THE STORY OF YESTERDAY

Reader, I fell for it. I took the bait. My stupid little heart— it looked that Sciencenter worker in the eye, fluttered at the rainbow of neon rubberized golf-balls in the caddy behind him, and saw the glint of goodness, of fun, of shared delight and enjoyment. It seized my credit card and pried it out for the sweet and shaggy teen. My heart is so terribly unruly.

It would be $7.50 per player, he said, kindly, and I barely managed not to reply, “yes but it should be a lot less, because number one we are such frequent fliers here that we should have a bathroom stall named after us, maybe with a snack bar feature, and number two, I happen to know that the volcano hole is partially clogged with rather large rocks.” <blows bangs off forehead, stares. Cobble drops out of one of the children’s pockets and thuds onto the carpeted floor>.

It was probably the high fructose corn syrup and red dye #40 of the 80s. The mini-golf places— the soft-serve ice cream— o help me— those glistening, whipped and dolloped sugars, the recollection of them, crusted in rainbow sprinkles and dripping onto my slight and sweaty, about-to-be-sunburned wrist— the specters of these gorgeous toxins had coupled in my mind with the remembrance of the putt-putt itself, and so far elevated the overall experience as to ultimately file it under “Such a Beautiful Time” in my consciousness at large, rather than the more accurate “Agony Rewritten By Snack Dopamine.”

I paid the challengingly friendly Sciencenter employee and we set about the three-week-long process of allowing each child to select a color for their ball. When that process was complete, and the employee had grown his first beard, we entered the second, apparently necessary process, wherein the employee explained to my children how to hold the tiny clubs. They each appeared to be partially listening, which surprised me, and then picked up the metal bludgeoning tools and began swinging them, ambidextrously and indiscriminately, indoors, which didn’t surprise me, while I thanked the worker with one side of my mouth and chased the small weaponized ambulators out of the building with the other.

I hate this, Child A announced, before we’d stepped on the first plasticky green patch. I don’t know how to do it, the same child explained. Well, I replied, not knowing how to do it is how everyone feels until they’ve tried it. We have to go try it to find out more!

By this time, Child B had made it completely out of the area to the other side of the course and was jumping up and down on the turnstile feature about three miles away, yelling something about a CHICKIE EGG FACTORY. No rocks! I yelled to the far-off Child B, because I could see the hunger in its face, the itching fingers, could hear the siren song of the tidy little tunnels in the “educational” putt-putt sculptures just calling for a good cobble-clogging.

This is awful, said Child A, and sat down on the astro-turf in front of a collected, masked, genial family in line behind us. Hi, I said to the Normals, We aren’t playing by any rules at all here, so please let me know when you’d like to move through. Polite, subdued chuckles.

By now Child B has clogged the south side of the Turnstile feature with cobbles. I pick up the half-banana I’ve peeled and jammed partly into collapsed Child A’s mouth. Child A wants my puffer vest because it is cold. I give it my puffer vest and ask it to please get some more banana into itself as I turn to move towards cobble-goblin to deter and redirect it. Child A moans through a mouthful of banana as I depart and begin to sweat. It is somehow suddenly 75 degrees and humid with hard-beating full sun and no shade to be found on the putt-putt course. It had been about 4 degrees and sleeting just minutes before. This is the month of May in Ithaca, NY.

I hear my keys fall out of my puffer vest pocket as Child A relocates its angry, despairing sprawl to a slightly different patch of turf, also in front of the Normals, who are murmuring. I remind myself the Normals are in charge of their own life, and dismiss with difficulty the impulse to protect them from the inconvenience of my life sprawled large over the publicly accessible torture-course.

I pry two of the cobbles out from the Turnstile’s south-facing tunnel and can see a third in there too far for the butt-end of the extra-small bludgeoner (which Child B has been licking norovirus off of while it waited for me to arrive) to reach. I enlist Child B’s tiny hand to reach from the upper side of the putt-putt tunnel and retrieve the final cobble. Child B and I are high-fiving over the successful clog-removal when Child A moans again from afar and we turn to see it mounted on a xylophone, its ball racing off into the weeds and its bludgeoner raised above its head. OK HAVE FUN AT CHICKIE EGG FACTORY **BUT WITH THE BALL INSTEAD OF ROCKS**, I say, and depart the north half of the course to go try and salvage the day for the xylophone catastrophizer.

Xylophone: Par 3

Things proceed like this until the sweat between my boobs makes a wooly swamp of the MERINO SWEATER I chose to wear this morning. I pull it off, tie it around the bloated waist (god, what did I get into last night? Was it another honey-toast jag? 2/3 of a block of gruyere? What have you demanded of my exhausted willpower now, you poor insatiable heart?) and I turn my pasty, pinking, overheated potato arms to the blare of the sky. My tank top is sopped in a heart shape on my upper ribs, and it bears the oil stain, over the left nipple, of some drippy snack that bought me twelve seconds of solace yesterday.

I find ways to put my body behind my children’s bodies, pry their incredibly strong little flippers off the rubberized bludgeoner stalks and replace them in a more golf-ish way, under my own hands, and eke out a breathy, sing-song “one, two….” to show them how to ghost a hit, to practice the upcoming swing before doing it…. and then, this “good faith effort” completed, I pivot, momfully, to begging them to please just use their hands.

But the miniaturaized weapons they carry are too seductive, and they are set on “using” them to “do golf,” so they employ several trademark “moves” for the next raggedy-ass twenty-eight minutes, until I think of a way to bribe them back indoors. (Something about bubble wands.)

That’s it. I’m not going to lob any lofty insight over the fence on my way out. Friends, there’s no learning from the horrors of putt-putt.

Yet. I find that eventually, somehow, learning may uncover itself, if we can find ways to get out of the way. It’s our job, some days, just to keep the hand-sani in the most accessible pocket; sometimes we just gotta make it home, rest our bodies and give them the cheese they cry out for, so that we can wake up and find out how the night has shaped, or colored—or maybe, if one is lucky, embraced— this struggle.