One small step that became one giant leap

I remember the first time I felt old.

It was on a golf course.

This may seem counterintuitive because aging and golfing seem like perfect partners, a synchronicity akin to puberty and pimples, but I assure you when the realization hit home, I was jolted, stunned.

It was summer 2000, and as faithful readers might recall, I was between jobs, which is a nice way of saying I had quit my last one with no feasible plan of action for the next chapter of my life.

We’ve all been there, though. You get to a point where you have to trust yourself, even if you’re risking what little you have for a future that might be even worse. It’s like hitting 17 in blackjack.

You just hope you haven’t used up the last of your good karma.

What made it a dicey decision was that small-town journalism, at that particular pivot point, was undergoing a seismic shift, one that threatened to render irrelevant all that had come before, one that hinted at a digital divide in which pure talent simply didn’t matter.

And to someone with an ego as inflated as mine, this was a challenge I couldn’t resist; after all, I had always considered myself to be irreplaceable, a modest superstar, a word wizard with enough awards to line the walls of the stereo room, forcing my bowling trophies into the closet, along with my Jamaica souvenirs.

But as the days and weeks went on and another Ohio winter sank its teeth into my idle carcass, there was a curious lack of — how shall I put this without sounding like a self-centered, delusional idiot? — communication from my former colleagues/friends.

I had cut down my career in a forest, and no one had heard it fall.

By that spring, my 45th on the planet, I had adopted a sort of “Shawshank Redemption” outlook, a philosophy that embraced the whole “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’” ethos, but I cross-wired it with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” duality, which led me directly to R.E.M. and a song called “You Can’t Get There From Here.”

As you can probably tell, I had way too much time on my hands.

Consequently, I visited my brother, an open-ended mission whose object was for us to collaborate on finally writing a best-selling novel, a pipe dream we’d stoked for decades, thinking that between us and our world of ability, it’d be too easy for us not to succeed.

Against all odds, though, we failed, both of us shouldering blame.

“It’s like a car with two steering wheels,” he said, which serves as pithy and appropriate epitaph etched into the headstone of “Gull’s Way,” our stillborn creation that my wife still believes we should resurrect and finish, which is a lovely, if innocent, point of view.

So instead of that project, I turned my attention to another longtime ambition, one that revolved around a reunion of a softball team that had come into existence just after our high school graduation and had lasted for four summers, from ’73 through the bicentennial.

It was something that had been tossed around whenever two or more of us gathered in the same place, usually some smoky, beery hole-in-the-wall dive where the jukebox might still have Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back In Town” in its innards, a thin slice of vital vinyl just waiting to remind us of our vibrant glory days.

I was only the co-pilot on the reunion plane, though, operating the outreach portion with the founder and guiding force of our team, who provided the more tangible ingredients of the memory stew.

An essential part of our team’s summer reunion had been — since its driveway inception at my friend’s house, snow falling and the oldies station providing the soundtrack for the planning sessions — a golf outing. In my heart of hearts, I realized that even though I wasn’t very good at the game, it would be popular among the guys, and that’s how I found myself coming face to face with getting old.

The fifth tee of our local muni track is located on a downhill par 3, known among us as “the tennis court hole,” because if you hit your drive too far, it’s likely to disrupt those playing singles or doubles. I’d always liked that about it, the whole anarchy that was possible.

Most of the time, though, my 5-wood with a three-quarters swing resulted in the ball coming up short, usually in or near a trickle of a creek that fronts the green. In my younger days, it was easy for me to simply leap to the other side after I’d hit my approach shot.

On that Saturday morning in July 2000, however, something in my worldview shifted, and instead of clearing the water with room to spare, my foot slipped on the muddy bank and I lost my balance.

It was in that moment, faithful readers, I realized I was no longer a young guy. Something that I’d done dozens of times without a second thought suddenly seemed eminently embarrassing, like not being able to name the presidents in order or failing to accurately sing every single word of “American Pie.”

Fortunately, I didn’t end up on my backside in the muddy stream and was able to gain sufficient purchase in my trusty sneakers, but something changed and I don’t think it was the width of the creek.

When you’re standing on the other side of the getting-old gap, having made it across intact, the best thing you can do is stride confidently onto the green, drain your putt and simply walk on.