Barry Friedman - The Old Folks At Home: Warehouse Them or Leave Them on the Ice Floe by Barry Friedman Read Free Book Online Page B

got his ball to drop into the cup.
    Gerry was keeping our scores. His pencil was poised over the scorecard while he mentally counted his strokes. “Let’s see. I had a five.” I had watched him flailing his way toward the green and counted at least eight strokes before he started putting. If he had a five, I was Arnold Palmer.
    Harriet, who couldn’t remember where the door in our apartment was, had not forgotten how to swing a club. She had an honest four, the lowest of any of us.
    The rest of the round was a carbon copy of the first hole. Gerry and Ted stumbling along, hitting the ball from one side of the fairway to the other, then keeping their scores with imagination.
    Harriet, although not hitting the ball far, was never more than a millimeter from the middle of the fairway. Her putts from anywhere on the green dove into the cup as though drawn to a magnet.
    After one of my drives ended up about two feet into the rough, Ted sidled up to me. ”It’s your grip.”
    “What about my grip?”
    “The reason your ball ended up where it did was because of a faulty grip. Here, let me show you.”
    He wrapped his hand around the club so that the face of the club was almost backwards. “This how to grip the club. See the difference. Your grip will impart a lateral trajectory on the ball and…”
    I had been gripping golf clubs since I was a twelve-year-old caddie. I had taken lessons from pros from coast to coast. My bookcase was filled with every book on golf ever written. I had a drawer full of videos of my swing as well as those of every great golfer from Bobby Jones to Tiger Woods. Here was this dodo whose swing resembled a defective windmill, his ball frequently in a boomerang path that would hit him in the ass if he didn’t jump out of the way, giving me a lesson on the aerodynamics of the ball in flight. I should have wrapped a three-wood around his neck. Instead, I said, “Gee, thanks. I wondered why my drives always made a beeline for the pin.”
    My sarcasm flew miles over his head. He patted my shoulder.
    “Sure. Anytime.”
    In the bus on the way back to the Bowers, Harriet hummed.
    “That was fun. I can’t wait until next Monday.”

Chapter Fifteen
     
     
    Obsessed with curiosity about Assisted Living, I stopped off one day at Chet’s office in the Independent Living building. He was on the phone, but when he saw me, he held up a finger and pointed to a chair in front of his desk. I waited until he finished his phone conversation.
    He hung up and leaned across the desk for a handshake. “How you doin’ Henry?”
    “I’m on the right side of the grass.” Another of my clever lines.
    “Freddie tells me you’ve been over visiting in AL again.”
    “ AL ?”
    “Assisted Living.”
    “Yeah. I’ve been visiting Larry and Christine Rogers. They’d been in the apartment next to ours before they moved over.
    Chet nodded. “What do you think of the place?”
    “I’m impressed. Clean and quiet. In fact, that’s one of the things I want to ask you about. Where is everybody?”
    His brow furrowed. “I don’t get it.”
    “I’m talking about the AL. Except for the Rogers , the place seems empty “
    He chuckled. “It’s a long way from empty. There’s only one vacancy.”
    “Does everybody just stay in their apartment?”
    “’Course not. Most go down to rehab or Tai Chi or to one of the meetings. There’s something going on all the time.”
    I suppose I’d have to take his word for it, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. The place just seemed too dead.
      I said, “I’ve never met or even seen the guy who is the AL administrator. Where does he hide?”
    “You mean Kurt, Marty Berman’s son. He’s around most of the time. Is there some reason you want to meet him?’
    There were a lot of things I wanted to ask him. For one, why was it so hard to get in to visit someone in Assisted Living? Chet had given me some bullshit about the residents’ fragile immune systems. Not exposing