The segregated and impoverished world outside the gates may not have been apparent to the new arrivals to Hilton Head. If they had looked, they would have seen a relatively new school building for young black students. The segregated Hilton Head Elementary School, limited to blacks, was built in 1954 as part of the South Carolina School Expansion Program that operated from 1951 to 1954. A new school building might have seemed to indicate a concern for a quality education, but improving the education of black children was not the driving force behind the effort. Indeed, many elected South Carolina officials and others of that era stated openly that they did not want a better educated populace because that might upset the low-wage labor market, and they certainly did not want a better educated black populace. Instead, money was being put into schools specifically to save a segregated system.

The brilliant legal NAACP litigation campaign led by Thurgood Marshall against segregated schools had been having success after success. The South Carolina governor and others wanted to preserve the “separate but equal” doctrine, but it took only a glance to see that black schools were seldom equal to white schools. Acting as if in panic, South Carolina started to put money into black school buildings in hopes of maintaining legal segregation. Not surprisingly, the initiative that on the surface seemed as if it were concerned with a better education, ended in the year that the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education holding that separate schools were inherently unequal. South Carolina and Beaufort County, where Hilton Head is located, fought integrated schools, and it was not until 1972, after my friend’s parents bought in Sea Pines, that the schools were integrated.

What existed outside the gates of Hilton Head resort communities when they were first developed was not just a segregated world, but also a poorly educated one. Before the new elementary school for black students was built in 1954, the kids attended one-room schools that dotted the island. It was not until that year that a black high school of any sort was available, and that was on the mainland. And since the bridge to the mainland was not yet opened, attending school on the mainland was hardly easy in 1954. Moreover, in the days of the one-room schoolhouses, the county only paid teachers to come to Hilton Head for three months each year. Perhaps by the time of Sea Pines development, children were being better educated beyond the gates than in previous generations, but all the existing adults had had almost no chance for a respectable education.

The Midwesterners, of course, had to have known of the segregated world they were moving into. Even the least socially and culturally aware people of the 1950s and 1960s had to realize a civil rights movement was underway. The migrants to Hilton Head, however, while well aware of segregation, may not have known about some of the work conditions on the island.

(Concluded on April 27.)

The bridge that opened in 1956 connecting Hilton Head to the mainland and the Sea Pines development on the island that also began in 1956 foretold the future of Hilton Head. It would be, and now is, a place filled with resort communities. The first golf course was built in 1960, and now there are many. The first Heritage Golf Classic, won by Arnold Palmer by three strokes, was played in 1960. Arnold also landed the first plane at the Hilton Head Airport, which opened in 1967. Also in 1967, Sea Pines first installed gates.

About 70% of the island is now located behind the gates of more than a dozen communities, often with “plantation” in their names. The developments have been eco-friendly, and beautiful trees and tasteful houses are everywhere. This was a place seeking to attract the affluent. At the beginning, these were primarily second homes. Primary homes were rare; people were not going to buy Hilton Head houses because of a nearby job. Second homes in general are for the affluent, and these spacious, well-constructed homes were not meant to attract the trailer-park crowd.

I tend to think of Hilton Head communities, at least at their inception, as having especially attracted the upper crust of small Midwest towns. My image may merely be because that described the parents of friends of mine who bought a place in Sea Pines in the 1960s. But even if that image of their hometown locations is wrong, it surely is correct that the it was the affluent who were buying into this place with large homes near the ocean. Those early development days promised a new community that offered explicitly and implicitly both a uniformity and a separation from the world. Architectural rules made sure that the color and size of houses would fall within a predictable range, and of course, the location of Hilton Head and the real estate prices held the promise that neighbors would be “much like us.” Gates made sure that “others” would not be allowed.

However, another world existed on Hilton Head when the Midwestern folk started buying land and houses behind the gates. I wonder if the new arrivals ever thought about that other Hilton Head. Behind the gates it was a de facto segregated world of the wealthy who were overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. Outside the gates was a continuation of a formally segregated, often impoverished Southern world, a world that may have been difficult for the affluent to understand. A couple of quotations come to mind.  Charles Pierre Péguy, the poet, said, “Short of genius, a rich man cannot imagine poverty.” Walter Bagehot, the journalist and essayist, said something similar: “Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.”

(Continued on April 25.)

