The background music at the White Pines Golf Dome is sixties rock. Fortunately, the rhythm of the songs they play suits my swing. Way back when, I loved running to the rhythm of certain songs. My personal favorite was the Spinners’ 1980 version of Working My Way Back to You (with no offense to the original Four Seasons version). Now, if only I could master rhythm on the piano. I play the piano as if I were doing interval training on the track, frequently (though unintentionally, as opposed to when running) changing the beat, regardless of how the music is actually written – let’s call it unintentional improvisation, a new kind of jazz.

The Dome opens at 7:00 am. No matter how early I get there, the caffeinated coffee urn is empty. Maybe there’s never any, even if you get there at 7:00 sharp, which I guess doesn’t really matter to me because I don’t like coffee. I drink it for the vanilla creamer. I keep vanilla extract in my kitchen cabinet, with no idea of what I’m going to do with it (I don’t bake), but reassured by it just being there. It has been suggested to me that I sniff it on days when I need a lift. Sure, why not, it’s probably not a gateway drug – I’ve never heard of flavors anonymous.

As for golf, I’m currently working on only seven swing thoughts, which is pretty good for me, and which I should be able to handle, based upon Miller’s Law. Miller’s Law refers to the oft-cited article, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”, published in 1956 in Psychological Review by the Princeton University cognitive psychologist George A. Miller. I try not to think about the article itself while swinging – that would be an eighth thing to remember, and would throw everything off.