SIMPLE LIFE

As I write this, it’s an hour before sunrise on Good Friday of Holy Week. With my morning meditation behind me for the day – I call it “Coffee with God,” a time when I have frank conversations with the Almighty beneath the morning stars – it seems like the ideal moment to take stock of my “Three G’s.”

In addition to the enduring love I have for my wife, children and brand new grandchild – a baby girl named June; how’s that for timing? — the Three G’s is my simple shorthand for God, golf and gardening, the three defining elements of my life’s journey.

Allow me to consider them in reverse order of importance.

This month, on June 7, my home’s garden will be featured on the annual Greensboro Council of Garden Clubs tour. It’s an honor I never saw coming. That’s because building gardens (and working in them) has been a passion of mine since I was knee-high to a post-hole digger. I hail from rural people, you see, small-time Carolina farmers who lived off the bounty of the land. So, the urge to grow things is in my bloodstream. Some of my fondest memories are of visiting my dad’s elderly second cousins, Josie and Ida, a pair of spinster ladies in their 80s who shared a handsome old farmhouse from the Civil War era and a giant garden in Orange County.

My dad called them the “Moon and Star Girls.” He called them this because their house had limited indoor plumbing but a pair of splendid outhouses with elegantly carved wooden doors. One featured a half-moon (Cousin Ida’s), the other a shining star (Cousin Josie’s). I was deeply fascinated by both women and their fancy outhouses. Almost every Easter and Christmas of my boyhood, our family would take them a salted country ham, Pond’s Cold Cream, and copies of Reader’s Digest, Life Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post.

Ida was the solemn and stern sister who ran the household. Josie was the sweet and talkative one who loved books and storytelling. Their dressing style was pure 19th century, floral dresses with knitted sweaters Ida made by hand and lace-up boots. I like to think part of the verdure in my blood comes from them as well as my great-grandmother, who lived 5 miles closer to Dodsons Crossroads, and grew and collected native plants for making folk medicines. Aunt Emma, my dad’s grandmother, was the beloved “healer” along Buckhorn Road since a real doctor was 20 miles away.

The vast garden of the “Moon and Star Girls” was well-known along Buckhorn Road between Hillsborough and Chapel Hill. The Dodson sisters shared their bounty with neighbors up and down the road. For several summers before a game called golf seized my waking attention, I got to stay with Ida and Josie and help in their garden. Josie would sing hymns and tell me stories about our Colonial ancestors while Ida kept a sharp eye on our progress, sometimes reminding us that the “Lord loves busy hands. Not idle chatter.” Once, Josie stuck her tongue out at Ida’s back and we both dissolved with laughter. Cousin Ida was not amused.

Both my parents were serious suburban gardeners, which is why I grew up to become one, too. I’ve built three ambitious gardens in my life, from a forested hilltop in Maine to a pine-girdled garden I brought back to life in Pinehurst. Number three is the most ambitious, built around the old house we purchased a decade ago on the street where I grew up in Greensboro. Likely, it’s my final garden.

Garden work is good for the soul, Cousin Josie liked to say.

• • •

Golf came into my life at age 11 after watching Arnold Palmer play in the 1964 Masters Tournament on TV. That’s the year the King of Golf won his final green jacket by six strokes and tossed his cap into the air. I promptly joined “Arnie’s Army.”

I began beating golf balls around our backyard with an old Bobby Jones wedge I still own (somewhere) and quickly progressed to a modest nine-hole golf course I nearly wore out every day after swim practice. I followed my dad into journalism and shared his passion for the cruelly addictive game invented 400 years ago by lonely Scottish shepherds.

In 1997, as a columnist for Golf Magazine, I published a memoir called Final Rounds that told the story of taking my wise old man back to play the courses on England’s Lancashire coast where he learned to play the game as an airman shortly before D-Day.

The book was a bestseller that changed my life. After reading it, Arnold Palmer invited me to write his memoir, A Golfer’s Life, and share the cover credit with him. We remained close friends until his passing in September 2016. During our last visit in Latrobe a month before he passed away, I asked him to autograph my copy of our book. He wrote: “Jim, Thank you for your wonderful words. I couldn’t have a better friend.”

I’ve been deeply blessed by my golf writing, a career that includes four books of the year about the game (two from United States Golf Association and two from International Network of Golf), scores of friends and a lifetime of memories.

Not long ago, just for fun, one of my golf buddies and I even started a podcast on Apple called Sports Is Beyond Us that allows us to share the timeless joys, fellowship and low comedy of the game.

• • •

God is the most important “G” in my life. I once heard someone say there are two paths to God — one is love, the other is sorrow.

I’ve taken both paths in my life and found that the divine force of the universe eventually welcomes everyone home regardless of where they’ve been. We all have a different picture of who or what God is. My belief is that God grades life on a generous curve and small miracles are everywhere if you take time to notice.

Many years ago, I took my highly opinionated Scottish mother-in-law to the daily Evensong service at St John’s College Chapel in Cambridge, England. Kate was probably my best friend during several challenging years, a gifted gardener and educator who never missed watching the British Open Championship with me over gin and tonics. She was the only person on Earth who ever called me “James.”

Kate was also a professed atheist who had one of the kindest hearts of anyone I’ve ever known. Her own parents perished during the German bombing of the docks in her native Glasgow when she was very young.

That summer evening at St John’s, though, when the choir sang the familiar “Old Hundredth” hymn from the Genevan Psalter, I heard Kate softly singing along. As we exited into a beautiful evening, she took my arm and squeezed it. There were tears in her eyes.

“Thank you, James,” she said. “My mother and father loved that old hymn. I haven’t heard it in 50 years.”

Praise God, I thought, from whom all blessings flow.