As I thought about friends who owned pickup trucks and reflected on books about the economic and political divides in this country, I realized that I was focusing mostly on present-day America. I also knew, however, that divisions had been part of our history for a long time, and that many of us have been little concerned about them. A recent trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, had me thinking about this.

Hilton Head is a shoe-shaped, resort island twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, as the crow flies but not as the driver drives. (Query: Do crows invariably fly straight for twenty miles?) While there I heard much about the rich history of Hilton Head and the surrounding Lowcountry of which it is a part.

I already knew a little about the Lowcountry’s Gullah heritage from visits to Charleston, South Carolina, other coastal islands, from remarkable novels—Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Roots by Alex Haley, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall—and a memorable movie directed by Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, which was re-released a few years ago. All the novels and the movies utilize the striking Gullah story of Igbo (or Ibo) Landing.

I may have known a bit about the Gullahs, but I knew next to nothing about the rest of Hilton Head’s history. While there, I learned that the island in the antebellum era had about twenty plantations growing indigo and Sea Island cotton. The island, however, was an unpleasant place. Because of the prevalence of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever, the plantation owners did not live there. Slaves and overseers (the polite label, I suppose, for slave drivers) were the inhabitants.

The plantations were abandoned during the Civil War as a result of Sherman’s march to the sea, and large-scale farming operations did not return after Lee’s surrender. The few thousand inhabitants that remained on Hilton Head, almost all former slaves with little contact with the mainland, survived on subsistence farming, fishing, and oystering. Through the years, the population declined, and at the end of World War I an estimated 1,500 blacks and a few dozen whites lived on the island.

Change came to Hilton Head Island in the early twentieth century. Rich white men, largely from the north, began buying large tracts of land, which could be had at bargain prices, to be used for hunting preserves. By the 1930s two New York brothers-in-law owned 80% of the island while about 600 blacks still owned small plots on the island.

In addition, a few oyster factories were opened. Workers shucked oysters for canning. The shells were ground up for use as chicken feed and to make roads. Initially, blacks and whites, often Polish immigrants, worked side by side in the factories, but over time the workforce became largely black.

Land ownership again changed after World War II as acreage from the hunting preserves was sold to the newly-formed Hilton Head Company for logging. Hilton Head, however, remained a primitive and isolated place. Electricity first came to the island in 1950 and telephones only a few years later. Two truly transformative changes, however, came in 1956. A bridge to the mainland was opened, and Charles Fraser began developing what would be the Sea Pines community on one end of the island.

(Continued on April 23.)

As I thought about friends who owned pickup trucks and reflected on books about the economic and political divides in this country, I realized that I was focusing mostly on present-day America. I also knew, however, that divisions had been part of our history for a long time, and that many of us have been little concerned about them. A recent trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, had me thinking about this.

Hilton Head is a shoe-shaped, resort island twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, as the crow flies but not as the driver drives. (Query: Do crows invariably fly straight for twenty miles?) While there I heard much about the rich history of Hilton Head and the surrounding Lowcountry of which it is a part.

I already knew a little about the Lowcountry’s Gullah heritage from visits to Charleston, South Carolina, other coastal islands, from remarkable novels—Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Roots by Alex Haley, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall—and a memorable movie directed by Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, which was re-released a few years ago. All the novels and the movies utilize the striking Gullah story of Igbo (or Ibo) Landing.

I may have known a bit about the Gullahs, but I knew next to nothing about the rest of Hilton Head’s history. While there, I learned that the island in the antebellum era had about twenty plantations growing indigo and Sea Island cotton. The island, however, was an unpleasant place. Because of the prevalence of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever, the plantation owners did not live there. Slaves and overseers (the polite label, I suppose, for slave drivers) were the inhabitants.

The plantations were abandoned during the Civil War as a result of Sherman’s march to the sea, and large-scale farming operations did not return after Lee’s surrender. The few thousand inhabitants that remained on Hilton Head, almost all former slaves with little contact with the mainland, survived on subsistence farming, fishing, and oystering. Through the years, the population declined, and at the end of World War I an estimated 1,500 blacks and a few dozen whites lived on the island.

Change came to Hilton Head Island in the early twentieth century. Rich white men, largely from the north, began buying large tracts of land, which could be had at bargain prices, to be used for hunting preserves. By the 1930s two New York brothers-in-law owned 80% of the island while about 600 blacks still owned small plots on the island.

