The Day of Daze
One of my favorite photos ever taken of me was snapped on Monday, April 8th, 2013, the first time I beheld Augusta National Golf Club in person. In the late afternoon sun-soaked image, I’m wearing a crimson-colored collared shirt and touching my left wrist with my right hand as I stand beside the seventeenth fairway blankly staring into the ether masking my awe while the since felled Eisenhower Tree hovers behind me, a half-smoked menthol cigarette nestled in between my lips. My girlfriend, Sue, once uncharacteristically sneered at the snapshot, her an inveterate anti-nicotine agitator unwilling to fully embrace the fact that it documented the first trip to what would become my Mecca and occurred on her forty-third birthday. She would only get to celebrate ten more of them, throat cancer the implausible culprit.
I hadn’t savored Sue’s birthday in her company since 2012—the year before my Georgia peregrinations began coupled with her desire to be alone in her childhood home with the memories and revenants of her parents—and the first one to power through without her transpired exactly eleven years later, also the Monday of Masters week. The golf tournament, which can be held any time from April 2nd through the 14th, always takes place on the median day: her birthday.
Reverse birthday gifts became a tradition on each of my birthdays for the last several years Sue and I were together—I told her, a woman incomprehensibly obsessed with the number four, that I had to be the love of her life since my birthday, July 4th, was arguably the thing that, apologies to the Beatles and Mount Rushmore, her hallowed numeral was most commonly associated with—as I grew fond of sappily claiming, accompanied by an imperative dash of mild sarcasm, that my most meaningful birthday gift was sharing the day with her. Reverse gifts included a lion-themed journal, bejeweled gold peacock bracelet, and a trip to an oceanside church, among others, but nothing that approached the first reverse birthday gift she bestowed on me. On what would have been Sue’s fifty-fourth birthday, some approximation of her essence summoned a tetralogy of The Universe’s cosmic coincidences for a day so overwhelmingly joyous and poignant that it felt like her energy had been granted a complimentary one-day pass to host a party in my honor at The Masters, the event my lofty source of comparison when once explaining how much I adored her: “There’s only one thing in this world I love more than that golf course—you.”
When coordinating travel arrangements with Brian, my one-time boss who invites me to help him for the week each year, he divulged how sweet he found it when I called Sue every April on her birthday, regarding our bond as a form of true love he admired. My primary gift for assisting him is the one day he anoints me to enjoy the golf course alone, generally a Monday or Tuesday practice round, but this time he’d proposed an alternative: basking in Sunday’s final round, a generous offer to observe the green jacket ceremony for my first time. However, while I drove east across Interstate-20 listening to a women’s college basketball game on the radio, he called with a euphoric counteroffer: “How would you feel about going into Berckmans tomorrow, bud?”
Berckmans Place, named for the Belgian family who once owned the nursery on which the golf course was constructed, is a ninety-thousand-square-foot palace adjacent to the fifth hole housing Masters memorabilia, four putting greens, five upscale restaurants, and an exclusive gift shop. It is revered as the most difficult ticket—badge, per local lingo—to obtain in sports. My friend, Brock, another Masters nut, had been inside once and informed me that should my Augusta-possessed eyes ever glimpse the bounties within, a pair of Masters-branded defibrillator paddles would get appended to my pro shop receipt. In between suggesting how Sue would be watching over us throughout the week, Brian said it would be fitting for me to be fêted by VIP treatment on her birthday, spoiling himself at Berckmans Place later in the week two days before his own forty-second birthday.
As I chatted with Brian about my nine hours inside The National the ensuing day, I asserted that it was likely the greatest day I’d ever lived. “You say that every year,” he replied, a valid counterclaim to my hyperbolic streak, but also one oblivious to a discussion my therapist and I had in advance of my flight south. She inquired if I’d sensed Sue’s presence around me in the four months since she died, and without hesitating, I said, “No, not really.” For a woman with infinite obsessions, the extraordinary synchronicities that constantly abounded in my sixteen-plus years with Sue had gone dormant in the terminus of fall and all winterlong. She knew I loathed surprises, but when writing her obituary I’d alluded to how she’d inevitably surface with a revelation or two upon emerging from her spiritual slumber, and in her uncompromising lifelong insistence on doing everything to the utmost, her infatuation with animals, aesthetics, and her mythical ambassadorship dedicated to the happiness of others proved that if a pseudo-deity were to roam among us for twenty-four hours, she only had highs for me.
