This place is made for kids.
There are no sharp edges, nothing to scrape or cut, no nails, splinters, burrs or broken glass. The brightly colored posts can be walked around but are not easily climbed, colors are primary, and water falls from the triangular sails like a cool rain. The shapes here are organic and you can hide behind,or touch to your heart’s content.
Children’s voices are amplified and they are involved in their play, walking and running, under, and through the water. Their voices make a soothing melody. Besides the sails that give shade,there is a green sea serpent in the middle of this installation and a maroon lighthouse that gives the park its nautical theme.
The kids are happy this morning, inquisitive, co-operative, playful.
Temperatures will rise into the nineties with no rain forecast for the next several weeks, and, if I’m a kid, I can’t think of a better place to be while my adults are acting like bigger kids somewhere else.
Golf, as invented in the Scottish countryside, started with sticks and a ball.
Those old guys hit the little hand made wood ball for a distant hole dug in the ground, added traps and water later to make the game harder. They created a rule book and came up with tournaments and prizes to keep competition interesting and playing the game seem more noble than it is. Hitting a small ball with a stick with a club head, and getting it to go where you want it to, is a devilishly difficult skill.
Frisbee golf has recently become popular with the younger crowd. There is a frisbee golf course around this Fountain Hills Lake and it features eighteen designated holes. There are no traps but the goal is the same – get the frisbee around the course in the fewest amount of strokes, or throws.
These guys are practicing this morning for their Sunday tournament today, and, by empty picnic benches, competitors are stretching, taking their frisbees out of Wal Mart tote bags and wiping them down with a clean rag.These two contestants tell me there are different sized frisbees for the different shots they have to make in a round. They let me try my hand and toss one of their plastic plates at a close by practice hole they are using to warm up before their tournament begins. I give a toss and manage to land the frisbee inside the little upright basket where it is supposed to go.
There is room in this world, I believe, for ” frisbee golf. ”
After a round of ” frisbee golf ” I expect all these ” golfers” will easily be found at their ” nineteenth hole ” just as we go there after our rounds on our local courses.
Drinking predates golf by thousands of years, and explaining why your score was so high is always easier with a cold beer, chips and dip.
Whether it is real golf, or frisbee golf, GOLF is still, since it was made up, a four letter word.
Even if golf tests your temper and ego, it easily beats work, still another four letter word we all LOVE to HATE.
At night, when it is cool, Santo Domingo neighborhood people, in the Colonial District, congregate in front of the local mini market and watch sports on a big screen television.
This group of grown men and women, on the closest corner to the the LaPuerta Roja Guesthouse, are watching an American basketball game on television this midweek evening. Some men are on their cell phones, others are talking about something other than the game in progress, the rest of the congregation are watching equally grown men in under- shorts running up and down a hardwood court, tossing a ball into a basket, and getting paid millions.
Anything that gets people out of their house and visiting their neighbors can’t be all bad.
Sports and competition run deep within all cultures.
We all like to be entertained and mildly challenged but when things get too serious or too hard, many take their ball and go home to bed..
Spectator sports have long been one of the world’s biggest enjoyments.
Sitting out at night under the stars watching a big screen television on a working night, and not spending a dime, is beginning to make a lot of sense.
The old and new world co-exist, sometimes shake hands, but more often ignore one another.
These kids are fundraising for a trip to Phoenix, Arizona for an International Hip-Hop Competition.
These seniors,sitting on green crates in the park,close to them, are seeing their peace and quiet taken over by the new world crashing in like rapping waves,
The Indians that saw Columbus might have felt the same way this old generation might be feeling right now.
In this world, there is room for everybody, but we need plenty of benches with some space between them.
Games of choice on the neighborhood streets seem to be dominoes and chess but I have also seen checkers and card games with money on the table.
This street corner game, in progress,even has an official scorekeeper who shouts out the score at the end of each game and visits his cell phone often. Some of us pedestrians stop to watch. This is likely an ongoing game between friends who have money and/or bragging rights involved.
The men don’t talk much. They slap their dominoes on the board when they make a play. When they shuffle the dominoes to start each new game in the series, it sounds like feet hitting the floor in a salsa dance.
It is quitting time, with darkness starting to move in, and the most conspicuous thing missing is rum.
When this tournament is over, the players and onlookers will go into the nearby colmado and take care of drinking business.
It doesn’t cost much to sit on this corner. When one tournament is over, different players take seats at the table and start another. There is luck involved as well as skill. You can have good dominoes but it you don’t play them right they aren’t worth a damn
No one says anything about my picture taking, and, I wouldn’t expect them too.
