February, 2011
It’s cold and three feet of snow have fallen in the past weeks. Today it’s ice. Work, schools and roads are closed. Snow days in New England automatically start with staying in bed to read on- beyond the alarm clock. Winds gust in the early darkness. We’re wide-awake and we have nowhere we need to be so we reach for the Perfect Book: A Window Into Elsewhere. Yesterday I re-read Curtis Gillespie’s Playing Through: A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast, sniffing back cover-to-cover tears even though I think golf is totally lame and it’s a happy book. The poignantly personal tale of Canadian Gillespie’s year of living in Scotland with his young family in the small East Lothian golf-haven of Gullane is woven into both Gillespie’s journey as a son, father and golfer and a color-filled walk along sandy shores. My own hanky-soaked connection is simply that it is the same small village I grew to love when we lived there for our own year awa’–despite my adamantly being a non-golfer.
Gillespie chronicles his story through reflections on life- lessons learned from his (recently deceased) father (“a man of wisdom and goodness”) with whom he’d always talked about the “someday” when they’d play these courses together. Not unsurprisingly he is adopted by Jack and Archie, two hugely likeable Gullane locals; aging golfers whose irascible natures lend a buoyant and often hilarious tone to the story as they speak in the kind of leg-pulling code that comes from many years of deep but competitive friendship.
Gillespie has that intuitive ability to use words that transcend his moment and make it ours. Reading through his eyes brought me back to the sweet crescent of Gullane Beach, to the child-friendly commons of Goose Green, to the winds and the sea and the Firth of Forth, the birds swirling by the links-trail along Aberlady Bay through tenacious buckthorn and grassy dunes, to the bright fire at the pubs whose warmth we sought on many a wild evening and where Gillespie, Jack and Archie relaxed over 19th hole pints of 80 Schilling Ale.
Turning the last page I startled to see snow blowing across my window and had to do that head shaking reality thing to jump back from Gillespie’s Gullane world into mine. I have walked around since then hearing words filtered through a gentle East Lothian burr. I can barely refrain from breaking into a faux Scottish tongue. I wonder if it will be possible to live “awa’ ’” again for a golden year.
To me this is the epitome of why we read travel stories, even if they involve golf. Someone once coined the phrase “armchair travel” and it clung because it works. We cruise bookstores and surf the web looking for that perfect story; the one that excites us (“Let’s go there!”), reminds us (“Remember when?”) and offers us immersion into places we will never visit nor do we necessarily want to. This is passion and we can never get enough. My bookshelves probably like yours, are heavy with marked-up outdated travel guides and someone else’s stories about where they’ve been, what it was like and why we should want to go there too; books we’ve read once, twice or maybe tomorrow, feeling a curious richness in knowing that they are there, for us, the very next snow day.
Wandering Bookluster–Meg Robbins 2/2011