★ ★ ★ ★
While scanning my Berckmans Place badge’s barcode, a plastic rectangle conveniently colored pink like Sue’s vibrant blonde coiffure, an elderly gentleman handed me the annual spectator guide and daily pairing sheet along with dark green cardboard eclipse glasses. The Masters and Sue’s birthday were coexisting in the spotlight with a total solar eclipse, a singular fold in time enabling her a surefire means to traverse between the astral plane where she now resided and the golf course where I had hoped we’d walk together one day—her guaranteed to trip and say, “Jesus Christ! Sorry Jesus!”—as we smelled and petted the in-bloom flowers and closed our eyes while absorbing the voluminous birdsong, a triumvirate of mother nature’s bounties she treasured. Sue had been bewitched by the total solar eclipse almost seven years prior, and when researching details of the subsequent one, she assumed that we’d be separated for it, in no way prepared for how severe the separation would be.
Sporting a brightly hued bracelet on my right wrist spelling out RAINBOW, one Sue had crafted as an hommage to her nickname at the nursery where she worked for the last four years of her life, I arrived at the cloistered entrance to Berckmans Place and was given a tiny clear bag with a gold and green Berckmans Place pin as a pink bracelet was fastened on my left wrist, an additional security measure enacted to prevent attendees from leaving the hospitality locale and relaying the badge to someone else deemed undeserving of the privilege. While The National withholds issuing Berckmans Place photos for public consumption, I’d purchased their self-published book chronicling the utopia out of sheer fascination, sanctioning myself to have an idea of what to expect should I ever get conferred admission. In reality, a green jacketed member welcomed me at the front doors and politely requested that I remove my go-to blue Masters hat in deference. “Yes, sir,” I said, unnecessarily happy to be inconvenienced.
The building’s main foyer is a prototype for a Masters museum, its walls adorned with historical treasures like ninety-year-old maps and watercolors of each hole’s namesake flower or plant, yet it also blossoms into tall-ceilinged rooms on either side: the gift shop, a compact area with four phones, a lounge teeming with portraits and copious artifacts, a gallery-style room with video screens and curios encased in glass, guest services with a concierge and stack of newspapers, a library whose contents I intently ogled like a borderline pervert, restrooms cleaner and better arranged than Felix Unger’s environs on his most manic day, a bag check area to store luxury gifts so your hands are unencumbered on the course, and an atrium with three of the four indoor restaurants (the fifth is located on the terrace) where the temptation to mainline cholesterol could end in a stroke of an altogether different variety than the place is famous for. Meanwhile, well-dressed employees sweep the carpet, polish the glass, and spritz the cushioned wooden furniture, some smiling in a way resembling being on the wrong end of a grandparent pinching their cheeks too firmly, skin taut with obsequious formality. I locked eyes with one feeble lady on the verge of exhaustion, beaming at her while the couples and groups around me rightfully busied themselves with one another, trying to engage a loner like myself in need of a fleeting speck of goodwill, an act of compassion Sue imparted to me was as valuable as things like the lavish badge anchored to my wrist by a rubber band beside her former bracelet.
Once I’d finished attempting to memorize every word on the walls and inspected the paintings of Bobby Jones, Clifford Roberts, and Dwight Eisenhower like a curator, an important decision loomed: where to eat breakfast. The menu posted outside Augusta’s, the building’s Creole-influenced restaurant, lured me up a staircase whose walls were decorated in black and white archival images, and I was met by a preservation hall-style jazz band featuring elderly white men in suits cooking through a bayou standard as I focused on the naturally and artificially lit rooms, one comprised of an expansive dining area and the other with an ornate, pristine bar where I chose to sit, keen to converse with the adrenaline junkies on the Masters’ service side.
