“The light’s on, but nobody’s home!”  “Where were you just now?  You seemed a million miles away!” “I TOLD you about that yesterday, but you obviously weren’t paying attention!”  Sound familiar?  Have you ever said any of these things to someone or has anyone ever said them to YOU?  Well . . . I have, and I have.

I can’t help it.  My mind wanders — a lot.  I’ve stopped into grocery stores on numerous occasions for a few things but am easily distracted by some fancy display offering free samples or the seductive aroma of freshly brewed coffee wafting through the air from the embedded Starbuck’s.  I find myself back in my car sipping a grande non-fat no foam double mocha latte without the items I intended to purchase in the first place!  Other times I sit, wrapped in a comfy blanket reading but I have to turn back several pages and reread them because I’ve lost track of the storyline! I’ve even double washed or double conditioned my hair due to inattention to the task at hand! I don’t seem to focus on what I’m doing for very long, so you can only imagine what I’m like on the golf course  . . . for eighteen holes!

I know I’m not alone with my attention deficit issue, though.  Many of my friends have nodded in agreement that a round of golf should only include fifteen holes MAX! After putting out on Hole #15, we’ve succumbed to inertia.  It’s not that we’re not interested, it’s just that our thoughts have been hijacked.  We’re planning dinner or rushing to finish our round for bridge or any number of other reasons.  How professional golfers can stay wholly focused, hole after hole, shot after shot, putt after putt is truly the Eighth Wonder of the World!

Last summer, three of my friends and I committed to improving our golf performance once and for all.  We enrolled in a clinic consisting of four sessions with a female professional golfer who had the extra qualifications of a Masters degree in clinical psychology!  We hit the Mother Lode!  Abby had the experience of playing on tour, she could head-shrink us AND she’s a woman!  Her being female sealed the deal in our selecting her as our teacher.  She KNOWS how thoughts dance through our minds, just like stones skipping across a pond!  One minute we’re concentrating on our next golf shot and club selection but in less than a split second, we’re thinking about what color nail polish we’ll choose at our next manicure or gasping at how fat our shadows look!

“O.K., Ladies,” Abby began in our first classroom session, “one round of golf takes around four hours, give or take right?”

“Right!” we all agreed, proud of ourselves for knowing something about the game.

“What happens to us,” she continued with professorial wisdom, “is that we lose focus over that long period of time! That’s NORMAL!”

<Oh! My Gosh!  This woman is AMAZING!  She thinks we’re NORMAL!>

But then as if on cue my thoughts skipped . . . <But wait a second . . . she just met us!  Let’s hope she doesn’t change her mind by the time this is all over!> 

Session 1, “Focus and Thought Management,” was exactly what we needed.  Just think: Each golf shot requires only 20 seconds of pure focus.  For a player consistently scoring 92-ish (like Yours Truly), only 31 minutes of intense concentration is needed over that 4-hour period.  So . . . what happens during the other 3 hours and 29 minutes?

Abby provided us with a variety of focus-driven strategies, visual images to picture during our pre-shot routines, physical cleansing breath techniques and positive self-affirming mantras to chant silently just before hitting the ball.

“After you’ve made your shot,” she continued, “go ahead and chat a little as you walk down the fairway!”

<I LOVE this Pro!  She just gave us permission to think and talk about something other than golf while we’re actually PLAYING golf!>

<Things are lookin’ up!!  I only have to be serious for 31 minutes!  The rest of the time I can have fun and joke around!>

This was JUST what my Inner Voices needed to hear — well, The Comic, anyway.  The Coach and The Critic had been confined to 1/2 hour’s worth of “air time,” but The Comic just got THREE HOURS AND TWENTY-NINE MINUTES of liberty!

An entire year has passed since that enlightening lecture, and, being the good student that I’ve always been, I have to boast that I’ve gotten pretty good at focusing for 31 minutes over a 4-hour period.  I’ve ALSO become profusely accomplished in effectively using the 3-hour and 29-minute recess!

“O.K., Everybody! Shut up!  I have to focus for 20 seconds!” I demand as I assess my shot, quieting all conversation.

And with that, words drop mid sentence.  Everyone and everything immediately stops as if in the midst of a game of Freeze Tag.  Only the caddy is in motion, setting down the golf bag to select the appropriate club.  Sunglasses lower over my eyes, my breathing deepens, making me sound like Jethro Tull’s Aqua-Lung, my leg and arm muscles tense as my fingers interlace gripping the club with clear, confident conviction.  I am a human Transformer, morphing from a woman wearing a brightly obnoxious argyle golf skirt into a fierce Decepticon Golf Machine . . . for 20 seconds.

“There!” I say as I hand my club back to the caddy, “what were were talking about?”

“Is you all going to the Super Bowl party at the Club next week?” asked Inga, resuming the conversation.

“IS you all going . . .?” I ask, stressing her error in subject-verb agreement, “Really?  IS you all going?”

In her defense, Inga is an Austrian, making English her second language.  She should be cut some slack in her usage of the language.  But then again,  I, forever an English teacher, just canNOT stand some of the errors that I hear.  Listening to incorrect grammar, to my ears, is worse than a whole classroom full of students dragging their fingernails down a chalkboard.

