The Halcyon Days are Gone

You’re back in your hometown, and it’s been a while. The people who own your childhood home have ripped out the basketball hoop and painted the whole thing green. The trees are taller, the 7-Eleven is now a bike store and somehow that terrible Chinese restaurant survives. You find yourself happy that the Chinese restaurant made it, though you are faced with the unnerving realization that this is still what many people in your hometown think constitutes great Chinese food.

The high school football field, site of so many big plays and bigger dreams, looks like it somehow shrunk. There are times, both here today and in your new town, when you find yourself pining for those long-ago days when life was seemingly carefree, without worry or obligation. Then you remember how you had to pump yourself up every morning just to go to school. All those heartbreaks, all that homework.

Thomas Wolfe was right when he wrote You Can’t Go Home Again. Our realities are colored by perception, by our minds wanting things to be a certain way. You don’t remember the past; you remember your chosen memories of the past.

You go back to your golf course. The one you worked at, where you had a crush on that cart girl. The one you played countless times. The practice area looks exactly the same, though your short game these days feels worse. The trees that line the narrow fairways, which were en vogue at the time, have grown larger and wider. With the benefit of new equipment, you could probably outdrive your teenage self. But when you need to hit a 20-yard fade to get to that guarded green, you’re not quite flexible enough to get the necessary curve on the ball.

It all comes flooding back while walking the course: the trash-talking rounds with your buddies, that time you holed out from the fairway on the last hole to beat that one friend who could never beat you, the other friend who could bomb it 280 and later turned pro. Rounds with your father, your siblings, your teammates on the ragtag high school golf team.

The course, built in the early 1990s, feels of its time, which means it’s outdated. The bunkers are circular and lost their edges years ago. And there’s still that ridiculous one shaped like the silhouette of a comic book character. You remember it being gimmicky then, and it’s even stupider now. You congratulate your teenage self on being right about a few things.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, many of us are in better places as adults. We are more experienced, equipped to handle life’s curveballs, and there are more people and love in our lives. The golf is better too: Today we place a priority on more walking, more width, more attention and money paid to course design and upkeep. Technology allows more players of all abilities to enjoy the game longer. Oh, and the clothes! Gone are the boxy shirts that choked rather than breathed, the pleated shorts made of thick cotton, the ill-fitting, ugly hats. The game feels more inclusive and less pretentious.

In golf and life, I’m learning to drop the past and focus on the future. Keep and cherish what is good, but also change and improve what isn’t. To be OK treating nostalgia for what it is: a myth, an out-of-date player searching for a home course that no longer exists.

Jim Sitar has been a Broken Tee Society member since 2019.