A handsome, fidgety twenty-one-year-old from Long Island named Constantine fetched me a cuppa black coffee and glass of seltzer with a lime, questioned me for personal data (I disclosed that I’d graduated from UConn, describing how hours later I had the opportunity to root on my alma mater to win its second consecutive men’s college basketball championship—they did, an outcome that seemed preordained), and exhibited the bona fide giddiness inherent to the happiest week of the year commencing. Pillowy parmesan-drenched scrambled eggs, size-zero-thin scalloped potatoes, bacon as crunchy as Tic-Tacs, and grits creamy enough to be gravy in camouflage were my sustenance when gallivanting around the greenery.
Nixing my diet soda addiction was initiated a decade beforehand in Augusta, but when on the grounds discipline kowtows to indulgence as I consume however many the day demands. In tribute to Sue’s longtime urging to eat dessert first, I paired the cola with a peach ice cream sandwich, letting it thaw in the plastic wrapper in my hand as I migrated to a primal source of renewal: my dearly beloved, the tenth hole, home to pink camellias I failed to grow the preceding fall while thinking about the vigorous five hundred-yard stretch on which I was now standing each time I pleaded with them to cut the shit. Once I licked the last delicious glob off my fingers, I opted to walk the second nine while promising myself that I would sit in more grandstands, taking breaks for fresh perspectives.
During my day at The National in 2023, I’d had an out-of-body experience at the twelfth hole, spying on myself studying its legendary green for a few seconds, a phantasmagorical interlude impossible to rationalize, although Sue instantly recognized its enigmatic truth, my ability to achieve a form of clarity granted when my mind, more than any other day each year, was aligned to be present on an extra-sensory level. Relaxing cross-legged in the front row of the grandstands, a trio of golfers putted on the eleventh hole’s green as a drawling southern lady behind me said, “I could live here, just put up a window and watch.” Elated folks posed for pictures nearby with Amen Corner, the moniker for the alluring triptych of holes eleven to thirteen, as I grabbed an invisible bottle of Windex to ensure the window being busily erected by my newfound neighbor was revealing the reality I thought I spotted.
There on the twelfth green stood two geese by Rae’s Creek, the infamous body of water filled with as many lost Titleists as turtles. Nobody around me acknowledged the birds, so I figured I was hallucinating until one putzed in a circle unsure of its surroundings as I recalled walks Sue and I frequently took at a nature preserve bustling with endless geese, her interrupting our step count to photograph them, tiptoe closer to them, and talk to them, thanking them for sharing the day’s walk with us, an act of animal appreciation so free from self-consciousness that I forced myself to refrain from being irked by how long she sometimes soliloquized, Sue as mindful on any given day in a way I could conjure strictly on special occasions. When the geese flew away—Sue surely pointing at them and excitedly screeching, “MY GEESE!” (another pastime)—I exited the stands, seeking a gallery guard, a ritual of mine, to ask the day’s first vital question.
“Have you ever seen a goose on this golf course?”
“A goose?” the man said. “Sir, in the thirty-five straight years I been here, I ain’t never seen a goose. Where’d you see one?”
“I saw two of them on twelve a few minutes ago.”
“You gotta be kiddin’ me! I cain’t believe that! They should be up north, but then again, it’s been cold and rainy up there.”
“I know. Just came from Connecticut yesterday.”
“Well, maybe they followed yuh. Or they ain’t ready to head up there yet. Either way. Man, I wish I saw that.”
More blissful seated scrutiny resulted—at the thirteenth green and fourteenth tee where a father and his adult son smiled at one another after simultaneously racing to empty their beer cups; at the fifteenth green and sixteenth tee where fans roared at golfers skipping balls over the pond protecting the sixteenth green, the perennial site of practice round exuberance—as Aeolus gracefully limited the wind on a seventy-five-degree day absent excess humidity. Many patrons intermittently affixed their eclipse glasses, gawking at that lucky old sun commanding the world’s attention, but I envisioned that they too were awaiting flashes of Sue frolicking with rabbits and lions in the clouds.
