The Adventures of Harry Fruitgarden – Book # 2 – Who Would Have Guessed?
Chapter #1
The air was so hot that I felt like I was breathing through my sister’s hair dryer. Once again I was in a long yellow school bus. This time I was sprawled on top of a huge pile of suitcases, backpacks and sleeping bags in the very back of the bus – it was the best seat in the house. As I looked up the aisle towards the front of the bus I could see thirty-nine more of my contemporary “city” boys. We were all headed to a summer camp in Colorado, but first we had to cross the Arizona desert with no air conditioning!
The last time I had been camping was with the Boy Scouts. We went to Crescent Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains outside of Los Angeles. That had been a lot of fun. It had awakened in me a desire to spend more time in nature. So when I heard about this camp from my Physical Education teacher at school, I ignored the fact that he wasn’t high on my list of people to listen to carefully and opened myself up to the idea of spending two months in the San Juan Mountains of Southwestern Colorado.
Convincing my parents to let me go wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. When they heard that I wanted to go away for two months their eyes lit up. Hmmmm. Now that I think about it, maybe there is a hidden message there?
Well, I can be pretty prickly at times, but that’s my charm! Or at least, that is what I keep telling myself. I don’t actually seek to cause problems or get into trouble, it just seems to come my way. I attribute that to my creative approach to life. My grandmother just says that I’m stubborn. She might be right, but it seems like however I am, that is the way I’m made. You can say, “Tomaato” or you can say “Tomauto” but you can’t say Harry Fruitgarden is boring!
My tendency to rub adults the wrong way has actually been a dilemma for me. You see some years ago, well …about four to be exact, I had an experience that put some pressure on me to behave well. It wasn’t something that came from my parents or anyone else. It was something that happened inside me in my own self.
It isn’t something weird like hearing strange voices in your head or anything. Maybe I should explain.
When I was about eight years old I would sometimes find myself at my father’s office. I can’t remember my older sister ever being there, but I am sure my older brother and younger sister had the dubious honor of being in the real estate business for a few hours on Saturday afternoon.
Our main impression of the real estate business was that you sat at a desk and shuffled papers.
The exciting part was using the typewriter!
Back in those days there weren’t any auto-correction buttons on the typewriters, not even liquid white correction fluid, to say nothing of word processors. If you made a mistake you had to use an eraser type pencil and rub out the offending letter. Most of our time in the real estate business was spent making more business for the correction pencil and the paper companies, as well as, the typewriter repair companies. As you can imagine, we would wear out our welcome pretty quickly at the office.
Fortunately for my Dad’s office, as well as for us kids, across the street and up the block there was a miniature golf course.
I wonder if my Dad ever calculated the point at which it was cheaper to send us over to the miniature golf course than to repair his office equipment? Anyway, I think we thought our luck was pretty good. After all, how many kid’s Dad’s offices are across the street from a miniature golf course?
A miniature golf course is a kind of fantasyland where you can not only learn the futility of good putting, but explore the mind’s realm of unseen possibilities.
As I listened to some of the golfers that I met while being on a real golf course with my Father, I had sometimes wondered if golf might be an inherently spiritual experience. I heard men pray for a good shot. I heard plenty of golfers ask God to “Damn it” or “Damn it to hell”. I even heard an occasional “God bless it”. Maybe they also had other requests for God that I don’t know about. It even occurred to me that maybe golf was the same as religion since so many people went there on Sunday morning.
For me, it was miniature golf that lead to what might be described, not so much as a spiritual experience, but as a spiritual “situation”.
My inner conversations with God started as the result of the very last hole on the miniature golf course. You know the one. It is the one that, if you get a hole-in-one, you get a free pass to play again.
After having visited the course a number of times I became a fair player for my age. I knew the object was to use the least number of strokes necessary to get around the course.
The more I played; I noticed that my focus began to shift from how I played each hole, to how I would perform at the last hole. I started to see the course as a kind of preparation time for the only really important putt of the whole course – that last shot for the free pass.
Once you have tasted the excitement of getting that hole-in-one and waving a free pass in the air as your victory flag, well…that is the Superbowl for a kid!
My desire for that experience welled up inside me to the point that I was desperate for victory.
I will never forget that day!
As I putted past the staggered blocks, over the little bridges, through the tunnel, over the bumps, down the slopes towards the windmill, my plight became more and more desperate. Oh how I wanted that hole-in-one at the end of the course!
How was I going to get it? What extra edge or hidden power could I bring to my side at this time of need?
And then it struck me.
God.
After all, if God couldn’t do it, it couldn’t be done. Yes, God was the answer.