Walking with Jack Read Online Free PDF

also love the fact that nature is in charge: the rough grows according to the weather patterns. It is a reflection of the elements. Man takes the land and builds the course, then walks away and gives the golf course back to nature.
    It was a perfect morning that even the Englishman sharing the dining room with us for breakfast could not ruin, though he tried his best. He was a lanky, garrulous fellow from Manchester who had fought in the first Gulf War as a sniper, and he told us that Americahad opened a Pandora’s box in Iraq and that it was only a matter of time before the whole Middle East was in flames and the United States was drafting its citizens into the army. Jack was bleary-eyed, eating his Frosted Flakes, while the man proclaimed, as he spread his toast with marmalade, that people he knew inside the Pentagon were already making plans to initiate the draft. He was still talking when he walked across the room to get more coffee.
    I got Jack’s attention. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.
    I yanked my first drive out of bounds left, just as I had the day before. It was a combination of the narrow fairway, the flag on the green so far off in the distance that you could glimpse only the top of it, and a moonscape of mounds and bunkers in the middle distance that proved too intimidating.
    I hit my drive out of play again on the 2nd hole but managed to reach the green with my fourth shot. Jack was just off the back of the green in light rough after a long drive and a blind eight-iron. I watched him take a wedge from his bag and then hit a shot much too hard that rolled thirty feet past the hole. This was the same shot he had missed four times in the State Championship almost exactly the same way, by putting too much strength behind it. “Fuck,” he said as he dropped his shoulders in defeat. It is eating at him, I thought. The memory of that day in October is still hurting him.
    “My uncle Page was the first person I ever heard say
‘fuck’
,” I said.
    “Who’s Uncle Page?”
    I looked up at him, a little stunned by his question.
    “What?” he asked.
    “Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t believe I never took you to meet my uncle Page.”
    He didn’t seem to think this was worth talking about and began walking. I watched him for a moment, then called to him to wait. We walked side by side while I told him how Uncle Page had inspired me as a boy. He’d come home from World War II, married my father’s older sister, Jean, and settled into a tiny ranch house with an open field in back where he built a baseball diamond for the neighborhoodkids. He put up a backstop behind home plate and mowed base paths so that it was the closest thing to a real ball field I’d ever seen. I loved being there so much that when I wasn’t there, I was dreaming about getting back. Because he worked the night shift, he was free to spend his days watching us play baseball, sitting in a rusted lawn chair behind the backstop, drinking cold beer and smoking.
    “He was one of those men who little boys love to be around,” I explained. “He was always up for anything. He had one of the first television sets I ever saw, and I remember the day he called me into the living room to see something he was watching on TV. My father was there with him. It was a news bulletin of some kind, with black-and-white images of Russian tanks rolling through Budapest, Hungary. This was 1956. I had just turned six years old. There was a revolution in Hungary that had begun with students demanding an end to Soviet occupation of their country. The Soviet army crushed them right in front of our eyes. The tanks were rolling over the people in the streets. Uncle Page said to my father, ‘What the fuck are we doing here, Dick? We should be over there helping those poor bastards.’ ”
    That was my uncle Page.
    At the turn after the 9th hole Jack had a 38 on his card, and I was at 43. We played the tenth and then I called to