Fairway

By Brindley Hallam Dennis

A near neighbour of mine has a dog that has learned to sit up at table and drink soup through a straw!

He also has a large garden. The two are not disconnected. His neighbour has an even larger garden, and in it he has constructed, well, at least mown, a golfing fairway. It’s a personal, one-hole golf course, down to a proper green with a proper hole and a proper flag stuck into it. The garden is on a slope, and my neighbour’s neighbour tees off from the top, with the little circle of mown grass and the flag at the bottom. The fairway angles across his patch, its line coming close, maybe as close as five metres, to the corner of my neighbour’s garden, which is an oblong carved out of what was once a single property.

A slice might fly off into the far corner of my neighbour’s neighbour’s garden, but it might equally fly over, or into the bottom corner of my neighbour’s patch. They’ve lived happily as neighbours for several decades now. The odd golf ball has appeared among the shrubs in my neighbour’s garden. My neighbour places them on the flat top of the waist-high boundary wall near the top of the slope. Nothing needs to be said, though if it is, my neighbour’s neighbour will often point to his father-in-law as having been ‘having a go’. Usually, the balls disappear off the wall as unobtrusively as they have appeared among the shrubbery.

Once or twice one has ricocheted off the tall pine that was once a pot-grown Christmas tree. Once or twice, while weeding or simply taking the air, my neighbour has heard whizzing above, sometimes only just above, his head.

The dog, a joyful Labrador, was used to playing in the garden with my neighbour’s son, who would throw him a tennis ball that he would invariably leap to catch.

The neighbour’s neighbour made no bones about picking up the vet’s bill, but it was my neighbour’s son who taught the toothless dog to drink his liquid meals through the straw. I cannot say whose idea it was that he should sit at table to do so.

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Brindley Hallam Dennis lives on the edge of England where he writes occasional plays, poetry, and essays. His writing has been published and performed. He blogs at www.Bhdandme.wordpress.com 

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