Following my confirmation that the eighteenth hole’s tee shot vista remains the sport’s finest, I ambled uphill to the green. One man had picked up his Masters badge from me the night prior, detailing how he’d attended an Atlanta Braves game, the thirtieth and final ballpark on his list to cross off visiting in person, then drove to meet me. I was on edge owing to running roughly nineteen errands immediately upon arriving in Augusta, but since he was a valued retail customer, I paused more frantic zig-zagging of the city to dispense my spiel: write down where you park, eat breakfast by 10:30 or else because that’s when the morning items disappear from the menu, buy merchandise on the way out (or check your bag), laze in at least one grandstand, soak up the view of sixteen from the hill, get your photo taken in front of the clubhouse, call your nearest and dearest to spread the love, stay hydrated and apply sunscreen, allocate extra time to examining favored (not just famous) holes, and shoo anything non-Masters-related from your headspace until back wherever you’re calling home for the evening.
“I hate to sound arrogant,” I said to Sue once, “but I guess I’m sort of a Masters historian, so I don’t feel too bad about acting like an oracle.”
“Dude!” she replied in trademark fashion. “You are a fucking Masters historian!”
“But still…”
“But still, nothing. Anybody can tell how knowledgeable and sincere you are when you talk about that place!”
While circling around the green from the right side, a lanky man in a blinding navy blue and gold Michigan Wolverines polo shirt had his back to me. Ken, the guy I’d given the badge to, had mentioned his Michigan fandom, specifically their hockey team. He turned to his left as I tapped him on the shoulder and asked how the morning had treated him.
“Hey!” he said, understandably surprised. “How’s it goin’?! I did a bunch of the stuff you recommended. Drank a cup of coffee, got my picture taken, sat at the patron area by sixteen…”
“That’s fantastic! I cannot believe I ran into you out here! Fifty thousand people and here we are. This is wild.”
“It’s nice to see you at peace right now. You were pretty frazzled yesterday.”
“No shit, huh? There was a lot going on. Sorry about that.” He shook his head like it was no big deal. “Nothing can bother me here. So…worth the hype?” I said while smirking, his ebullience obvious.
“I’m keeping your number. Already addicted and planning to come pick up from you again next year for a tournament round.”
“Where you off to now?”
“Gotta do the back nine again. You wanna join me?”
As much as I wanted to, I was committed to walking the first nine and getting lunch. I also suspected it might disrupt the spell Sue had cast on me.
“No offense, but I just did. Plus, I lucked out with a ticket to Berckmans.” His eyes got a little buggy. “I know…fancy. Gonna head there to eat. I’m so glad I got to see you again! Cherish the day, man.”
“Thanks a ton, Adam. Enjoy the rest of your day too.”
En route to the pastoral, pine-lined pathway from the fifth hole to Berckmans Place, I stopped at the palm tree beside the fourth hole’s green, an idyllic area that preoccupied me one year earlier. As a patron taking photos absentmindedly walked by it, I casually persuaded him that it was The National’s easter egg, the lone surviving palm on the grounds, making him curious to reevaluate its bent elegance. The area safeguarding it was roped off more snugly than past practice rounds, and in a fit of luck I clutched its trunk, silently counting to four with it in my clasp. The last palm trees I’d seen were in Sue’s company as we drove to the airport to conclude our August vacation in Los Angeles, that week her version of The Masters, a reunion with the prized locale that she’d waited twenty-three agonizing years to return to. For the first time, I wiped away tears inside The National. It would not be the final time.
★ ★ ★ ★
Sitting at my second bar of the day, opposite a wall of Ketel One bottles encompassing two enormous televisions, I ordered a burger topped with truffle-infused goat cheese, marinated portabella and enoki mushrooms, a side of slightly acidic coleslaw, and Sue’s favorite foodstuff, a treat inaccessible to the hoi polloi on the course, french fries. She joked that she was a cheap date early in our relationship, usually reduced to predictable salads with fries at restaurants—at least until the vegan food revolution’s inception—and salted the hell out of them like a snow globe had exploded in her hand. When the French bartender served them, I asked for mayonnaise, receiving a personal-size tiny glass bottle as well as a seltzer top off despite maybe three sips being drained. Merci, monsieur.
