Goodbye to Golf

I WAS still in high school when Dad’s farm equipment business finally closed shop. I saw how broke he was, in kind and in spirit, whenever I looked at him. He was almost always at home insipidly tending plants and boringly feeding the pets as diversion to his misfortune. He sold his car, jewelries, golf set and practically every valuable possession he once had just to augment mom’s budget for food and bills. Once he brought me with him to sell our old Underwood typewriter—the gadget where I learned to type—for a measly three dollars.

Evidently old but still strong-minded, he later on partly managed a molasses farm for racehorses. Dad brought me once to this farm and introduced me to his friend and farm owner, an aging but still burly American war veteran named Sprout, who had a prosthetic arm in lieu of the one that got blown away during the Iwo Jima offensive.