You’ll need to work on your swing…

Couples who wondered how they would survive retirement with a full-time spouse prepared ahead of time. They took up an activity pleasing to both partners. The key word being “both”.

Dancing was a “NO” with my hubby not even if there was a show called “Dancing with the Nobodies” and involved a huge monetary prize. Bowling, gambling, and swimming were also vetoed. Preretirement had to involve a sport, a sport for worn out people on their way to becoming worn out and old.

“What about surfing?” I said.

“Wishful thinking. A beach house won’t be in our budget and bad knee.”

“What if we slapped a copper brace on the knee?” I said.

Next I suggested deck shuffleboard. We played years ago on vacation. You shoved a disc down a court, stick in one hand and margarita in the other.

“I’m not building a court to have our friends come over to play and drink our booze.” He said.

Forget curling. No matter how many Olympics I’ve seen, I still didn’t get it. I also had trouble standing on solid ground. Sort of running on ice? Never.

When our options whittled down, I finally gave in to the fact that our activity would be something my husband liked to do. We settled on driving around in a cart with beer. I meant golf.

I figured I could spend an afternoon hitting balls with a club. Easy, I thought. I knew diddly about golf. Golf was a structured game with rules.

Part of my problem was the structure. You didn’t have just one club to hit balls until your heart’s content. You had a bag of clubs with different purposes. You had to hit a ball down a corridor of grass in a set amount of hits or strokes as is the proper term. Feel the pressure? That’s where the beer came in.

The other problem with golf was the terminology. Not profanity. I had that down. For instance, the clubs all had special names or numbers. The biggest club was called a driver. I believed drivers were made of solid gold because why on earth would a club cost so damn much?

A hybrid club gracefully swept the ball  further down the fairway, if you were one of  those people who could hit a fairway. I couldn’t even use the regular numbered clubs. With the exception of the seven iron, I could leave the rest of the numbered clubs in the garage.

Pitching wasn’t taking the golf ball and chucking it onto the green. Trust me. Golf had penalties that added to your score for moving your ball with your hands. A pitching wedge scooped the ball and tossed it short distances. My driver did that most times too. Get this. Low score won? Someone needed to invent canned tequila. Most courses didn’t allow glass bottles.

Not only did the clubs have names, but also your score was given a name: par, bogey, double bogey, etc…. The numbers of strokes were inconsistent with the name. A par could be a three, a four, or a five. A bogey could be a four, a five, or a six. All I knew was that you didn’t want a score without a name.

I’ll not get into the scores called birdie, eagle, or double eagle. The bird scores were flights of fancy for me.

There was even a special word to yell if the ball you hit might thonk someone on the head. The word wasn’t duck, run, or get the hell out of my ball’s path, but fore. When I commented that golf was a bizarre game, my hubby said, “Then you should eventually excel at it.”

We’re still married and living with the delusion of retirement. The only thing that has helped my game immensely was my hubby’s knee and shoulder surgeries. Hell of a way to gain a few strokes, but I’ll take what help I can. As far as a retirement pursuit though, golf has been a good choice. You can’t cha cha or swim with a beer in your hand.