None of my personal possessions are as well-traveled as I am, but I need to give a shout out to December 2009 for probably being the most adventurous month of travel my Titleist Ultra Lightweight Stand Bag has ever seen.
On December 21, it boarded a semi trailer for Tempe, Arizona and was whisked to the desert with 600+ carefully-tagged friends. But less than two weeks earlier, there were moments of doubt that my clubs would even survive to see their morning of abuse at Papago Municipal Golf Course. Because in five minutes on an icy December morning, they took a lot more abuse than I could ever have inflicted upon them in 18 holes' worth of sandtrap hacks.
It was, well, the ride of their life.
Let me just point out that I am a person who has both vacuumed her face and hit herself in the mouth with the leg of an ottoman. I once lost my car key, um, on my person while out jogging. I have torn my earlobe in half falling onto a wrought iron chair, lost my prosthetic tooth in a steak sandwich, and slashed my own tire while parallel parking. I've had bread stolen from me by a goose and been knocked on my face by a grounder in beer league softball.
So is it really any surprise that, on Dec. 7, I backed over my golf bag and dragged it 3 1/2 blocks to a quickie mart, all the while littering my neighborhood with clubs that were shooting out from beneath my car like graphite-shafted primitive warfare projectiles?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
It's our new Blu-Ray player's fault, actually. Because I had purchased the device as a Christmas gift for my husband and hid it in the trunk of my car just a few days earlier, I didn't put my golf bag back in my trunk after a joint Sunday morning practice session at the golf dome. I didn't want Ben to see his gift and figured I'd just leave the bag sitting behind my car and stash it when I left for work the next morning.
But there was a problem: I was the first to leave for work the next morning. I slipped through the door on the side of the garage, pushed the button to raise the garage door, threw my shoulder bag on the passenger seat, and started out of my driveway for work.
Upon starting down the street, I immediately noticed that the roads were icy and that I was having quite a bit of trouble getting my car to accelerate down the road. My car drove almost like it was dragging something. Stupid ice, I thought. I need to fuel up my car, so maybe I should reassess my decision to commute to work this morning when I get around the corner to the gas station.
By the time I turned the corner, I became convinced that I actually was dragging something under my car. Stupid chunks of snow and ice that get stuck under your car, I thought. When I pull up to the pump, I'll just kick that stuff off my car and it should drive better.
So I pulled up to the pump, started the auto fueling process, and took an exploratory lap around my Honda. I found no attached chunks of snow and/or ice. But, dammit, I knew there was something dragging under there. Determined to solve the mystery, I moved to the front of the car and bent all the way down to the ground, almost placing my ear on the snowy ground as I looked underneath the car. That's when it jumped out at me, peeking out between blackened pipes in vivid white script embroidery: "Titleist." The previous day's events finally came flooding back.
Holy nerds. I ran over my golf bag.
There is only one thing a person can do in this situation: Start to cry; decide that crying would be pathetic and sort of stop crying but not really; stick your arm under the car and lunge at the bag, which you have no hope of retrieving because it's in the exact middle of your car, you're wearing heels, and it's snowing; pull only your golf towel and one catty-wompus club out as they are the only items you can reach; call your husband, because surely he will know what to do; and sit in the car and be a total pussy about the situation.
So that's what I did.
When my husband arrived at the gas station it was quickly apparent that he, too, would be unable to reach the bag without mechanical assistance. But he did make one discovery that for some reason had escaped me until then:
"Ummmmm... Kate... There aren't any more golf clubs in this bag!"
He threw me the keys to his Ford Escape. "Go. Find. Them," he said. I shuffled toward the car, panic-stricken.
"Wait," he stopped me. "I need to go home and get my jack so I can get your bag out from under the car. I'll come with you."
So we left the Honda and golf bag parked at the gas pump and started up the icy road toward home. When we turned onto our street, that's when we saw it: Our neighborhood looked like a Dick's Sporting Goods. A cluster of irons lay in the middle of the road, and my other clubs were scattered randomly about. Brightly-colored head covers dotted snowy front yards on both sides of the street. I drove the car slowly with the window rolled down, pointing out clubs as we crawled toward home. "There's my driver next to that person's lampost!" "There's my 7 iron next to that dumpster!" My husband picked them up and filed them in the back of the car. I can only imagine what was going through the heads of the motorists who passed us, what with me driving three miles per hour in the Escape while my husband walked alongside the car clutching a handful of golf clubs, barely able to get traction on the ice-covered road. At 8 o'clock on a Monday morning.
We found all but four of the clubs. Remarkably, none of the ones I found were damaged. Ben was able to pull the bag out from under the car after he jacked it up, and even the bag still works! (It just has a couple of new dirt stains. I'm planning to send my story to the Titleist Corporation.) I figure there is a chance those four missing clubs might turn up when the snow melts this spring, so I decided to leave notes in my neighbors' doors. A normal person might simply have written, "I had an accident with my car and lost some golf clubs. If found, please return to Kate." But that's just not my style, so I left a note for my neighbors that told the whole story, ending with a statement of absolute and humiliating fact:
"I'm sorry to say this is probably not even the stupidest thing I have ever done. But it's at least in the top five."
Some day I may have to put this up to vote.