These guys wives, and girlfriends, know where they are.
This morning, in the rough, I don’t look for my errant drive. One of our foursome’s little dog, Winston, was bit by a rattler and died on another course a few weeks ago. A golf ball,even a new one, is not worth coming face to face with a poisonous viper.
Winston 1 never barked while we were putting though he sometimes ran up to the cup and looked down inside it to see what we were all looking at, then gave us a funny look when he didn’t see anything.
We all miss Winston 1, but Gary has already found Winston 2, a little bigger than his predecessor, looking much the same, but with a different personality..
Winston 2 spends most of his time, on the golf course,sleeping in his carry cage and exploring only when Gary lets him out on a leash.There are plenty of predators on a golf course and some of them have two legs.
None of us want to see a Winston 3.
Seeing a grown man cry is humbling.
The odds for shooting a hole in one,for the average golfer,on par 3;s, are 12500 to 1. For professional golfers, the odds drop to 2500 to one
In a tournament at the Tanoan Country Club, Scott beat the odds on the Acoma nine, #3, a 154 yard par 3 and shot his first hole in one after years of playing.
Using a seven iron, my iron shot was high, straight, hit the frog hair in front of the green, bounced, rolled towards the pin, and fell into the cup.
At first, none of our foursome realized what had happened but confirmed it on the green.
Now, when I hit an iron into any green, I expect my shot to fall into the cup.
Once you see you can do something, the odds of doing it again, increase.
The odds against me getting another hole in one seem suddenly bigger than they used to be.
Does shooting a hole in one make you a professional?
River Falls has a make believe golf course in a cow pasture not far from the Texas Palo Duro Canyon.
This area has been transformed from grazing to ranchettes. With an airport, five acre lots, utilities and roads, the development attracts people with money who want to get away from big city life. Plenty of city folks make huge money in urban jungles but like their leisure with their horses in wild open spaces.
The River Falls Country Club has a small unattended clubhouse, a short nine holes with raised indoor outdoor carpet greens, bumpy fairways of prairie grass, no traps or trees, a steady West Texas wind.
Alan and I watch out for prairie dog holes and rattlesnakes and navigate the course somewhere north of par. If you hit short of the green your ball bounces back towards you. If you hit the green your ball bounces off the green and you have a tough chip coming back.
Those old Scottish guys, who invented the game, played on courses like this in weather like this. It isn’t hard to see them savoring scotch whiskey after a round with the elements.
When I think of the equipment they used and the scores they achieved, I am glad they aren’t playing today.
We wouldn’t have a fighting chance, on the course, or at the bar.
In the 1960’s, a most favored slogan was ” Make Love, Not War. ”
Their were lots of babies conceived in hippie vans as the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane fanned anti war sentiment, wore flowers in their hair and had meetings with Indian gurus. Flower children blew bubbles in parks and gave roses to hardened cops wearing helmets and sunglasses.
It wasn’t hard to be against a war that sent home young men in caskets.Communism wasn’t likely to swim across the ocean and take over our cities but Washington D.C. wasn’t taking any chances. North Vietnam, backed by still Communist China, was trying to consume South Vietnam and our American military machine was going to plug the hole in their border.
50,000 American dead later, the war ended with a whimper.
The 1960’s have returned without tie die T shirts, beards and hippie glasses. At the Punkin Chunkin Festival we have cowboy boots, pickups with tow hitches,levi’s and Copenhagen snuff secured in back pockets.
Shooting pumpkins is about as peaceful as it gets.
” Make love, not babies, ” is our newest generational slogan.
I guess some have finally found a war they think they can win.
Not loving babies is a hard pill to swallow.
Bennett’s Amusements moves in the day before an event, fences off their area at the Festival, back up huge equipment trucks, rides, and promotions. Agile carnies pick up wrenches and assemble a superstructure of steel connected by hundreds of feet of electric cables to a main generator run by diesel gas. Plain ole country dirt turns into an amusement venue.
In this circus there aren’t any animals or strongmen, no bearded ladies or human freaks. These are all protected species now, and midway visitors in 2017 are mostly interested in rides created by country bumpkins with time on their hands and a love for machinery.
Bennett’s, a small time outfit, moves across country, handling amusements in fields, shopping center parking lots and county fairgrounds.The king of the circus, Ringling Brothers, shut down last year and all that is left of the industry is ma and pa operations like this one.
Kids, these days, don’t run away to join the circus. Many just want to sing rap, get interviewed on television, and drive a nice muscle car..
I don’t know what is coming to replace Bennett amusements but it is not likely going to be something I like.
What people do to amuse themselves tells you who they are.
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