By: Meg Allred Finnerud
A Good Walk Spoiled
I wonder what Mark Twain would have said about the disruption of the Coronavirus not only on golf but every other form of outdoor recreation. We’ll never know, unfortunately. And, despite popular tradition that he originated this quip, it looks pretty likely he died before it ever appeared in print. So sorry to be the bearer of a bit of historical record correcting. Full disclosure: it was a shameless ploy to draw attention to my first column in the early days of a pandemic. It’s also a result of my fascination with golf having come into the center of conversations about life’s essentials. Who knew? I joined the Connecticut State Golf Association just a few years ago to get a registered handicap and learned really quickly how this organization takes its role as golf advocate very seriously. Don’t get me wrong; as a native North Carolinian and a golfer, I love the sport even though I was the C player in a family of four. (My mother has never swung a club.) All of this public debate about golf and confinement and kids stuck at home with parents turned homeschoolers, brings up long ago memories for me.
In response to being cut from the high school basketball team and denied of his first sports love, my brother took up golf. As the holder of the driving license, I spent the summer after my freshman year of college driving him every day to multiple public golf courses (there were many) to play 54 holes a day. In a place where outdoor sports can be played at least ten months a year, my parents quickly learned that threatening my brother with a full day indoors would be the best bet to motivating behavioral change. All too often (as some of you with sports-loving children at home may suspect), this resulted in many divots in the ceiling of our modest ranch in Raleigh and incessant parental reprimands about not swinging golf clubs in the house. (If you think I’m indulging in southern hyperbole for the sake of a good story, I can show you the offending divots in that house where my mother still lives!)
Thoroughly intimidated by my brother’s athleticism and my own lack of height or speed, I joined my mother in a love of music. In these days of necessary confinement and in a town blessed with incredible recreational assets and particularly beautiful parks, I find myself realizing my brother’s pain as I long for a piano in my house to play—something I spent many years and many hours doing for the simple joy of it. All these years later, as the mother of a grown son who could turn a rainy weekend into a desperate search for indoor diversions, I feel the pain and frustration of those of you with children of any age wondering how to survive a necessary quarantine without the pass times we and our children enjoy.
Admittedly unable to join my CSGA counterparts in full-throated belief that golf represents an essential, I can at least offer some comfort to parents hearing too often the dreaded “until further notice” indication for continued family confinement. All of these years later and having played piano rarely, I still keep my nails trimmed just in case a piano comes along. And one has. A Greenwich friend (just before the quarantine) treated me to her own exquisite Steinway grand with an open invitation to return—a prospect that has reignited my long-neglected love. Those many hours of play and my parents’ loving encouragement come back to me now in my time of need to remind me of the simple ways I used to cope.
And, although I did not succumb to my piano teacher’s desire that I major in music, I did sing solos in the Duke Chapel Choir and work all my four years in the Chapel music office where I was once in a private audience while Kiri Takanawa and Isaac Stern warmed up before concerts. Just to tie up the story of my sports-loving, athletically-gifted brother and bring it back to golf, let me just say that all of those ceiling divots paid off. His brilliant approach shot saved the state’s 1-A golf championship in his junior year and his new sport—the result of something he adored being taken from him—resulted in a college scholarship. Take heart, dear friends. Finding our own spiritual resilience and determining what we find essential in these challenging days will serve us well. And, I assure you, in the long run, your children and their inner selves will be better for it. Stay safe and stay home.
Rev. Meg Allred Finnerud, is the newly appointed Executive Director of Greenwich Chaplaincy Services, just completed her tenure as Priest-in-Charge at St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church, Old Greenwich. She previously served as Assistant to the Rector at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Back Country where she was ordained a priest in 2014.
