Currently Chasing: The distance from here to there

I’m not really big into sports. When I was growing up I was picked last for most teams, and sometimes just not picked at all. Literally there was a time when a dude chose to play with a handicap of six against seven rather than pick me to even out the teams. I guess no one being there to retrieve the ball would have been about the same as me being there to not retrieve the ball. However, I was always a big fan of the men and women who played sports so naturally, I became a cheerleader. But the fact remains to this day that if all teams in all sports just kind of went away, my life would not be affected at all.

And that brings us to golf.  My bf loves golf. If he could marry his driver I’m sure he would have. In fact, golf already takes half of his income, so in a way, he is married to golf, and cheating on golf with his driver. And also cheating on his driver with his putter. And let’s not even talk about the wedge!  He loves golf so much that when he deployed to Iraq he refused to leave his golf clubs at my house for fear that if something happened to our relationship while he was gone, I may take it out on his damn clubs!

I don’t love golf, or even understand the obsession with spending $900 on a stick. But last night when he suggested going to the OG (Olive Garden) I knew he was buttering me up for a trip to GG (Golf Galaxy) and that translates to a long night where I stand around pretending to care while watching him feel the texture of every single shirt in the store to find one that breaths and has perfectly placed sleeve seams.  

He also likes to examine, pick up, and swing tons of different clubs. After he swings them he says, “that feels good.” Then he puts it back. Then picks up another one and swings it and says, “that feels good…and very light.” What drives me bat shit though is that he never buys anything. He has the money, and he has the desire…but he is also a bit frugal, and the thought of spending that much money on anything is a decision he doesn’t make lightly. It took him five years to finally buy a new car. He identified the car he wanted in 2007. Spent all of 2008 doing online research. Test drove it 150 times in 2009. He finally bought the car in 2010 at a 0% interest rate. And he still isn’t 100% satisfied that he made the right choice.

I decided I wanted a new car on a Monday. Shopped on a Tuesday. Purchased my new car on a Friday.

So here we are at Golf Galaxy. He has me look at a club and then another all the while explaining the differences between the two.

“See. This one has a thinner club face than that one. This one is also very straight. Currently mine are closed. I used to draw to the right, so I used a corrective club. But now I’ve learned to hit straighter and need a new club. But not today. Maybe another day when I’m ready to up my level. I need to hit these clubs on the range to make sure they are what I want. I’ll come back tomorrow and not buy this club again.”

He wants to me care. He wants me to be passionate about this ‘sport.’ Clearly, he wants too much.

However, I do try. So we are standing there and he is looking at some clubs (that he won’t buy) and I look past him at a sign, and I begin to read it out loud.

“Are you still using Aluminum?” I read to him in the form of a question.

He says, “no.”

So continuing to read the sign I say, “Are you now using forged component? “

He looks at me with a light I have never seen before, right before realizing that there is no way in hell I know what forged component is. Then says, “Where the heck are you getting that from?”

There was a moment there though…where I was speaking his language on his level. And then it was gone. So after we walk the entire perimeter of the store, after he looks at all of the spikes on each pair of shoes. After he hits 20 or so balls with different clubs, after he checks out the hats and the socks, we finally head toward the door.

Then we stop in front of the glass counter. Inside are golf GPS devices. There are courses from all over the world entered into this GPS so that golfers can determine the distances to the flags so they know which club to use to cover the yardage. He has been talking about getting one of these for ages. He downloaded an APP on his iphone … but his phone often dies before the end of his game…and if I happened to text during the game, reading my text kicks him off the APP. So needlesstosay it’s not very convenient. And also, he’s afraid, not as accurate as he would like.

There is another device he’s been raving about that doesn’t require constant updates as more courses become available. It’s not a GPS. Instead you aim at the flag, or whatever mark you’d like to find out the distance to, and you click a button and the screen tells you the distance to that object. It even takes into account hills and high and low points. But it’s kind of expensive and something he will have to think about for the next seven years before committing to the purchase.

So I tell the guy to wrap it up and I buy it for him.

Within seconds, it doesn’t matter that I have no interest in learning to golf. It doesn’t matter that I don’t actually know what forged component is, and it doesn’t even matter that the one time I went golfing with him I chose to sit in the cart and text the entire day. Nope, none of that mattered. This one purchase really brought us together. I was able to embrace his obsession with golf, and for once he wasn’t mad at my inability to resist an impulse buy.

We spent the rest of the evening doing two things…

1.       Doing internet research to make sure we got the best possible deal on this device.

2.       Figuring out the distance from the couch to everything else in the house.

However, without that machine I knew the distance between me and his heart was 0.