Golf: A Gentlemen’s Game

Tim Demetres

I would have never figured that a lazy afternoon playing golf with a friend, would have turned into a bloody mess. Being in fifth grade, I was always finding ways to get into trouble and scrape my knees when my friends and I hung out after school. But this time, it turned out to be a little bit more than a knee scrape.

            I went over to my best friend’s house. We were extremely bored for a while and we came up with an idea. Since it was the beginning of the spring and all the flowers were blooming and the weather was getting warmer and sunnier, we decided that we’d better get back into our groove with the wonderful game of golf.

Will’s house is home to many acres of woods, so we figured that we’d point out specific trees to be our targets and depending on how far away they were and how wide they were, we would determine if they would be a par three, four, or five.

After a great game of woodland golfing, Will and I headed back to his house for a well deserved snack, when suddenly the neighbor’s dog zoomed by right in between us. We thought about just going home for that snack that we so desperately longed for, but our conscience took the best of us.

We chased down the dog and brought it back to the neighbor’s house who was so grateful that we returned the dog. So grateful in fact, that she felt like we didn’t need any kind of reward for rescuing her loyal canine companion. So we trudged our way back to Will’s house performing even more community service on the way back. Will found a patch of large weeds and we decided it would be fun to. He decided that it would be fun to whack all of the weeds at once. He took a large swing and got a lot of the weeds out of the way, however there were a few left. I went over to look at how his swing turned out but as we all know, there were still some weeds left. “Watch out,” he told me. Without hearing I continued down my path. One second later I had received a full blown swing right into my mouth. I realized what had happened and starting running up to the house.

            I was running up his driveway holding my hand over my mouth afraid to look down but as soon as I did, I saw a blood covered t-shirt and some newly painted red shoes on my feet. I busted through the door with Will leading the way. I heard him yelling something to his mom, but I couldn’t make out what it was. His mother took the blood like I had only gotten a paper cut and continued to stay calm despite the amount of gore in her kitchen. I heard her say that I had lost a tooth. My front, adult sized tooth. Joan, Will’s courageous mother, had Will run outside and find my tooth. Contrary to the odds, he found it and ran it back within 25 seconds. Joan soaked the tooth in milk to preserve the calcium.

She then proceeded to shove the tooth back into its socket. Somehow, it stayed. Meanwhile my own mother was on the way over to rush me to the hospital. When my mother arrived, she flipped out. She was completely freaked out by the blood. Along the way to the hospital we stopped at the dentist which was much closer, to see if the dentist could do anything quicker than the hospital could. The dentist told us that she couldn’t do any work until I had my bottom lip all stitched up because it was busted open.

            Later at the hospital, I found out that I had chipped five of my teeth, busted a hole in my lip, and popped a tooth out, the same one Joan put back in with the courage of a thousand men. All of my present-day teeth are the original teeth from that day, but have had some major work on them.