March 13, 2003

Dear Julie,

The jazz ballad "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" is one of my favorite songs. Some of the lyrics are as pseudo-hip awful as the title, but the tune is melancholy and stunning at the same time. It is the sound of longing aching to be fulfilled.

This week's warming breezes finally are starting to blow away our winter funk.

I have been such a B.B. King that my friend C.C. sent articles about Seasonal Affective Disorder and another friend referred me to her psychologist. While I was out of town last weekend, DC straightened up my disheveled closet. She hoped it would cheer me up.

I'm not alone. As I entered work one warmish day, a co-worker told me she'd actually seen people smiling.

Suspecting my problem might be nutrition, I excluded wheat and sugar from my diet. That was a feat. The average American diet contains gobs of wheat and sugar. Even most soups contain wheat. All you have to do is start looking at ingredients labels to realize that the world runs on sugar.

I don't know if it's a lack of light or an abundance of sugar that makes people blue. I wonder if my own case has more to do with golf swings than mood swings.

It has been six months since I last played golf. Tendinitis ended my season early, and our Alaskan winter has prevented a return to the course. Tournaments on television have provided only flickering reminders of the joys of golf.

I stare with envy at the players' eyes as they watch the ball just hit dance on the wind, careen far off course or plop softly on a green. Any of those experiences would gladden me.

Being able to propel a tiny ball hundreds of yards into space with a metal club remains a miracle to me. To make one go in the right direction, perhaps at a certain trajectory, requires more miracles of aptitude and grace.

People who don't play golf don't get the magic. They've been to a driving range a few times and failed to hit the ball more than a few feet in the air. They haven't learned the fundamentals, so the result is like someone trying to play the violin without knowing how to tune and how to hold it. You can make do, but you probably never will make music.

Besides watching tournaments, there are two other things golfers do during the hibernation months. They swing clubs at imaginary balls (sometimes they swing imaginary clubs) in the living room and they watch golf infomercials.

Swinging a golf club indoors is tricky. The toll so far in our house is one tray and one light fixture. The infomercial toll so far this winter is one video purporting to tell me "the secret of golf."

None of this is a substitute for the real thing. The real thing floods your senses with sunshine and exhausts your body if you do it right. It thrills you.

Some people look for crocuses as signs of spring. I watch for other signs. The first is for the Dairy Queen in nearby Jackson to reopen. I don't know them but imagine the owners spend their winters in Florida, where you can play golf all year round.

The second sign is the removal of the straw that protects the Bermuda greens from frost at the local municipal course. When the straw disappears, you know spring is here.

Spring can hang you up the most, but golf can hang you up even more.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.