In addition, a few oyster factories were opened. Workers shucked oysters for canning. The shells were ground up for use as chicken feed and to make roads. Initially, blacks and whites, often Polish immigrants, worked side by side in the factories, but over time the workforce became largely black.

Land ownership again changed after World War II as acreage from the hunting preserves was sold to the newly-formed Hilton Head Company for logging. Hilton Head, however, remained a primitive and isolated place. Electricity first came to the island in 1950 and telephones only a few years later. Two truly transformative changes, however, came in 1956. A bridge to the mainland was opened, and Charles Fraser began developing what would be the Sea Pines community on one end of the island.

(Continued on April 23.)

As I thought about friends who owned pickup trucks and reflected on books about the economic and political divides in this country, I realized that I was focusing mostly on present-day America. I also knew, however, that divisions had been part of our history for a long time, and that many of us have been little concerned about them. A recent trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, had me thinking about this.

Hilton Head is a shoe-shaped, resort island twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, as the crow flies but not as the driver drives. (Query: Do crows invariably fly straight for twenty miles?) While there I heard much about the rich history of Hilton Head and the surrounding Lowcountry of which it is a part.

I already knew a little about the Lowcountry’s Gullah heritage from visits to Charleston, South Carolina, other coastal islands, from remarkable novels—Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Roots by Alex Haley, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall—and a memorable movie directed by Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, which was re-released a few years ago. All the novels and the movies utilize the striking Gullah story of Igbo (or Ibo) Landing.

I may have known a bit about the Gullahs, but I knew next to nothing about the rest of Hilton Head’s history. While there, I learned that the island in the antebellum era had about twenty plantations growing indigo and Sea Island cotton. The island, however, was an unpleasant place. Because of the prevalence of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever, the plantation owners did not live there. Slaves and overseers (the polite label, I suppose, for slave drivers) were the inhabitants.

The plantations were abandoned during the Civil War as a result of Sherman’s march to the sea, and large-scale farming operations did not return after Lee’s surrender. The few thousand inhabitants that remained on Hilton Head, almost all former slaves with little contact with the mainland, survived on subsistence farming, fishing, and oystering. Through the years, the population declined, and at the end of World War I an estimated 1,500 blacks and a few dozen whites lived on the island.

Change came to Hilton Head Island in the early twentieth century. Rich white men, largely from the north, began buying large tracts of land, which could be had at bargain prices, to be used for hunting preserves. By the 1930s two New York brothers-in-law owned 80% of the island while about 600 blacks still owned small plots on the island.

In addition, a few oyster factories were opened. Workers shucked oysters for canning. The shells were ground up for use as chicken feed and to make roads. Initially, blacks and whites, often Polish immigrants, worked side by side in the factories, but over time the workforce became largely black.

Land ownership again changed after World War II as acreage from the hunting preserves was sold to the newly-formed Hilton Head Company for logging. Hilton Head, however, remained a primitive and isolated place. Electricity first came to the island in 1950 and telephones only a few years later. Two truly transformative changes, however, came in 1956. A bridge to the mainland was opened, and Charles Fraser began developing what would be the Sea Pines community on one end of the island.

(Continued on April 23.)

He was a journalist who wrote articles for the website of a cable news network. I asked him about the liberalism of his fellow journalists. He said that there were more non-liberals on the staff than many might think, but even so, the journalists were mainly liberals. Many of the staff did that popular quiz or drinking game after Donald Trump won: How many of us know someone who owns a pickup truck? How many know someone who owns a gun? Have you listened to a country song this week? Of course, these questions are meant to illustrate how out of touch the media and other coastal, liberal elites are from the segment of the country that elected our President.

I had a number of different reactions to what he said. One had me wondering about the one-sided nature of this game. The diehard Trumpistas are a minority that supposedly feel alienated and overlooked by much of America. That, perhaps, should lead them to thinking about the sources of their alienation, but I haven’t heard of them asking each other: Have you listened to NPR this week? Have you looked at the New Yorker recently? Have you read a novel this year? Do you know anyone who drives a hybrid? Does this supposedly alienated group ever introspectively explore the grounds that separates them from other Americans?

