The Game My Father Gave Me

 

My dad taught me to play golf when I was very young.

He tells me I've been hitting golf balls since I could stand up.

I don't remember learning. I just remember it always being there, the way certain things from childhood become so woven into who you are that you can't locate the beginning of them. Golf was like that for me. It wasn't a sport I picked up. It was something my father handed me before I was old enough to know what I was receiving.

I didn't understand what that meant until much later.

A few years ago, my dad and I started checking courses off a bucket list together.

St. Andrews. Pebble Beach. TPC Sawgrass.

We bring my wife and my mother along, so it becomes something larger than two men and a golf bag. It becomes a family occasion, a trip, a memory that belongs to all four of us.

But at the center of it, underneath all of that, is something simpler.

A father and a son, doing the thing the father taught the son to do, forty years later.

We don't live in the same state.

Getting together isn't always easy, and that's part of why these trips matter so much to me. When we're on a golf course together, there are no schedules pulling us in different directions. No quick visits wedged between other obligations.

Just time.

Uninterrupted, unhurried time in the middle of something we both love. Walking the same fairways, reading the same greens, giving each other a hard time about the same things we've always given each other a hard time about.

There is a quality of attention you can only give someone when you're fully present with them, doing something that requires your whole focus. Golf has a way of creating that. The rest of the world gets quiet.

And in that quiet, you remember what matters.

I've been thinking lately about time.

Not in a dark way. Just honestly.

The older I get, the clearer it becomes that the majority of the time I'll have with my parents has already passed. That's simply true, and I think most adults know it even when they don't say it out loud.

The years when my parents were the fixed center of my daily life are behind me. What's left is chosen time. Intentional time. Trips planned on purpose, tickets booked, calendars cleared.

That awareness doesn't make me sad.

It makes these moments feel like what they are.

Standing on the 17th green at TPC Sawgrass last year, I thought about the little boy my father described. The one who was swinging a club before he could fully understand why.

That boy had no idea what was being built around him.

He didn't know that a game was actually a language. A way his father was teaching him to show up, to be patient, to enjoy something slowly, to spend time with the people he loved doing something that asked nothing of him except his presence.

He didn't know he'd be standing on one of the most iconic holes in golf forty years later, next to the man who handed him all of it.

But here we are.

I think about this a lot in the context of what I've built with Letters To Journal Company.

Not because journals and golf have anything obvious in common.

But because the thing my father gave me wasn't really golf.

It was time, and intention, and a way of being together that has outlasted every other circumstance of my childhood.

That's what parents pass down when they're paying attention. Not just skills or advice or wisdom. A way of being known. A language between two people that doesn't need explaining because it was built slowly, over years, out of something as simple as showing up together and doing something you both love.

That's what I want to help parents create.

Not because they need a journal to love their children well. But because the words matter. The record matters. The intentional act of sitting down and saying: I see you, I have always seen you, and I want you to have proof of that in your hands.

My dad and I have more courses on the list.

I'm already looking forward to the next one.

Not for the course itself, though the courses have been extraordinary. For the quiet in the middle of it. For the uninterrupted hours with someone I love, doing something he gave me before I knew it was a gift.

That's the thing about what our parents hand us.

We don't always recognize it at the time.

We just look up one day, forty years later, and realize we've been carrying it all along.