“‘You’ can be either singular or plural.  It’s a pronoun.  You HAVE to use the plural form of ‘to be’ with it whether or not you are asking one person or more!” I corrected.

“Oh.  Well then, could I say, ‘Is EVERYBODY going to the Super Bowl party?'” she asked.

“YES!” I said, believing that she was really interested in a mini-English lesson before it was her turn to focus on golf for 20 seconds.

“Why?  ‘Everybody’ means a lot of people,” she asked, a little confused.

“Ya, but it’s a SINGULAR pronoun.  You have to use a singular verb!” I clarified.

Inga lit a cigarette, blew some smoke toward my face, gave me a quasi-blank stare and said,

“F*k you!”

“O.K.!  Great! Now see?  We’re getting somewhere!” I complimented her, chuckling at her response, “You used an imperative sentence, and you used it correctly!  You inverted the subject and the verb to form a command! Well done! Congratulations!”

And with that, she attended to her next shot, bringing her focus to the forefront.  How hard it must be for Inga!  She not only has to battle the stones of thought skipping through her mind, but she also has to fight stones of language nuances that tiptoe through many of her conversations!  Noun/Pronoun and Subject/Verb agreement were two of these.

As an aside, I quietly whispered to the caddy,

“By the way, as long as we’re talking about grammar, it’s not ‘Mrs. West, where’s your putter at?’ but rather, ‘Mrs. West, where’s your putter?’ NEVER end a sentence with a preposition!”

Shaking his head and laughing, he said, “Is THIS what White women from small towns talk about?  Grammar?”

Because my grammar lesson to the caddy continued through Inga’s shot, I didn’t see where her ball landed.  Neither did she (a clear sign that she had kept her head down).  The other two in the foursome hadn’t seen it either.  They were headed toward their own balls and focusing on THEIR pre-shot routines.

Inga pointed in the direction she THOUGHT her ball went, sending us all out in search of it.

“It’ll be easy to find,” she said, “it’s got gravity all over it!”

“What?!  ALL of our balls have gravity all over them!  It’s what happens when you hit a ball: it flies through the air and because of gravity, it drops down and lands!” we told her.

“Didn’t you ever study Isaac Newton and his Theory of Relativity?  He’s the guy who’s famous for all those laws of motion and universal gravitation things!” I said, overjoyed that I finally had the opportunity to use the only thing I remembered from high school physics.

“NOOOOO!!  GRAAAAAAAAVITY!” she repeated, expecting that lengthening the word and increasing the volume on her pronunciation would increase our understanding.  “It’s got lots of blue and red lines on it that I made with my Sharpie . . . it looks like a gang member painted markings on it!”

“Good god, Inga,” I said, “You mean GRAFFITI, not GRAVITY!”

<Clearly, she’s just skipped another stone . . . across the ocean!>

“Found it!” exclaimed the caddy, nearly doubled over with laughter, “I know it’s the right ball because it’s got GRAVITY all over it!”

I successfully resisted launching into another English lesson, this one on correct pronunciation, but thought better of it.  Instead, I silently reviewed Abby’s instructions to us about focus, visualization and confidence during a round of golf.  Conscious attention to the mechanics of the mental game awarded me with a steady rhythm of 20-second focus, execution of steady shots and, to my great happiness, good scores.  A few more holes of minimal idle chatter passed but as usual, when something seems too good to be true, it usually is.  Our round of golf was in its final quarter, leaving us with only four holes to go.  The afternoon was wearing on, the air was cooling rapidly, and our shadows were lengthening.

All four balls on the green, we began putting; the ball furthest from the hole to be played first, and so on in.  As each player read the green from her position, the others moved to get out of her line or peripheral view.

“I’ll move over here,” offered Inga, “to get my shade out of your way.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

<I failed to notice she’d just tossed another stone!>

“Move way over here. See? When I come over here, my shade comes with me and it doesn’t darken your path anymore!” she explained.

“Oh!!  You mean your SHADOW!” I said, in full comprehension.

“Yes. ‘Shade,’ ‘shadow,’ what difference does it make?” she asked, rhetorically.  “I always get those two words confused!”

Another couple of holes memorialized on the scorecard, the four of us marched down the last fairway when stones of both types were tossed, one being a random thought; the other being an English as a Second Language one.

“If you guys were going to get a tutu, what would you get?” asked Inga.

“A pink one . . . like the ballerina in Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” wears,” I said, not having to think very long about the kind I’d like.

“A TUTU!” clarified Inga, “like the burn-in-your-skin kind! If you got one of THOSE, what would you get?”

That was it.  I dropped by 3-wood on the ground.  There was absolutely no hope for any of us finishing out the hole.  Even the caddy couldn’t contain himself.  There was such an uproar of uncontrolled laughter from our fairway that golfers on nearby holes stopped to wait for an acceptable level of decorum to return to the area.

I’m guessing that we’ll all be back in Abby’s clinic again this summer.  Despite having passed through her first seminar and improving our mental focus, it’s still blatantly obvious that stones are still skipping through our minds and through the green!