me that the only way I was going to learn to be a real sailor was to take my boat out into the bay when the small-craft warnings were flying and everyone else was coming back to the harbor. I think