Walking with Jack by Don J. Snyder Read Free Book Online

afternoon after I stripped off all my wet clothes from a round on the Old Course, a tough old Scot said to me, “You should try Carnoustie on a day like this.”
    I asked Jack to pose beside the mural outside of the beloved Scottish runner Eric Liddell, who was portrayed so beautifully in the film
Chariots of Fire
. “Only if we eat in the next five minutes,” he said.
    He ate a mountain of sausages and mashed potatoes, an order of wings, a bowl of mushroom soup, and half a loaf of bread, before he finished my fries.
    “I’m glad I only have a few more months of paying for your food,” I told him.
    In our room we found golf on television. The pros playing a big-money event in Abu Dhabi under a warm sun, on a perfectly manicured course. Feeling self-righteous after what we’d been through, we began yelling at them. “You call that wind! What kind of wimps are you?”
    Jack was sleeping when I went out for a walk. The skies had cleared. The sun was shining brightly in the day’s final hour of light, and I walked joyfully. At every turn there was something I had seen before when I was living here four years earlier, writing a new novel and having no idea that I would return to live this part of the dream with Jack. As I walked, I took in the shadows and the open places where that novel had taken shape in my imagination as if I had dreamed it in another life. I had missed these places, I knew that, but only now that I was back did I realize just how deeply I had longed to return. In a way, it felt as if my life had been suspended for the four years since I’d left here and only now had its progression and reason been restored.
    Back in the room, I found sand in the empty tub from when Jack had climbed down into the Hill bunker off the 11th green. That was the bunker that got the better of the great Bobby Jones in 1921 when he took three hacks at his ball and, failing to get out, tore up his scorecard and quit. Jack had dropped a ball in there in Jones’s honor and knocked it out on the first try.
    I was standing in the shower, thinking about this, when Jack opened the bathroom door.
    “Where did you go?” he called to me.
    “Just took a walk,” I said.
    “Maybe I won’t leave home,” he said flatly. “Maybe I’ll just go to the University of Southern Maine. Play on their golf team.”
    I was trying to tell if he had already decided to do this or if he was just testing the water. “That would be the easiest thing,” I said. “I think you should do the hardest thing.”
    I heard him walk out of the bathroom. I listened as the television went on. More of the golf from Abu Dhabi. I walked into the room, wrapped in a towel. “I’ve been riding the stupid exercise bike for ten years,” I complained, “and I still have this pathetic potbelly.”
    He looked at me and then away.
    “It won’t be forever, Jack,” I said to him. “You can just give it your best for a year—it’s worth going for it.”
    “I know.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing.”
    “It was a great day here, wasn’t it? It was a great day for me.”
    “Yeah.”
    “My father and I never did anything like this.”
    He looked at me for a moment. “What if I never make it as a golfer?”
    “What if you fail, you mean?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Most people fail, Jack. Look at me. I wanted to write books that would make the world better in some way. Take a look at the world; it’s gone to hell on my watch. You’ll never fail as badly as I have. You just keep trying, that’s all.”
    “Yeah, but some dreams die,” he said. “You have to let some dreams die.”
    “Maybe,” I said.
    “I don’t know what’s harder,” he said, “holding on to a dream or letting go.”
    ———
    An hour later we were lying on our beds heckling the professional golfers on TV again. “These pins are in very difficult locations today,” the announcer said gravely.
    “They should be!” Jack hollered.
    We laughed about my former student who wanted to