This all started when I played golf in Salinas two weeks ago at the Ladies Invitational. My friend, Donna, who is a member at the country club recruited her friend, Peggy, to be a part of our “team”. And this story was fueled by discovering that Peggy’s husband was a duck hunter. Well, that was interesting to me because I have a friend, Warren, who is also a duck hunter. I think duck hunters are a rare breed of person, mostly men, I guess. And the rarified duck hunter is usually involved in a duck club. A duck club is a piece of land that is located in a swampy area (my impression is hard at work here) where grown men have taken their resources and built duck blinds (this is complete conjecture at this point) so they can hide from the unsuspecting fowl that fly over the blinds. Now, people. Think about this. It is cold and damp and wet and very early in the morning and these grown men don their duck hunting ensemble to trudge out to the duck blinds and sit in hiding until until that poor duck flies his way and then I think he jumps up, aims his gun and shoots the living daylights out of the poor duck. Then a well trained dog leaps from the blind (they all seem to have dogs that have been sent to dog duck training classes, universities, I’m told, so that they can become proficient in, well, locating the dead duck and bringing it back to the blind) and fetches the duck. One presumes that after all the ammo is gone or the ducks have “ducked and covered”, these grown men trudge back to the house. Oh, did I mention the house? Some of the houses at these duck clubs are quite elaborate with scores of bedrooms and bathrooms and a big kitchen. Perhaps they have a bar too as many stories seem to be involve eating copious amounts of food (probably never the ducks) and drinking copious amounts of alcohol. I imagine spitoons, don’t you? Really, people, these places are big man caves where they can go and be men. No girlie girlie stuff going on at these places. In fact, I don’t think any of these clubs have ever had a woman visit. That means that duck clubs are a lot like mosques where women may not enter either. Just saying. But it is just as well because as a woman I can think I can vouch for most of us and announce that I do not want to go to a duck club, I don’t want to see the big man cave and I certainly have no interest in eating wild duck. And as for bowing to Mecca on a carpet…that doesn’t float my boat either.
But I digress.
So, Peggy is married to Bob (I learn on the 6th green of the tourney). Well, I ask, does Bob know Warren because he is a duck hunter too? And this is where the story starts to get interesting. Why, yes he does. It turns out Bob and Warren went to the same high school in San Jose and graduated the same year and haven’t seen each other since then. OMG. What a small world. But wait. There is more. Bob and Peggy have a house in the mountains and these are the same mountains that I and my crazy golfing friends are going to the next week. What are the chances? Well, it turns out that Bob and Peggy have a house that just happens to located directly across the fairway from the condos were are renting next week for our week long golfing extravaganza and Bob and Peggy will be there at the same time we will be there. Well. What can you say? The facts in the case are dizzying.
But let me back up here and say that we have been going on golfing vacations with this group of people for years and years. Once a year we veer off our busy lives and save time to get together for a week of golfing fun. It hasn’t always been easy. Problems have arisen. But, we have managed to pull this grand fete off for a very long time. And that is why I am sitting here blogging because we pulled in yesterday afternoon and the partying commenced with raucous charm. We all come from various walks of life but golf is the glue that binds here. We all love the silly game and we have great fun around it. An example of this is last night. On the first night of each trip there are a few things that take place. Always. 1. We have a meeting and golf games are announced. This year the theme is Big Break Plumas. We each pony up $25/person for the games. 2. We drink too much. 3. We eat too much. These are rules that never vary.
So it was last night with the exception that Bob and Peggy joined the group for cocktails. And that’s when we learned that Bob was President of the senior class in high school. And we discovered this when we all looked at the high school annual that Bob brought along. And that is when we also discovered that Warren was a buff swimmer because he was pictured in his speedo in the same album. What a hoot. They had quite a reunion and we enjoyed every minute of it. And we also met Bob’s two labs. Too much fun.
- “Speedo” cooks the meat and it’s not duck.
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