The questions that the journalists asked of themselves are predicated on the belief that there has been a massive shift of white, blue-collar folks towards Trumpian conservative policies. I also wondered about that. Maybe there has been some change, but perhaps it has been overstated. If there has been a shift, it did not lead to a majority, or even a plurality, for Donald Trump. That fact should cast doubt on the supposed sudden, massive blue-collar flight to the right. In fact, Trump got almost the same percentage of the popular vote as Mitt Romney did four years earlier. This hardly indicates a seismic change in the electorate. If more of the white, blue-collar demographic did vote for Trump than had voted for Romney, then an equivalent sized group who had voted conservatively four years before did not vote for Trump. If we talk about groups that gravitated to the conservative candidate, why aren’t we also talking about those who moved away from the conservatives?

And, of course, any rightward shift of white, blue-collar voters has not been sudden. It has been underway for a long time, since at least Nixon’s southern strategy.

The discussion also led me to think about a couple of books I have recently read which should be in the canon for anyone interested in understanding blue-collar America—Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild and Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein. In 2008, General Motors shut down a Chevrolet plant that employed 4,000 people in Janesville, Wisconsin. Local companies supplying the GM plant also close, compounding the effect of GM’s closure. Goldstein, a Washington Post writer, chronicles the effects the closings had on the city of 68,000. With the loss of $28-an-hour jobs, many families dropped from a comfortable middle-class life to one with not enough food or clothing. Other families were disrupted because some spent the work week far from home working in still-functioning GM factories. Some of the laid-off people found new jobs in Janesville, but the pay was usually much less than what they had made before. Depression and shame haunted those who remained out of work or worked for reduced wages.

The book does not propose remedies for what happened, but it does indicate that a favorite remedy of many—job retraining—was not successful. On average those who sought new jobs without retraining earned more than those who went through formal retraining programs. Amy Goldstein states, “The evidence is thin that job training in the United States is an effective way to lead laid-off workers back into solid employment.”

Goldstein does not indicate that Janesville’s travails brought a sudden shift to the right by the white working class. Chronicling the political upheavals in the country is not her goal. However, the book does illustrate the impact that corporate decisions can have on individuals and communities and that the individuals and the community are largely powerless to affect those decisions. (Janesville is Paul Ryan’s hometown. He was not able to keep General Motors there. There is no suggestion in the book that if Ayn Rand principles were followed everything would have been hunky-dory.)

Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, on the other hand, spent years in Louisiana’s Tea Party country to try to understand this brand of rightwing voters. She sees paradoxes in these conservatives. They maintain the country is better off with less government, but Hochschild notes that by almost all measures people in red states are worse off than those in blue states. She concentrates on what she sees as one great paradox: Pollution has directly and severely harmed many of these conservatives, but they still oppose environmental regulation. They prefer to live with the aftermath of pollution to having the government trying to prevent it. As one of them says, “Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism.”

In her sensitive, affectionate portrayal of these people in rural Louisiana, she also makes several telling points about our present political divisions. First, she notes that the left has not moved further left in the last generation or so, but that the right has veered sharply right. She also has the important insight that for the Left, the flashpoint is up the social ladder. Thus, the Occupy Wall Street Movement focused on “the one percent” and increasing income inequality. For the Right, the flashpoint is between the middle class and the poor. The conservatives focus on they perceive as undeserved and munificent breaks given to those below them on the economic scale. As a result of these different flashpoints, the Left examines the private sector; the Right the public.

(Continued on April 20.)

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

“I am by trade and calling an Americanist, and I believe, contrary to much current academic opinion, that America is a special case in the development of the West.” Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s.

“Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.” George Orwell, Animal Farm.

“When Charles Lodwick observed in 1692 that New York City was ‘too great a mixture of nations and English the least part,’ he was articulating the sentiments of not only an influential group of contemporaries but scores of later commentators who believed that ethnic diversity threatened the social fabric.” Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664-1730.

“History has failed us, but no matter.” Min Jin Lee, Pachinko.

“I don’t usually name my trucks but this one I call Mona, after the sound she makes when I push her toward her top speed.” Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Street and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City.

“The gravel pit was about a mile east of town, and the size of a small lake, and so deep that boys under sixteen were forbidden by their parents to swim there.” William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

“It was Super Bowl Sunday, the only day of the year my mother served dinner in front of the television set.” Michael J. Agovino, The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City.

“Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron.” Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

“A.R. bet he was going to die.” David Pietrusza, Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series.

“There’s likely some polished way of starting a story like this, a clear bit of gaming that’d sucker people in surer than the best banco feeler in town.”  Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness.