Directly across from me sat a loudmouthed wannabe baroness-in-training holding court with her girlfriends, one assumes sucking back a vodka something on the rocks with no plans to get off her stool unless the bathroom beckoned. This was my worry prior to Berckmans: Would reveling in a dreamland within a dreamland stunt my yearning to survey the grounds? Not one iota, but I couldn’t blame patrons guzzling gratis booze while being treated with noblesse oblige from declining to move around much. Still, wasn’t the entire point of The Masters’ progenitors to sell cheap sandwiches and beverages so that any commoner could walk in, enjoy a round, and spend all of ten dollars to make it so? If Sue was slouching at the bar alongside me, she would’ve defended the luxuries on offer by the powers that be by channeling her time as a former small business owner and people pleaser who likewise detested corporate greed but would’ve commended the logistics and precision in addition to being pained as I entertained any negative thoughts about Eden, fair or not. It shocks me that I neglected to dub her an angel’s advocate.
Brian requested I purchase twenty hats and three half-zip pullovers for him at the gift shop, which I’d been jonesing to see since evading the morning’s line. Spotless yet incapable of being cleaner or more organized than the glistening larger gift shops on the course, the two cozy rooms exhibited rarities unseen elsewhere, including a beaded brooch in the shape of the Masters logo, me momentarily considering how Sue would’ve loved it then abruptly hearing her insist that I keep it for my collection by relying on her own self-deprecating logic: “I’ll lose that in four seconds, Blebbz!”
Normally anxious about complimenting a woman when alone, I noticed a slender, winsome, middle-aged lady with dark, thick, shoulder-length hair in a white, gold, and pine green floral-patterned dress outlined by black trim, her sparkling engagement and wedding rings relieving my self-generated tension, and broadcast how she’d won the Prettiest Dress of the Day Award, a semi-noteworthy faux honor on a day pollinated by gorgeous, multicolored spring garments, earning a smile and thank you before we forked away from one another to unearth more gems. In carefully selecting hats I was positive Brian’s nitpicky side would covet—“I’m glad you’re shopping for me because nobody knows what I like from here like you do!” he'd told me—a monstrous man breathing heavily stood a foot to my left. As I glanced askew, there was Mike Tomlin, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ head coach, perspiring like he’d just had a shvitz in the secret Berckmans sauna. Turning the corner, another sporting Mike (Tirico, the NBC play-by-play man who’d covered the Augusta National Women’s Amateur over the weekend) lingered near a jacket rack. I conversed with a dark-skinned teenager browsing expensive watches while the clerk unboxed the year’s commemorative silver coin for me, the eighty-eighth tournament being divisible by two to yield forty-four, the type of arithmetic Sue perpetually engaged in as proof that her allegiance to fours was a birthright having greeted the world at 12:44 p.m.
“Fun fact of the day,” I said to two women, one a retiree, the other a teenager, respectively tasked with scanning and bagging my items, both confused that I’d inadvertently snatched the display copy of a leather journal. “The previous total solar eclipse happened on August 21st, 2017. You’re now thinking, ‘Why does this strange man remember that?’ Because it was my mother’s fifty-fifth birthday. Oddly enough, today is, as you both know, a total solar eclipse and it happens to be my girlfriend’s fifty-fourth birthday.”
“Wow!” the white-haired lady said.
“It’d only be crazier if today was your girlfriend’s fifty-fifth birthday too!” the brunette added.
“Please,” I said before winking at them, “she’s old enough as it is!”
Seventeen hundred dollars and no inquisitiveness as to Sue’s whereabouts from the gift shop duo later, I entrusted my wares to the bag check handlers and patrolled the four Berckmans putting greens, my brow surely scrunched in a comical manner like a cliché cartoon heavy appraising them, three smaller scale replicas from the main course (the seventh, fourteenth, and sixteenth holes) as well as one composite green. Men in white caddy suits helped read putts for patrons eager to reproduce million-dollar shots the pros make. In a significant upset, I vanquished my fanaticism, choosing to merely audit the greens from afar, the undulations on the facsimile of fourteen eerie clones of the main course’s big sister, yet satisfied that I felt content to move on without checking another foolish box uneasy that the lack thereof would disturb my inner monologue.
