Golden Girls

Golden Girls

I remember a golf course on rte 16 near Jackson, New Hampshire. The small course was located on the east side of the road and as you drove north from Glen, it appeared on your right just after a wall of trees. A tee sat close to the tarmac in that first corner of the golf course, bordered by the treeline and the roadway.

One summer day, over twenty years ago, I was driving south on rte 16, coming down the hill from Pinkham Notch along with Leon Thibodeau as we returned from a three day backpack to Speck Pond in Maine. As we approached the golf course, ahead and to the left, I could see a group of four older women standing on that tee. All were members of the elder blue-haired generation, and one stood to address her ball while the other three watched from behind and to the side.

I saw that the timing would be perfect.

“I detect some horn action,” I told Leon, and I was now driving directly at them and rapidly getting closer.

The ball-striker pulled her club back and just as she reached the top of her backswing, I pushed my hand down hard on the horn of my truck. The loud blast blew straight ahead at the four of them. Now on her downswing, the golfer's head came up and the ball sliced wickedly off to the right in an evil arc and disappeared into the line of trees that bordered the south side of the course. The four of them then turned as one to stare at the truck. Glancing to my left as I drove by, I saw in a flash four distinct faces, each bearing a different emotion: amusement, worry, curiosity, and anger. Then Leon and I were beyond them, laughing our way down the hill as we continued to the south.

I remembered this story in July of this year when Estelle Getty of “The Golden Girls” passed away at 84, one day shy of her 85th birthday. For some reason, the four faces of those “Golden Girl” golfers back in New Hampshire became vivid in my mind once again. The events of that day on rte 16 transpired in under 10 seconds, and the glance I had of the four women was but a small fraction of that, yet their faces exist forever within some recess of my memory.

They are probably all gone now, but live on in me, and in this brief story.

Laudizen King
Los Angeles
August 2008