(with the spouse as co-author)

Although Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie has been on my bookshelves for over a decade, I just got around to reading it. In this novel, the unnamed narrator and his friend Luo have been sent to the countryside during China’s Cultural Revolution for “re-education.” The two seventeen-year olds find they have a gift for storytelling when they see a movie in a neighboring village and tell their villagers about it. And then they find a cache of Western novels—literature that is forbidden to the Chinese.  Through these books, the boys discover not only new geographic places, but new worlds of experiences, insights, and emotions. The power of the literature spreads beyond the two of them as they tell others, including the beautiful daughter of the district’s tailor, of their new-found stories. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress shows us that literature can expand lives and that literature can be subversive to those who wish to control the lives and minds of others.

While the backdrop to the book is the Cultural Revolution, we learn little about it. If there is a flaw in the book, it is that the re-education seems as if it had been a merely somewhat unpleasant idyll. That is not what I have learned from other books that make clear that that the Cultural Revolution produced senseless, almost unimaginable terrors. And I can’t read or hear about the Cultural Revolution without thinking about the spouse’s lab lieutenant.

The spouse’s lab lieutenant came from Beijing in 1986. I don’t remember how he came to be hired by the spouse, but I do remember first meeting him shortly after he arrived from China. I don’t believe he had ever been abroad before. He spoke English, but his accent then made it hard for me to understand him. (Even today, I sometimes have trouble.) We showed him around New York. He was quiet, but we could see that he was amazed. He was bugeyed in Chinatown by the restaurants and grocery stories. He said that comparable restaurants in Beijing would have been more crowded. People would have stood behind the diners to make sure they got a chair when it became empty; otherwise you would never get a place to eat. The array of choices and the filled shelves in Chinatown grocery stores were startling to him.

The wife of the spouse’s lab lieutenant had preceded him to the United States. An ophthalmologist, she had been selected by the Chinese government to be among the first to emigrate to the U.S. The couple had to leave their infant behind, possibly China’s way of keeping a hold on the couple. She was raised for the first six years of her life by grandparents. On the day of her arrival from China, the little girl, jet-lagged from her long flight, baffled by meeting these strange new people called her “parents,” was whisked off to the spouse’s lab to pay respects to the lab lieutenant’s “boss.” She gave a little bow and said, “Pleased to me you” probably then her only words of English. The next day she entered a suburban American public school.

The spouse’s lab lieutenant was generally quiet, and the spouse reports that it took years before he talked in a personal way. Maybe that was because his English was not precise enough, but it was more likely because his culture had never encouraged or even allowed expressions of personal feeling. The spouse quickly learned that he was a kind, loving, decent, smart, hard-working man. Eventually she learned that the lieutenant had a dry and wry sense of humor. And she also began to learn more about his life during the Cultural Revolution. He had graduated from high school at the heart (a misnomer, if there ever was one) of that period. He, like others of his generation, were taken from their homes, put on trains, transported to the countryside and made to work in the fields, presumably to abate a terrible famine that was gripping China at the time. It was a lonely and humiliating time for the lab lieutenant Ultimately, the government recognized his intelligence and sent him for medical training at Beijing University, but just speaking about it made the lab lieutenant choke up, not something the spouse had seen before, and he changed the topic.

Through the years, the spouse and her lieutenant often sat companionably side-by-side doing an experiment together. In a happy division of labor, she would measure doses of things while he performed the delicate dissections that were required. During one of these experiments, the wife made a novice’s mistake, ruining the day’s experiment. Recognizing her error, she cried, “I should be shot!” “No, Mill,” her lab lieutenant said quietly but firmly. “You should not be shot.” From the way he said it, she realized that his response was not a mere platitude but based on his experiences. She recognized with embarrassment that the horrors he had experienced and witnessed during the Cultural Revolution were no doubt worse than she had ever imagined. The loss of an experiment seemed rather paltry in comparison.

Happy ending, though. That baffled little girl? She landed on her feet. After Harvard undergraduate and Yale Medical School, she lives happily with her husband and baby boy in California.

All my life I have heard conservatives rail against big government, but I have never been sure of the definition of “big government.” Apparently, food stamps, a subsidy to the poor, is big government, but a tariff, another form of governmental subsidy, is apparently not big government. Why is that?

“Wealth beyond one’s comfort has always seemed to me the most boring of possessions, and power beyond its usefulness has seemed the most contemptible.” John Williams, Augustus.

I asked the policeman how the stabbing victim was. He replied, “Ok. He was conscious.” An interesting standard for “ok,” I thought.

