My Purpose

The other day — well, okay it took me two days — I built a display case for my collection of logo golf balls. It is one of my proudest accomplishments.

Because I play golf the way everybody plays golf — which is to say, badly — I need to do something else while out on the course so that my afternoon isn’t just completely wasted. So my golf course side hustle is to hunt for balls in the woods and tall grass. As a result, I have not purchased a golf ball in about a decade and a half. Had I had children I could have sent them to Harvard on what I’ve saved in golf ball purchases.

The way this goes is that when I hit a ball into the woods (on rare occasions!) I go looking for it and, while I usually don’t find it, I do find about three or four others. That’s the way it started. Then, when I had to wait for the players ahead of me to hit their shots, I’d wander off into the woods to look for balls, none of which were mine as mine was sitting where it should sit in the middle of the fairway. Of course. Then, if there was nobody behind me to hold up, I’d drift off into the woods to look for still more balls. As a result, I’d usually finish 18 holes with a half dozen or so more balls than I started with.

A few years ago I started to take notice of the logos on some of those balls. They were logos of other courses or universities or businesses or from golf outings. Not surprisingly, the most common logo is from a financial company, like Morgan Stanley, etc., etc. This only reenforces the stereotype of upper middle class, white guys, often named Jack or Josh, on an outing where they talk about their investments while ogling and heavily tipping the cart girls. Nobody needs this stereotype, but my logo anthropology does tend to support the theory.

There are also logos that are messages that guys have had specially printed. The one I like best reads, “Filthy mouths and bad attitudes.” That sounds to me like it was created for a reunion of Catholic grade school buddies and it commemorated Sister Scholastica’s assessment of their characters.

The first logo that really caught my eye was a Texas longhorn, apparently hit into the woods by an alum who is used to the wide open spaces and generous bounces off the sun-dried turf of a course around Austin. I thought to myself, ‘well, that’s kind of cool’ and I saved it. Then I kept saving. At the end of a round I’d dump the logo balls into a bucket I kept in my basement.

Then my eight-year old self nudged me. ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have a display case so that you could look at your collection?!’ My 66-year old self immediately agreed and got to work on the project.

Now, my wife points out that this is the kind of thing eight-year old boys think about doing and 66-year old men actually do. Her implication is that most of the progress in the intervening 58 years was just about acquiring the means to execute the dream. To put an even finer and even less flattering point on it, I suppose she’s saying that I’m not doing anything my eight-year old self wouldn’t have done had he had access to a miter saw and six decades accumulation of scrap lumber. She takes this one measly example and applies it to other endeavors. Yes, I have two chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk every night before bed and, yeah, I’ve been doing that for sixty years. This proves nothing.

Without being sexist or drawing conclusions that are overly broad, I think it’s fair to say that women tend not to appreciate this sort of thing. I don’t know what they’re into. Raising the next generation, maybe. Or keeping food in the kitchen, paying the mortgage, that sort of thing, I guess. I’m not being critical. To each their own. No value judgements here.

But this raises another important point, and one that Dianne would just as soon ignore. All that stuff I’ve saved over the years — the hardware, the screws, the strips of wood from other projects — which I claimed I would find a use for someday, well baby, that day has come! I was right all along. And if I build about another two dozen of these things I will have used up just about half of it. So there. Vindication city.

You want to know about the material list, don’t you? The back is made up of left over flooring from a new floor we put down in our cabin living room three or four years ago. The frame is made from one and a half inch pine molding I used for… something. It’s all held together with brackets that came in a pack of 10 or a dozen when I only needed two for… something. My only out of pocket investment was for the doweling that holds the balls. I thought the doweling was outrageously expensive for little strips of wood, but it amounted to something like $18, so the whole project came in at less than twenty bucks. And of course all of balls were free.

When I completed my project I needed a place to hang it. Dianne suggested the garage. In fact, she had no other suggestions, so this took the form of a mandate. Turns out the width of the thing fit perfectly between the studs on the garage walls. So there it now rests, right next to my collection of fishing hats.

Its very existence has slowed progress on other projects as I’ll walk into the garage intent on taking care of some other business when my logo golf display catches my eye. I stand there for a few minutes and just admire it. I admire the logos, but I also admire the case and the ingenuity, resourcefulness and frugality that created it. I almost tear up as I reflect on the character that has made this country great.

Six decades ago I had a dream. Today that dream is fulfilled. My life has not been wasted. Turns out we all have a purpose, we were all put here to do something just like this.

That’s it for this week, folks. Have a nice weekend. Maybe play some golf.