"Winter Dreams"

Hard to believe, Harry, but Wednesday, March 1, marks the beginning of the high school spring sports season. Weather wizard Mr. John L predicts the mercury to top off at 29 degrees farenheit that day. What's a person to do? Especially you golfers?

Continue one's "Winter Dreams." What's that, you say? Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald penned a short story of that title as a precursor to his Gatsby. Working class boy meets his rich and lovely "dreamgirl,"and falls head over heels. She plays him like a bad banjo. He's crushed. She retreats. They lose touch for a while. He makes lots of money running a string of laundries. Money, you say? The girl is back in the picture. But alas, when he finally makes his play, she's not all that.

Here are the specifics The young teenage Dexter Green, the best caddy at the Sherry Island C.C. in Minnesota, isn't dismayed by the snow covered golf links one bit. Winter is his time for dreaming. Dreaming of some day becoming an actual member of the club. Dreaming of being a champion golfer. (Here is a link to the story).

His dreams increase by one when he meets Miss Judy Jones, a member of the club and only eleven years old herself. It's springtime, Dexter is caddying, and she is golfing. Dexter goes "ga-ga" and pulls an A&P Sammy. He quits his caddying job on the spot and accepts his new quest, to win Judy Jones. Childish puppy love, you say? Not a bit. These kids are mature beyond their years.

Fitzgerald's description is at his evocative best. Judy at eleven is "ugly as little girls are apt to be who are destined after a few years to be inexpressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men."

Her smile, well, it's the smile that Fitzgerald would use again in with Gatsby himself: "He [Dexter] was treated to that absurd smile [of Judy's], that preposterous smile--the memory of which at least a dozen men were to carry into middle age. " Oh, the stuff that dreams are made of.

Judy, nine years later, is doing her Natalie Gulbis (yup, that's Nat on the left) impression on Dexter again:"As she took her stance for a short mashie shot, Dexter looked at her closely. She wore a blue gingham dress, rimmed at throat and shoulders with a white edging that accentuated her tan. The quality of exaggeration, of thinness, which had made her passionate eyes and down-turning mouth absurd at eleven, was gone now. She was arrestingly beautiful."

So was this whole entry a ruse to get you to read a short story? Maybe. To introduce you to Natalie Gulbis? No, but I bet the fellows aren't complaining. But you COULD use these last few weeks of winter to catch up on some RFE (reading for enjoyment), to plan your research papers, or to take one last, long winter's nap. Because with the added hours and warmth of spring come the deadlines and demands of grades and graduation. Reality bites. Enjoy a few more days inside, maybe just dreaming.