Once the first nine walk was accomplished—the bunker on the eighth hole vast enough to contain both of Paul Bunyan’s footprints as if he were hopscotching The National during its design—I diverted to the phone area to make two calls. I’d dialed my buddy Rick in the morning, him on cloud eight (divisible by four, naturally) from attending WrestleMania XL, as well as my mother and Brian, but needed to memorialize the day with two others. My college roommate, Mackie, couldn’t travel so I regaled him with Berckmans tidbits and reminded him that our call was unquestionably being recorded for quality assurance. Then I called Sue’s soul sister, the woman in her orbit who mirrored #44 herself, Amy, a softspoken lady who had been a rock for me—quartz in particular, her affinity for healing crystals prominent at Sue’s hospital bedside—chatting on hourlong phone calls twice per month after Sue died, her listening to long-winded Sue-centric anecdotes in between extending astute analysis and bygone stories unknown to me as well as simply being altruistic with her time, vouchsafing perspective that sporadically eluded me and sent me in search of her expert ears.
“Amy!” I said, clueless that her iPhone screen read PRIVATE NUMBER.
“Who is this?!” she skeptically responded in a stern voice on loan from a darker timeline.
“It’s Adam! I’m at The Masters and wanted to say hello!”
“Ohhhhh,” she smiled through the phone. “Hiiii! Sorry, I didn’t know it was you at first.”
It was brief but essential as we both readied ourselves for peak eclipse visibility. Back near the magnolia tree-lined fifth, I sat in the grandstands at my second favorite hole, marveling at the fairway bunkers-slash-bomb shelters along the way. Patrons near the sixth tee were rubbernecking skyward at the crescent sun behind me and loudly commenting to fellow astronomers-for-a-day as if the moon had inexplicably lowered the earth’s volume knob when darkening the view. “I’ve never seen light like this here,” the gallery guard to my left said about the pink and blue cotton candy-tinged haze draped across the horizon, the penumbra’s luminescence distorted like dew drops obscuring a spiderweb. I couldn’t resist reminiscing about a classic cinematic scene that Sue and I referenced to amplify our love for one another—George Bailey lassoing the moon for Mary in It’s a Wonderful Life. The gallery guard looked at his watch and announced that it was 3:04, the apex of visibility at The National, as a ladybug, typically as incognito as the geese, stuck the landing on the railing a few feet from me, its fluttering wings the barely audible soundtrack as a sudden pitter-patter of teardrops bungee jumped from my eyelids.
“There is a ladybug in my bathroom with me while I’m drying my hair,” Sue’s cousin Lynn had texted me in mid-January. “It’s below freezing outside. Where did it come from? I have my guesses. She is saying thanks for the burn.”
Lynn had ordered a pizza the size of a car door for us as we incinerated Sue’s journals in a whipping, skin-reddening windstorm per her wishes—the fire, not the wind, the latter her hair’s archnemesis (she regularly referred to it as an “asshole”)—and apparently opened Pandora’s bug, me replying how I’d discovered Sue’s ladybug pin and clipped it to my bathrobe inches from my 2023 Masters pin days prior to her text, a bit of retroactive foreshadowing. Not long thereafter, I propped a plastic ladybug on the arm of the stuffed Buddha Sue had planted on our kitchen counter before we moved in together in September, often proudly emphasizing that she and the Buddha shared a birthday. Two days later, I found Sue’s ladybug stuffed animal and saved it, the fortuitous run of timing a bit mystifying. Whenever Sue and I sent good luck texts, we astoundingly used five emojis: the unicorn, rainbow, slot machine, four-leaf clover, and ladybug. During a day extolling The Universe’s fiery heartbeat, what were the unfathomable odds her most venerated insect would visit me at the exact minute it culminated? I took a sip of soda, the condensation sliding onto my shirt to mingle with my eye’s salty splotches, and purposely changed course by pondering where the hell they sold Masters-branded handkerchiefs.
