I gave up golf in high school. My father was a golfer, and he taught my mother to play. The two of them played two or three time a week. When I was small, I would walk with them and search the roughs for lost balls. It was always a thrill to find one. Even better than an Easter egg hunt. My father also taught me some golf fundamentals in our backyard with wiffle-like golf balls. I started to play with my parents. I suppose for a twelve-year-old I was okay, but I knew that if I were going to play the game, I was going to have to practice chips and pitches and putts and bunker play. I hated that stuff. I wanted to run and slide and get dirty and sweaty. Someone could hit me grounders for hours, and I enjoyed it, but not golf practice. I stopped playing.

I began to play golf again when I was 55 or 60, and that is my excuse as to why I am so bad at it. My summer community has 27 holes, but it also has ten tennis courts. When I first moved there, I played as much tennis as I could. This started when I was about 45, which is my excuse why I am bad at that game, too. But I also did academic work at the house in the summer place. I started to walk and play nine holes of golf at the end of a day that I had spent at a computer keyboard. I found it a good transition to the evening. After I hit the ball, I only thought about the next shot as I walked to my ball that was never all that far away. That cleared my head from my mental struggles during the day. I tried to remember what my father had taught me about golf, but I was not good. I only played by myself because I was embarrassed to let anyone see how bad I was.

I became more interested in taking golf slightly more seriously when I invited my high school friend, who is a good golfer, to play in the member-guest golf event at the summer place. I didn’t want to embarrass myself too much. We enjoyed the competition and the people we met. It became an annual tradition as long as neither of us had health problems that prevented us from competing. We never won the whole thing, but we won our flight several times. I was always pleased with the few holes where I helped us. On occasion I put a few good shots together to win a hole. So each year, I struggled with golf until the middle of the summer when the member-guest was held. After that I stopped caring about the game.

Now I play nine holes two or three times a week with Tony, who has become a close friend. We don’t compete. He is a terrific golfer, but our times together are only partly about golf. By our separate standards, we would like to play well, but we also have wide-ranging conversations—about books, streaming shows, concerts, good-looking females, history, sports, politics, spouses, children. I care about my time with Tony, but not really about golf. I would not seek out golf if I lived elsewhere.

I had assumed I would play tennis forever. I had seen old guys like I am now enjoying themselves on the courts, but increasingly I found myself not enjoying myself when I hit tennis balls. Various injuries had gotten me into bad tennis habits, and I could not get out of them. I could accept that I could not cover the court like I once did or hit as hard, but it was unpleasant that I felt I could not hit a forehand at all. I have not played in a while, and I am not sure I will again.

Having given up tennis, I thought of a saying someone told me when I moved to my summer community. First you play tennis. Then you play golf. Then you go on to lawn bowling. (The community has bowling greens, which I have seldom utilized.) Then you die. These days pickleball has to be fit into this timeline since the community now has a couple of courts. I vow that someday I will try silly-looking pickleball, although I have not yet done so. So, as I see it, I have some years left to try lawn bowling and pickleball. That should keep me around for a while. Yes, pickleball before I die.