The Club

Chapter 6 - Mom

The primary responsibility of a golf professional is to ensure that the driving range is cleared of golf balls every night. The fact that no self-respecting golf pro would ever offer to pick up range balls is the reason that assistant golf professionals were invented. As an assistant pro it is your responsibility to ensure that the apprentice knows that it is his job to drag the range every night. A good apprentice is a master of finding eager young kids that will scour the range for balls and even pluck the balls from the bottom of the nets. Jason was good.

It was Thursday night and I had to leave early so I left Jason to the sanctity of the driving range while I rushed home to prepare for a special visitor. My Mom was coming to town. She would be staying for 2 nights and I had the full day off on Friday to show her the sights. She had never been to Canberra before and I thought the National Portrait Gallery might make a good start. Friday night I’d take her out to a swanky restaurant in Manuka, but tonight I was going to make her my specialty, bacon and eggs.

A mother’s visit to her son’s bachelor pad is pretty special. As the son, you have to look in control. Your bathroom must be clean, the bed must be made, and the refrigerator must be stocked. If that trio is accomplished the rest can slide. I had been preparing for weeks. Lorna and I always had a close relationship. I was her one and only child and she both spoiled me and made me fiercely independent all at the same time. She had high expectations for Edward Harding and although I’m not sure that the assistant professional at the second best golf club in Canberra was what she had in mind, she supported my choice because I was doing what I loved. But she also saw a trap. Her husband also did what he loved but what he loved didn’t necessarily love him back. He wanted to sail in the Sydney to Hobart race every summer and fight the stormy seas on a glamorous expedition but instead he ended up a tour boat operator in Queensland. After a while he became bitter and seemed to take it out on me.

When I was 5 I was his right hand man, swabbing the deck and organising his tool box, but as I began to develop my own interests and ideas we quickly grew apart. Nothing I said ever seemed to interest him and, while he grew hard and bitter, my natural inclination for sweetness drove him to distraction. I cannot pinpoint the exact time that we stopped talking and I can’t think of one particular disagreement between us that was more memorable than any other, but by the time I was 14 I became acutely aware that the two of us never spoke. It’s not that we never had a meaningful conversation; we never spoke to each other at all. Not Happy Father’s Day, Merry Christmas, or pass the salt. We were strangers living under the same roof. My friends who occasionally came over to my house were dumbfounded. The conversation would always go something like this:

“Edward, you are a straight A student on the school’s honour roll, a State level athlete, a community volunteer, and your Father doesn’t acknowledge you are alive? My father would trade me and my sister for you tomorrow,” they’d say.

I never really said much about it. For me, it didn’t seem hurtful. I just put it down to the fact that the two of us just didn’t get along. We were different people, with different values. It happens. Why does everyone have to like each other?

In the last three months of his life my father tried to speak to me once or twice and I did acknowledge, in passing. The relationship could not be repaired, however; it had been too long. You can imagine how all of this impacted my mother. She was a wonderful woman and certainly didn’t deserve this dysfunctional family but there it was, for all to see.