★ ★ ★ ★
Equipoise is a crucial element when walking the course: for each trip around one nine, my brain’s devotion to symmetry compels me to reassess its other, and when I’m walking it, better half. Tired of feeling the badge clanking against my wrist, I entered the new, small-scale patron gift shop in between the eighth and eighteenth holes to buy a lanyard, recalling a co-worker who once said he refused to bow down to anyone, especially his employer, when scanning it to access the building, a philosophy the Augusta brass, largely titans of industry, would pursue ameliorating if somebody nitpicked about it when filling out the meticulous patron survey at one of the course’s electronic kiosks, a tiresome process I aborted due to the interminable length. Brian permitted me to keep one badge each year for my Masters shrine, the assemblage I’d once housed in a coffee table but rearranged in my basement on a bookshelf beside the bookshelf of Sue’s wisdom I’d compiled, her self-help and health-based tomes as influential to my well-being as the four dozen verdant golf volumes to their left. The shrine confirmed that my sole Wednesday patronage occurred in 2015 on—what else?—her birthday.
How could I skip my yearly walk along the ninth hole’s right side, framing myself between two conifers to contemplate the tiered green in the distance, the approach shot on the course I habitually projected in my mind, each side of the fairway comparable to an open curtain whose aperture the gods of golf peered through to check in on the sport’s signature event, the eyes and noses of men like Jones and Roberts perched on the tree line rejoicing as they witnessed their vision intact, preservation as strong a theme as any at The National. Nathan, the guy who’d dropped me off at the Berckmans lot in the morning, had carped about how countless patrons groveled at the event’s altar, his thoughtful insights illuminating until I unveiled my bulletproof rebuttal: the lack of a Cadillac ruining the sixth hole or a MasterCard logo on the scoreboards, the members’ intractable repudiation of shameless avarice more refreshing each time inside the grounds. “They’ll never allow phones in there,” I said to him. “Picture some troll blasting a gangbang clip during a Sunday putt. I don’t care how much technological progress the world makes; no patron will ever use the Internet on the property.” Even humanism requires its puppet masters.
“This hole is so, so good,” I’d eavesdropped on a man at the tenth green saying to his friend while noshing on my ice cream sandwich in the morning, the memory resurfacing as I grinned to myself on the fairway’s right side. My yearslong fear of “repurposing” one of the hole’s pinecones wafted away, but as I squatted to pluck my keepsake a sparkly tube on the pine straw practically dislodged my mind from my body, goosebumps on parts of my skin I’d forgotten existed. Angled at the base of one tree was the exact brand of lip gloss Sue misplaced so systematically that I’d not only incorporated the factoid into her obituary, but also uncovered one ineluctable tube from beneath the passenger seat in my car a month after she died and left it in the side pocket by the door handle afterward. My inner completist pled to even the day’s tally, begging me to extract it with the pinecone, but an aha moment was the victor as I relinquished her essence to the land, assured that in conceding I’d become one with her again at the miraculous par-four on her fifty-fifth birthday. If Sue’s corporeal presence could have corroborated this happenstance, she may have gotten me to recite the Nicene Creed. How in the world was the day’s fourth sign a supernatural absurdity beyond the limits of Carl Jung’s cognizance when he formulated the term synchronicity? You win, Augusta National. You always do.
The eleventh hole fairway was mysteriously quiet in the aftermath, registering as a monument to the landscape’s past, its removal from reality more startling after my apparitional girlfriend had rung my bell, a literal act Sue randomly did for good luck, pantomiming the action if her prop bell wasn’t handy. Nothing uncanny materialized as I inhaled a bag of caramel pecan popcorn at the twelfth hole, but a few days later I would baptize my right hand in Rae’s Creek, the body of water serendipitously flowing through the backyard of the week’s rental home. A couple friends grilled me in jest about why I abstained from drinking it, unaware I’d read a local author’s book about the creek’s history, rumors that groundskeepers dyed the water blue unfortunately verifiable based on my brownish purview. Perhaps that’s why all the animals vanished.
