Summer 2021
How is there still so much shit in this storage space?!
I thought I had surrendered to the life-changing magic of tidying up. I have decluttered, donated, and bid adieu to carloads of objects since Alfie and I separated in 2018. When I moved out of our three-bedroom house, I downsized to a one-bedroom apartment. I made space for a new phase of my life to begin! And yet, three years later, there’s still so much shit in this storage space.
I’m confronting the 5ft x 5ft padlocked unit tucked in the back of my apartment building’s garage, because next week I’m shacking up with my girlfriend. We found an apartment on the water in Alameda. The U-Haul is booked. And we certainly can’t cram two apartments worth of stuff into this new place. But it’s not just about the square footage. I don’t want to bring a bunch of literal or figurative baggage into this relationship – my first serious one since I painstakingly disassembled a 10-year marriage. I want to get this right.
So let’s decide if I still need every single item stacked in this haven of mildew. Do we need the box of Christmas decorations? Yes. For now. Am I finally ready to part ways with the box of denim and Lululemon that doesn’t currently fit? Yeahhhhhh, it’s time. This box of syllabi and worksheets? Keep it. Do I need a second broom? No. What am I going to do about the golf clubs?
There are two golf bags in my storage space.
One is a gold Ping bag with a kickstand and an after-market backpack strap. Inside there’s:
a set of Wilson irons
a Callaway Big Bertha driver and three fairway woods
an Odyssey putter
FootJoy spikes
pockets full of balls and tees and old scorecards
and probably a 12-year-old Nature Valley Granola bar
This bag and its contents have been with me since 1996. They were gifted to me by my parents on the occasion of completing 8th grade, and they replaced the junior set of clubs I’d been playing throughout grade school. They arrived in my life as we moved from the Philadelphia suburbs to Indianapolis and I started high school. I played varsity golf on the high school team for four years, but I decided not to play competitively in college. The bag still came with me to New Orleans. Sometimes I’d play on the weekends with my boyfriend and his frat brothers. And then my clubs moved to Berkeley with me when I started grad school. They’ve lived in garages and closets and little storage spaces across the Bay Area and Phoenix, AZ ever since. They’ve seen very little action. The last time I played was 2009.
The second bag arrived in my life a few years ago. Mom Mom, my last living grandparent, had to stop golfing as her mobility declined. Her clubs ended up at my parents’ house in Pennsylvania. My parents offered them to me while I was home for a visit. I brought them back on the plane with me to Oakland, and they’ve been sitting here in the storage space. Why’d I do that? I think they were offered to me as a way to upgrade my gear. Mom Mom’s clubs are nicer and newer than the ones I played with in high school. I also suspect this transfer of equipment was a way of managing grief. Mom Mom has reached the point in her life where she can’t golf anymore, but at least her eldest grandchild is playing with her clubs! (Except of course I have not been playing with her clubs. All of the clubs are just sitting here. Waiting for me to make a decision.)
Am I really going to look my girlfriend in the eye and say, “Yes, I’d like to find space for two sets of equipment for a sport that I don’t even play?” Is there room in our new home for the things about me that I haven’t yet reconciled?
Summer 2022
In the year we’ve lived together, Lisa’s never made me explain or justify my need to store two sets of golf clubs in our new apartment's 5ft x 5ft storage space. But she does ask me one afternoon, "Do you think you'll ever play again? What if it was every once in a while, for fun?"
We’ve been talking about her dad – a memory Lisa had about playing golf with him. I like when she tells dad stories. I only got to meet him a handful of times before he died last year. There’s so much to learn.
And now she’s curious if I’ll ever play again. I tell her I don’t know.
I do know all the reasons not to play. Like the racism. Everything in the U.S. has a history of racism and racial segregation, but golf has really committed to maintaining the tradition. And the sport seems to wear its sexism and classism like badges of honor. Then there’s the environmental impact. Golf courses aren’t typically great stewards of the land with all of that water consumption. The sport doesn’t exactly align with my politics.
There’s also the intensity of it all. My siblings and I played competitive junior golf throughout our entire childhoods and adolescences. We were told that we had what it takes to be great players, to win college scholarships. We were supposed to make good on all of the potential and privilege given to us. We were raised to excel within a complex network of rules, etiquette, and technique. I could be wrong, but right now I think it’s not a place I can casually visit. I either live there or I don’t. I am a golfer or I am not.
Lisa understands. She went to college on a soccer scholarship. There was nothing low key about that.
Becoming a golfer again would be a big commitment. Golfers pay for equipment, special clothes, greens fees at public courses, or membership dues at a private club. Lessons can be expensive. The time that it takes to practice and play is costly in its own way. A fast round of golf takes four hours. Practicing a few nights a week is another four hours at least.
The intensity also has to do with what golf means to my family. My parents met as children in the same junior golf program at the country club where their parents were members. All of my aunts and uncles play. My mom’s mother won an absurd number of club championships in her lifetime. I might even say that, for my family, golf is constitutive. The sport has been a tool for being and understanding family. To choose not to belong to golf feels like a fundamental kind of alienation. (In these years that I’ve spent away from the sport, has there been a feeling of alienation, humming along in the background? Barely detectable but still somehow irritating, like a fluorescent overhead light in a municipal building?)
To say with any certainty, “No, I will never play golf again,” might be a way of estranging myself from my family. I’m a queer artist with radical politics who lives on the other side of the country from her large, Catholic, often-conservative family. Maybe I want to hold on to the bits of belonging I can still access.
So as of today, the answer to Lisa’s question is maybe. I tell her, “Maybe – at some point in the future – I’ll play.
I didn’t realize she’d bring the future to me so quickly.
Summer 2023
Lisa returns triumphant from her final appointment with the surgeon. He’s the guy who gave her a new ACL and stitched up her meniscus after she tore them in a soccer game. He said everything healed perfectly. She asked him if it’s safe for her to swing a golf club. He said yes.
“You asked him if you’re cleared for golf?” I said.
“Yep!” she grinned.
Okay, I guess we’re going to the driving range this weekend. It’s time. Who am I to deny this woman her victory lap? She recovered from ACL surgery one year after having a broken ankle surgically repaired by another member of UCSF’s esteemed orthopedic team. She had to quit the sport she loves because it’s too hard on her body. And now, all she wants to do is go to the driving range.
To Lisa I say, “Yes, let’s do it. Let’s go tomorrow.” To myself, I say, “I can probably go to the driving range and hit a bucket of balls without having a meltdown, right!? I can probably swing a club without being overwhelmed by every complicated feeling, story, sensation, regret, tension, or critical voice I’ve kept in the closet since the early 2000s!” It’s certainly worth a try.
Thank you for reading the very first dispatch of Fancy Meeting You Here. I’ll be back next week to tell you what happens when Lisa and I go hit a bucket of balls.
xo
Kelly
I also relate so hard to this! #golffamilies
I love this on so many levels, and can relate to the complicated feelings about golf and family. Can't wait to read more!