Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) 27. Happy 27th Birthday to my doppelgänger Randy. Never fails to make me laugh when he laughs (or sneezes, or talks) and someone expects to see me.

2) Mom. Boy, my Mom and I made a spectacle of ourselves this weekend! I really wonder what folks thought about the wacky, age mismatched couple laughing uproariously at the bar on Friday night. The only one who “got” us was Cecelia, a ridiculously precocious 4 1/2 yo, a bat savant, who chatted up Mom at The Ice Cream Machine.

You had to be there.

3) Hip. Couple of milestones this weekend as I continue to recover from my total hip. I just finished my longest walk, 30 minutes, and I feel great. The lack of “athleticism” is weird, though. You know, that ability to just move on demand. Yeah, not there yet. The other milestone was setting off my first airport metal detector. Funny, it didn’t happen on the way out. Of course I left everything in my pockets (TSA pre-checked) and ending up getting the full, up close and personal experience when I went through the particle detector with my wallet in tow.

Air travel is not for sissies.

4) Sasha. What a gem our new little Aussie Shepherd is turning out to be. Our border collie Abby loves her, and Sasha is equally in love with her new big sister. You can’t help but feel great about coming home when your dog wags her (sorta) tail so hard her feet come off the ground.

Rescue your next dog so that it can rescue you.

5) Caddy. My caddy partner for the day was having a rough go of it. A bit older than the high school and college kids who filled the benches in the caddy shack, he was there to make a little extra cash while hanging out with his people, other caddies. His golfer was a handful. He’d been having a tough round and was not handling it very well. By the time we got to the 14th tee he’d thrown his club a dozen times. Of course, he duck hooks his tee shot out of bounds to the left and sends his club helicoptering 50 yards and into the gorse. The caddy looked at the gorse; he looked at the golfer. “I think you’re going to have to throw a provisional club Sir. I don’t think I’m going to be able to find that first one.”

Pretty sure that was his last loop, maybe ever.

Were you ever a caddy? In one of my older essays about my requirement that young physicians should spend time in their training working in an intensely personal customer service job I suggested that being a caddy would be an excellent assignment for interns before you let them take care of patients on their own. As a caddy you may be a better golfer than your boss, and you may very well know much more about the golf course than they do, but the only thing that matters is that you contribute to the enjoyment of the game for your boss that day, the golfer for whom you tote the bag.

Training for the ultimate consumer service job: doctor.

There is a very special bond between caddies who have worked together. Yesterday I had the pleasure and honor to connect with three men with whom I plied the links as kids, Christopher, Chris, and Michael. The brothers Bohac (Christopher and Michael) were two of three Bo’s who caddied when my brother and I were caddying, and Chris one half of a twin set who took their seats in the caddy shack alongside us. C Bo is now the director of course operations and assistant pro at the club we all worked for. The White brothers and the Bohac brothers were also junior members of the club as well. Chris, Christopher, and Michael were joined by a buddy for 18 and I rode a cart with them for a few holes of visiting.

If you think golfers are bad about telling the same stories over and over, hang out with a bunch of ex-caddies some time. Laugh? I don’t know how any of the guys got a ball airborne we were laughing so much for those 3 holes. You see, we caddied in a different time. A more innocent time, and frankly a less pretentious time, at least at our Dads’ club. We were famous for “caddy pranks”, stuff that the poor kids nowadays would never dream of trying. You always needed to keep a close eye on the caddies in the groups in front of and behind you lest a key club in your golfer’s bag go missing. I wish we had cell phone cameras back in the day just so we could have recorded a fellow caddy doing a front flip when his crossed straps caught him in the knees as he picked up his bags! Or a picture of Christopher’s bags hanging about 8 feet up in a fir tree when he was a junior caddy and made the mistake of leaving them right where his brother and I would be forecaddying on the next hole.

Poor “Chrissy” was only about 4’10 at the time.

So many caddies went on to become golfers. For sure the White and  Bohac brothers did. Both Chris and his bother Pat play. I like to think that all ex-caddies are as good to their caddies as my three buddies are. The fiercest ribbing came when a team hit their drives on the opposite sides of a fairway, a set-up that would make a caddy carrying double work extra hard. Indeed, what we learned on the golf course as caddies was not only how to provide service to a very particular individual, we also learned very valuable lessons about what kind of adult men we wished to be (note: there were no female caddies at our club; women golfers only rarely used caddies). Golf tends to accentuate essential characteristics of the golfer. Honor, or lack thereof. Courtesy and respect, or not. The difference between confidence and arrogance. Men for whom respect came naturally and men who tried to buy it. We saw it all. Being a caddy prepared me for pretty much all manner of adult male behavior as I moved through the stages of my education and career.

Many thanks to my old caddy buddies Christopher, Michael, and Chris for the warm welcome, the memories, and the laughs yesterday. For better or for best, I am who I am at least in part because my brother and I were caddies with you once upon a more (or less) innocent time.

I’ll see you next week…

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 9th, 2019 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.