Two grandstand gazes marked the afternoon’s denouement, the first at the fourteenth hole, my new pick for The National’s most undervalued elevated post. The fairway imitates high tide’s ebb and flow while the greenside hillocks are undoubtedly the envy of any skateboarders in attendance, but it’s the magnificent green that might as well be the foundation for a condominium complex, its breadth immeasurable up close. No other property I’ve surveilled doubles as a psychedelic drug capable of altering my perception on each dosage, one inexhaustible quality that hasn’t been overstated by other Masters scribes, the land a work of priceless art as much as it is the sport’s temple. Score a victory for my completionism: the seventeenth grandstand was the lone one yet to comfort my cargo shorts, a sartorial indiscretion I’ll never regret, as my favorite golfer, Rickie Fowler, tipped his cap from the green and said, “AHF! How ya doin’, bro?” You almost believed me, didn’t you? Nonetheless, the same man who would win the exhibition par-three tournament two days later putted on the quadrant nearest my seat, a “bonus Jonas” (to borrow a phrase Sue cracked herself up with) that fueled me back to Berckmans. Next year, Rickie!
It wouldn’t be a trip inside The National without a detour to the main gift shop. Eyeing a green rain jacket lit up my insides, my decade-old black jacket’s zipper on the fritz, but I passed on a pricey fleece blanket, Brian later acquiring it for me along with a miniature gnome as his gift shop thank you items, his instinct for largesse having grown more charitable each year I’ve known him. The two girls at the register struggled to chuckle at my obvious inquiry—“How much would you both rather be asleep right now?”—and said I’d read their minds. One employee’s shirt was untucked as he hunched over a counter; I didn’t want to rat him out to his overlords, but hoped he knew the concessions sold individually wrapped Aleve pills in lieu of employing Masters chiropractors. Eight-and-a-half hours inside was my longest Masters day yet, but on the stroll to claim my checked bags, the Scottish pub, named for course architect Alister MacKenzie, advertised sticky toffee pudding cake as their daily dessert, a must-eat no matter the occasion.
A beautiful, chipmunk-cheeked twenty-something blonde girl named Abi-Grace, the latest belle I’d fall in love with for a half hour, repeatedly apologized that my iced coffee was delayed, the unplanned perfect choice to facilitate gazing at her blue eyes and shimmering tan skin a couple-few extra times. I said a Diet Coke, my fourth, would suffice and debated if I should renege on my sobriety to imbibe a tumbler of Macallan 12, wisely substituting the dessert’s refined sugar as a surrogate to appease my palate. My new hyphenated friend blessed me with small talk for my patience, avowing that she hoped to see me each of the next six days, part of the script she rehearsed in training, but on a day when my imagination ran wild, I temporarily filed it under improvisation.
Four bags, two in each hand, had to be lugged a mile back to my weeklong bedroom, a feat made easier by a recent lunch break regimen curling Sue’s weights to build muscle. Jouissance blazed through me unimpeded as I retired from the bar mulling the pact we’d fashioned while she was sick, Sue quizzing me on how she could hypothetically prove she was still by my side in death, an unselfish postulate I pretended for months would not come true. My answer at the time concerned her juju affording me the ability to make a living doing what I love—writing amateur sociology and media critiques—but the preferred answer unfolded before me all day long, The National serving an ephemeral yet everlasting bounty as its land and Sue seemingly coalesced, the two most powerful forces in my consciousness unified on a day exalting The Universe itself, our fire-fangled crescent friend shining as if it were radiating a brilliant smile akin to Sue’s on the Santa Monica Pier Ferris wheel, the jubilant obituary photo I’d deliberately chosen to delineate her transcendent legacy.
As I departed the South Gate, I fantasized about Sue busy planning next year’s reverse birthday gift for a round suitably scheduled on Tuesday, better known in our couples’ lexicon as Sue’sday. What could she possibly have in mind? Might I find her catering to idealized childhood mementos from her parents, sneaking bites of candy gifted by her mom with one hand and gripping her dad’s fishing pole in the other while lounging beside Rae’s Creek at the twelfth green with the ghosts of Bobby, Cliff, and Ike? Gathered around the ultimate foursome would be The National’s not-so-secret fauna cheering her on to ensnare them a meal while her internal dialogue cautioned them about the brutality of eating animals, the dichotomy of woman eternally on display as she empathized with how being carnivorous was hard-wired into their nature. She’d make one of her customary exceptions certain the proper way to indoctrinate her latest furry brethren to the egalitarian principles anchoring her would require compulsory patience, opting instead to high-four each of them as she cackled in celebration of reeling in her catch, always and forever a silly goose.