AND WE THOUGHT GOLF BALL SIZE HAIL WAS DANGEROUS

When the temperatures hit 50 here in the Upper Midwest, outdoor mini golf centers shake off their winter slumber and whisper “Come.” My little granddaughter, ever mindful to the call of the wild, answered with a war whoop. What could we do but laugh and go along?

So, one brisk afternoon, (and blissfully unaware of the perils that lay ahead), we took her and a cousin to play 18 holes of miniature golf. She chose a ball and a club. Our first error in judgement. In the hands of this particular eight-year-old, a ball and club become weapons that shepherd boy David would have envied.

The chosen cousin for this adventure is on the cusp of teen-hood. He is polite, deferred to whatever the Wild Child wanted to do, and took his golf game with just the right blend of self-deprecating humor and thoughtful consideration. He assessed, he checked the goal, the obstacles, the options.

Miss Wild Child has a more exuberant approach to the game and its rules.

As far as we can determine the game is played thus:

-Hole numbers are mere suggestions. Treat them as such. 

-Approach each fairway efficiently. This means in a straight line. Use your manners and say “excuse me” when leaping over another green.

-Warm up your club with a twirl. Pro tip: drum majorettes and batons. Need we say more?

-Skid to a stop. Drop ball. This is important: before it hits the green, wallop at it.

-Hit air. Wallop again, Hit green. Giggle. Wallop and watch it bounce off the chain link fence. Parked cars in lot breathe a sigh of relief. Retrieve ball.

-Codify above rules to dumbfounded grandparents and cousin.“Just keep hitting the ball until it goes in the hole.” (For the uninitiated: This means consecutive strokes. She took 12 ((I counted)) strokes in 57 seconds. Including the windup.)

-Get within a foot of the hole and browbeat it toward said hole

-When ball, quivering with nerves, has been nudged half an inch at a time to app 4 inches from the hole, bully it in with a final no-nonsense push.

-Leap for joy. Turn to cousin. “Now you try.”

This was the entire 18 holes. She was a perpetual motion machine. She whacked her grampy on the hand on one backstroke. To do Paulette Bunyan justice, she was genuinely contrite. Her assault on Hole 13 didn’t continue until she’d been assured that her grandfather was fine, and it wasn’t the hand he eats with anyway.

Two holes later she almost achieved what would have put her in the minigolf annals. On a particularly enthusiastic backswing, she almost took out two grandparents with one fell swoop.

We performed a simultaneous reverse leap-and-duck move that people decades younger would have been proud to own.

For Miss W.C,, the monotony while waiting for her elderly almost-a-teen cousin and her antediluvian grandparents to finish their turns was relieved by the plethora of slides and ziplines and log rolls and bouncy things and kicky things. If the water hazards had been filled (it is the Upper Midwest. It is April. We still will get freezing temps) she no doubt would have demonstrated the front crawl for us.

To celebrate our survival, (or maybe to tempt fate) we ate at the on-site bar and grille. Did you know that purple and blue slushies look brown when stirred into an icy whirlpool?

Later, we told her parents about our near-death experiences. 

Her father nodded in sympathy, 

“It’s like playing with the little-girl version of Happy Gilmore.”