A Post With No Real Thesis

So I'm packing my bags for the Misty Mountains

Where the spirits go now

Over the hills where the spirits fly

-Led Zeppelin, Misty Mountain Hop

That song popped into my head this morning as I drove P to work. The mist over the hills here in the morning, the sun burning through and sending beams of light across the thick leafy forests, makes for one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever experienced.

Soon, through the miracle of Spotify, Misty Mountain Hop was shaking the cab of the Ridgeline as I jammed down the highway back to Tara.

Not my usual musical faire, a throwback to about the eighth grade in fact, but it felt good. I felt good.

I even commented on this to P last night on our walk, enjoying the cool evening breeze like Yahweh in the garden. P was expressing her worries, a rare switching of roles. I'm usually the one wringing my hands over money, work, the boys, and half a hundred other things rolling around in my head.

But this evening I felt happy, at peace. Everything is going to be okay, or it's not and there's not much I can do about it. Why tarnish this amazing moment, the late afternoon light turning the hills bright orange, the two of us healthy and together, worrying over things that haven't happened yet?

I never trust these flashes of happiness, have only felt them a few times in my life. And yet, with most of life behind me now, living part-time in this beautiful place with someone who completes me, there has arrived a peace which, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, "passeth all understanding". I can't tell you what I'm doing differently. Maybe it's the absence of the constant intellectual affront of living full-time in Trumplandia, or being away from the crowds and traffic and oppressive heat that render the panhandle almost unlivable this time of year.

I don't know. I just need to ride this wave for now.

Perhaps part of my moment of bliss flows from finally taking my very first golf lesson yesterday after work. Matt the golf pro at the Corning Country Club had me out there on the driving range for an hour, patiently and cheerfully working with me on my swing. His approach resonated with me as a pilot, because it's all about checklists, things to watch and feel in sequence with every shot. And by the end of the hour, I was consistently dropping my iron shots in a cluster and probably twenty percent longer than I'd ever hit them before. The driver is still a challenge, but about every third whack off the tee was arrow straight and 230 yards, even with a spent range ball.

I've written of my fraught relationship with golf, how my shortcomings begin to feel like a personal failure, a humiliation that turns self-defeating and leaves P wanting to jump out of the cart and run back to the clubhouse. But I've always known that there is no magic or gift required to play the game adequately, even if no one is going to offer me a tour card. The course is peppered with genuine knuckleheads who are able to consistently hit the ball. Why couldn't I?

Well, now I know. Just run the checklist. And practice. It's no different from any other endeavor. And as the game becomes more enjoyable, the joie de vivre turns into longer, straighter, more consistent shots. I was completely amazed by the end of my lesson, but really I shouldn't have been.

"Let's see if that was just the blind hog finding the acorn," I quipped to Matt, after hammering a six-iron 160 yards in the air.

He laughed. "Hog? I'll have to remember that one. I've always heard 'blind squirrel.'"

"If you live in the South, you're bound to come across feral hogs. We have them on the farm. They root around looking for acorns," I explained, suddenly the expert on porcine metaphors.

I pondered this distinction. Squirrels are cute and harmless. Of course a northerner would use that image. But have you ever encountered a wild hog? Scary stuff. Southerners live in a dangerous world, less civilized in some ways than this place.

A young man feeling his oats might be "wilder than a peach orchard boar." Lewis Grizzard once told the story of a date with a girl so un-comely that he "wouldn't take her to a rat killing." Apparently that's a thing.

My Mississippi relatives had some of the most cringeworthy colloquialisms. Dad used them around the house when I was a boy. Mostly, they had to do with male genitalia.

"Eat your peas, son. They'll make your stecker peck out." Mom winced, as my seven-year-old brain pondered why Popeye ate spinach for big muscles, but we Southerners ate peas for a big . . . well, you know.

It got worse. My friend Meredith, from up around D.C., used to quip that she was "busier than a one-armed paper hanger." Cute, and probably okay even if the over-Woke might suggest it mocked the disabled.

In our house, Dad was "busier than a three-peckered goat in a breeding pen."

Important safety tip--don't ever use that one on an elementary school playground within earshot of one of the adult monitors. After we moved to California in 1974 when I was ten, I quickly became known for my colorful speech, and not in a good way.

If Dad had trouble scooping ice cream that had frozen solid in our freezer, he'd exclaim that it was "harder than a preacher's pecker." He wasn't much for men of the cloth, and I never understood the relationship between preaching the Word and tumescence.

But the very, very worst was when Dad's temper exploded at someone, a regular occurrence at our house. More than once I heard him growl (never shout, which would have been less menacing), "I'm going to slit his sack and run his leg through it."

Oh my. Even at nine I knew that would be a very, very bad thing.

How did we get lost on this rabbit trail?

I guess the takeaway is that the images we use to describe our world, and our relationships with others, say a lot about who we are as a society. Folks up here are just nice, sort of vanilla, peaceful to a fault. Squirrels, not hogs. I grew up in a world that was always a little threatening, on the edge of violence, and overtly libidinous in a way that makes us seem colorful in our adopted home. Those crazy Southerners; fun, but don't cross them, and don't leave them alone with your daughter, particularly if they've been eating peas.

Time to get to work. If all goes well P and I will end the week this evening riding around in a golf cart, as I try to apply what I learned last night.