Kevin, Tunxis Plantation, Sunday, April 6, 2014. That’s Hacker (real name) in the red jacket, on the right, studying our receipts. In a little while, you’ll hear more about the foursome in the background on the left.

We had nine guys at Tunxis Plantation Country Club on Sunday, and we played a game that we invented eight or nine years ago, called Sons, Fathers, and Grandfathers. Nobody was actually related to anybody else (except Barney and Stanley, sort of). We just went by age: the three youngest guys versus the three guys in the middle versus the three oldest guys. We originally got the idea because Nick (who’s in his mid-seventies) often tells waitresses and beer-cart girls that Gene (who’s about eighty) is his father.

I’m four months older than Tim, so I ended up on the Fathers, with Hacker and Barney, and Tim ended up on the Sons, with Kevin and Doug. We must have been goofing around, or something, because the starter let the four guys on the left in the photo at the top of this post sneak out ahead of us. They were the kind of guys who walk fifty yards from their cart to have a look at their ball, then walk back to their cart to get a club, then hit a shank. We ended up doing a lot of waiting:

Two of the guys in the slow foursome were especially slow: the one on the far left and the one on the far right in the photo below:

The guys on the right seem to be looking far into the distance, but this tee shot was actually very short–too short to be measured in yards.

On one hole, the drive of the guy in the red jacket and shorts stopped safely in front of a water hazard, which was thirty or forty yards in front of the tee. He drove up to check it out:

A little later, the same guy hit the shot of the day. You kind of had to be there, but the guys on the right in the photo below are laughing hysterically because the guy in the shorts and the red jacket has just hit his tee shot maybe eight yards, into one of the gold tee markers. The guy on the far left, who is partly hidden by the first cart, is bending over to examine pieces of the shattered marker:

If the guy in the red jacket and shorts was actually trying to hit the marker, his aim was above average. I don’t know whether that’s his tee. Could be. If so: again, well done.

We finished eventually, and the winners, as usual, were the Grandfathers, who had complained so much on the first tee that we let them play from the senior tees and have handicap strokes on par 3s. Never again. But everything sort of worked out, because the two oldest Grandfathers either forgot to come to lunch or got lost on the way, so they couldn’t win any skins. Anyway, the good news is that our own course is going to open on Friday, and that means that on Sunday morning we’ll be drinking beer on our very own patio and making lunch on our very own grill.

The driving range at Tunxis. You should never watch strangers hit practice balls, especially in early spring.