Soft Landings

The opportunities to get the band together are fewer and farther between. So when Rowdy proposed a round at the Landings at Spirit on Black Friday it seemed like just what the doctor ordered. Yesterday, Allison, my daughter-in-law hosted a spectacular Thanksgiving as she approaches a due-date just about a month away. That gathering included along with my incredible daughter-in-law, my son, my wife and her brother and mom in from Memphis. My daughter Lindsey surprised us with a visit to St. Louis with her newborn in tow last week. I’m feeling like I have much for which to be thankful.

Dave Cox has three remarkable girls, the oldest of which is a Creighton University Blue Jay who plans to study in Florence, Italy next year. Tom Shaughnessy’s daughter is a proud Notre Dame Lawyer and Rowdy Jones daughter is a recently married Dartmouth grad and her little brother is a soccer star at Wisconsin. But we are stoic golfers who only share those moments about family between tee shots.

Time marches on and we are still men of a certain age consumed by ourselves and measuring our self-worth in the context of competition – with ourselves and our comrades in arms. The beauty of golf partners you have had for almost two decades is that you can measure up in some twisted statistically significant way if you look at data over time, in real time or in your own augmented reality. It doesn’t really matter. You always win.

Rowdy shared slices of his own home-made cherry pie over a cold beer in the clubhouse. And the scorecard review reveals, not surprisingly, the shot of the day is a 40 foot putt for a birdie two on hole #5 by Shaughnessy. But we all leave the course with a memory of something that happened because we showed up. We are alive and well. We are blessed beyond all of our own expectations.

We did not gush about those things for which we are thankful, but we are all indeed most grateful for each and every one of our accounts of A Wonderful Life.