Carolyn Bucior: Father's Day Memory Of A Hole in One
Moments ago, he said, he had been driving on the highway when a truck clipped off his side-view mirror. Dad had lightening-fast reflexes that had saved him from countless driving accidents, some of which he nearly caused with his Indy-500 driving style. Yet that day he never saw the vehicle to his left side. His peripheral vision had vanished. The cancer had spread to his brain.
This time, the surgeon opened his skull with an electronic cookie cutter of sorts and removed what he could. But the disease was out of the gate, the gowned surgeon told my Mom, my older brother Mark and me post-op, and it was only a matter of time. How much time? Mom asked. Maybe two weeks. Perhaps two months.
With his head wound in layers of white gauze, Dad returned to the tidy home in which he had raised a son and daughter in an era in which a tool salesman’s salary such as his supported an entire family, and bought a four-bedroom house in a new suburb, sprouting from the cornfields northwest of Chicago. He walked through the front door, then perched on the living room couch under a large mounted photo of his two smiling children, a Christmas gift that elicited tears two years prior.
“Get a black Sharpie and a golf ball,” he instructed me, so I did.
“Write ‘Titleist’ right here,” he said, dragging a finger across his forehead and sitting tall on the edge of the couch.
I held the golf ball in my left hand while I copied the distinctive scroll with my right, Dad and me laughing while Mom wept 15 feet away, around the corner in the kitchen. Days later, in the utility room doing laundry, Mom slipped me a note: “I like your spirit, I like your soul, with your sense of humor, we’ll get through this whole.”
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