Borland's

It’s Father’s Day, and I’m watching the final round of what used to be known as the Bing Crosby Golf Tournament at Pebble Beach, a landmark course celebrating its one hundredth year. I’ve mowed the lawn and will smoke my pipe on the stoop this evening on the lookout for the full moon and brood just a little on the passing of time and the unequal fates of landmarks.

The summerscape of my childhood is gone now to wrack and ruin, the remnants of the par-3 built by my father and my avuncular godfather in 1960. Uncle Dickie died years ago. Many now, most golfers of those days are dead; long extinguished their cigarettes and their occasional victory cigars, King Edwards, R.G. Dun, Dutch Masters, White Owl Invincibles. They’ve all been vinced, vanquished, except my father, whose handiwork now passes away. Golf is comatose here, though the course is strangely more alive than ever. Nine fairways are wildly overgrown with clover, broad leaf, cinque-foil, thistle, hardwood seedling. Nine greens preserve only faint outlines among these prolific new meadows. Eight flags lie flat in perfect disuse, marking nothing but demise. Number 1, alone, remains upright, but slanting irrevocably earthward. That landscape, once of seemingly endless and objective summer, is ending, with only its inscape surviving in memory. Though more than a little sad to me, its return to nature nevertheless has real beauties. If Borland’s becomes real estate, alas, sections of a bedroom community, those beauties will disappear as well—for me anyway. But perhaps, children, or a single child, will find their own edenic garden here on the lawn in what will become their own backyard.