Every Good Golfer

My grandfather liked to play the three-par nine-hole golf course 

near Jacks department store in Cedar Rapids. As an eighth grader 

my seven iron and putter could get me through the course, 

but my grandfather, weak from chemo, teed off with his one wood. 

We’d played two to three times a week that entire summer 

before he died—but he studied each hole as if some new 

way to approach the fairway might reveal itself.

Instead of renting a cart, we trudged along the short grass, 

pausing to rest in the shade of a ten-year-old maple. 

I don’t remember any of our conversations, not one, 

nor how we faired on the course, but I remember an afternoon 

in our front yard under the ash tree, after we’d played a round, 

sitting on a wooden bench my father had made. It was warm, 

but breezy and pleasant in the shade. Between sips of lemonade, 

my grandfather said, “Every good golfer wears a white hat.” 

I wasn’t sure how to reply, so I watched passing cars 

until he added, “What the hell am I doing wearing one?” 

He set the hat on my head, but reconsidered, took it back, 

and added, “we’ve always got tomorrow 

to see if I can earn the right to wear the damn thing.” 

KEITH PILAPIL LESMEISTER is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could've Been Happy Here. His poems appear or will appear in The MacGuffin, Barstow & Grand, and the Under Review. A 2023-25 Rural Regenerator Fellow through Springboard for the Arts, he currently lives and works in northeast Iowa. More at keithlesmeister.com.