After complimenting the chef on one of his dishes, I said to the friend that I had learned that most people like receiving compliments. I continued that, on the other hand, I did not. They make me uncomfortable because I do not know how to respond. The friend, without missing a beat, said that I probably had never received enough compliments to have learned how to respond.

“No one is easier to manipulate than a man who exaggerates his own importance.” Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.

An argument broke out across from me on the subway. A young man and an older woman seating next to him were heatedly exchanging words. I did not see the precipitating event, but I gathered that the woman’s daughter, who was standing and clutching a pole in front of the mother, had apparently tried to pet a dog on the man’s lap. He had objected and snapped at the daughter that she shouldn’t pet his dog unless she first asked for permission. The dog owner struck me as harsh because the daughter looked as if she had Down syndrome. The dog itself, one of those tiny creatures, was calm and did not look as if it had been bothered. The yelling continued, and a different young man came over and confronted the dog owner. He shouted that the rules required that dogs in the subways be in carriers. The dog owner shouted back that the dog was in a carrier (it was) and that the dog was a service dog. Then the dog owner shouted an epithet including the word “faggot” at the intervenor. Before things got uglier, another, older, quite large man stepped in between the two young men. At a subway station, some of the fracas participants got off and it ended. And then I thought, “What’s a service dog!” Could have I have ordered from it a dry martini, straight up, with extra olives? But then I realized that the dog could not have served me because it could not have checked my ID. Maybe I just don’t understand the real requirements of all the people who have service dogs.

After the father’s teaching had given me a modicum of backyard golfing proficiency, the brother and I often joined the parents on the golf course—a family foursome. I did not have a full set of clubs, but I got some pleasure in playing, mostly in seeing how far I could hit a drive. Soon, however, I got the stage where I was as good as I was going to get from merely playing. If I wanted to eliminate some of the frustrations from golf, I was going to have to practice, and not just drives. I was going to have to work on all those components of the game that require “touch”–pitching and chipping and putting. I tried this practicing bit for a while, but I hated it. I was willing to practice other games. I could shag flyball countless times a day, day after day; I could spend hours skating around a rink. I could practice those activities, but golf? No.

Golf was just not active enough. I wanted to be running and jumping and sweating. I loved coming home at the end of a day, stripping off clothes, and finding my ankles caked in that special red dirt of the baseball infield. I liked hitting a baseball hard and then running to first or beyond. Hitting a golf ball solidly and then walking up to it was not the same.

And perhaps there was something more. I played golf only with the parents and the brother. Nothing wrong with that, but I was not a very social kid. My interactions with others my age outside of school were on playing fields, courts, or rinks. I wasn’t aware of missing that when I was playing golf, but perhaps I did. So, at adolescence, I stopped playing golf.

I understand why I stopped, but sometimes I regret it. I regretted it when I returned to golf forty years later. Starting the game again when I was fifty-five assured that I would not be very good at it. (At least that is the explanation I give myself for my lack of skill.) But I still remember much of what the father said about the game and what he tried to teach me. A half-century later, what he tried to impart is still correct. (I absorbed some, but not all, of his golf clothing style. He never owned, nor would he have worn, any of those ridiculous pants and belts many men wore playing golf. I follow him in this, but he never wore shorts on the golf course or anywhere else, even when he lived in Florida. I am fairly confident that in his circles he was not an outlier in eschewing shorts. I don’t remember seeing any of his working-class contemporaries in shorts. I am not sure when growing up that men of his age higher on the economic scale wore them. I don’t remember seeing adult male knees as a Midwestern kid, but I do remember being a bit surprised at seeing bare calves on grown men when I arrived at my eastern college. I, on the other hand, wear shorts playing golf, generally limiting myself to boring solid colors. I wear shorts on many other occasions as well.  On a recent trip to Machu Picchu, I was the only man on the van in shorts. One of my new friends said that he had been to an outing where Tim Allen talked. Allen had said that no man over forty should wear shorts. The new friend said this as if he were imparting some useful lesson to me. I thought that Tim Allen had said many silly things in his life. But I digress.)

I also regret having given up the game because I, without thinking about it, was giving up the activity that I might have continued doing with the father. I have now learned that sometimes you can learn a lot about someone when you play golf together. Perhaps if I had played golf with him when I was an adult, I would have learned more about him and he would have learned more about me. At least, maybe, I would have learned how he had learned to play the game.