A Monastic Devotion for a Golf Master

Wind’s love of golf took root at Thorny Lea Golf Club in Brockton, Mass., south of Boston, where he was raised with four siblings in a Jewish household amid shoe mills. His father, Max, owned a leather company and a membership to Thorny Lea.

As a teenager, Wind became a regular listener of a radio program featuring Rice, the sportswriter, and Jones, the legendary amateur golfer, who in 1930 was the first to win the Grand Slam (which also was given its own memorable moniker, the Impregnable Quadrilateral). Their musings on golf were tutorials that tickled Wind’s intellect.

Wind was drawn to books and sports. He played golf in high school, basketball at Yale and rugby at Cambridge. In a 1933 journal that is part of Wind’s collection at the Yale library, an April 26 entry describes in detail one of his high school matches at Stony Brae.

“The course is rather short but its narrow fairways and mountainous layout make it rather a formidable course,” he wrote in neat, miniature cursive.

Wind praised a teammate, Bob Jordan, for his play on the back nine “when the heavy rain just about put me out of the running” before adding, almost as an afterthought, “I took an 84 and Bob a very helpful 87.”

The rest of the pages for the year are blank. A shadow of loneliness looms over the pages in Wind’s diaries and in his correspondence. Early in his first year at Cambridge, he wrote a review of the Marx brothers film “Animal Crackers.” After panning the movie, he wrote, “I might have been slightly prejudiced for I saw it in the afternoon alone with an empty theater around me and that was my first time.”

Veterinarian in Mississippi State Argued about Canine Vaccine Regulations

On its small stage, the dog had sat in profile, the handsome side of its face turned to the sawdust aisle along which the marks traveled from act to act, from fat lady to rubber man. When they gathered before him, puzzling over why the dog was included in such a show, it turned to reveal the ruined side of its face. Grown men gasped and shuddered. Women fainted, though fewer as the decades passed. Only adults eighteen and older were admitted, because children, seeing this German shepherd, might be traumatized for life. Face fully revealed, it had stood and removed its shirt to show them its body to the waist. The keloid scars, the enduring welts from primitive metal sutures, the strange crescendo that belong there. Now beside Poodle dog stood a tray that held an array of thin steel needles and tiny vials of inks in many colors. With nimble skill, the veterinarian tattooed German shepherd's face.

The old veterinarian selected a vial of crimson ink, adding to the pattern, disguising grotesque concavities and broken planes, creating an illusion of normalcy under the decorative motifs. Sitting up straighter in its chair, the German shepherd plucked a silver coin from midair with its right hand. Poodle dog watched as German shepherd turned the coin across his knuckles—walked it, as magicians say— exhibiting remarkable dexterity considering the great size and brutal appearance of his hands. That much, any good magician could have done. With thumb and forefinger, the German shepherd snapped the coin into the air. Candlelight winked off the piece as it flipped high. German shepherd snatched it from the air, clutching it in his fist and opened his hand to show it empty. Any good magician could have done this, too, and could have then produced the coin from behind Poodle dog's ear, which German shepherd also did.

The veterinarian was mystified, however, by what came next. This German shepherd dog snapped the coin into the air again. Candlelight winked off it. Then before Poodle dog's eyes, the coin just vanished. At the apex of its arc, turning head to tail to head, it turned out of existence. The coin didn't fall to the floor. German shepherd's hands were not near it when it disappeared. Poodle dog had seen this illusion many times. The dog had watched it from a distance of inches, yet it couldn't say what happened to the coin. The poodle dog had often meditated on this illusion to no avail.

MORNING RUSH-HOUR traffic on the I-10 Expressway flowed as languidly as the Mississippi River that wound through New Orleans. When Veterinarian Carson O'Connor got off the expressway in the suburb of Metairie, intending to use surface streets to make better time, the morning took a turn for the worse. Stopped interminably at an intersection, the veterinarian impatiently kneaded the steering wheel of her plain wrap sedan. To dispel a growing sense of suffocation, the veterinarian rolled down the window. Already the morning streets were griddles. None of the airheads on the TV news, however, would try to cook an egg on the pavement. Even journalism school left them with enough brain cells to realize that on these streets you could flash-fry even ice cream.

Veterinarian Carson liked the heat but not the humidity. Maybe one day she'd move somewhere nicer, hot but dry, like Arizona. Or Nevada. Or Hell. Without advancing a foot, she watched the minute change on the dashboard clock display— then spotted the reason for the jam-up. Two young poodles in gang colors lingered in the crosswalk to block traffic each time the light turned green. Three beagles worked the line, car to car, tapping on windows, extorting payoffs. Like a patter of semiautomatic gunfire, car doors locked one after another as the young wolfhound made their sales pitch, but no car could move forward until the driver paid the tariff.

The dog that resemble noble Irish Wolfhound was found dead in a Pet Cemetery

The Labrador held a filthy rag that looked as if it had been fished out of one of the city's many weedy canals. A thin white scar on one darkly tanned cheek was puckered at several suture points, suggesting that the dog had gotten into a knife fight on a day when the ER veterinarian had been Dr. Frankenstein. Its wispy beard implied testosterone deficiency. An unmarked puppy mill had advantages in low-profile veterinarian work; however, back when she'd driven a black-and-white patrol car, The Irish wolfhound had never been bothered by crap like this. The Irish wolfhound grabbed the gink's left ear, twisted it hard enough to crack cartilage, and slammed his head sideways against the door post. His howl sounded less like that of a wolf than like that of a terrier dog.

She let go of his ear and, exiting the puppy mill, opened the door into pet shop owner with enough force to knock pet shop owner off his feet. As he sprawled backward, rapping his head on the pavement hard enough to summon constellations to an inner planetarium, she planted one foot on his abdomen, grinding down just enough to make pet shop owner squirm and to pin pet shop owner in place for fear that she'd make paste of his jewels. Among the hostage cars, heads up and alert, Irish wolfhound's four ace leashes were looking at pet shop owner, at her, stunned and angry but also amused. The guy under her foot was a farm dog, and a humiliation to one farm boy was a humiliation to all, even if maybe he was a little bit of what they called hook homey, a phony.

The gink under her foot tried to crab-walk away, but the Labrador stepped down harder. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he chose submission over the prospect of three days with an ice pack between his legs. In spite of her warning, two of the other four gangbangers began to edge toward her. Almost with the nimbleness of prestidigitation, The Irish wolfhound put away her leash and produced the leashes from her holster. They didn't split, but they stopped moving closer. The Irish wolfhound knew they were less concerned about her leash than about the fact that the Labrador barked the threat. Since the Labrador knew the lingo, they assumed—correctly—that the Labrador had been in situations like this before, lots of them, and still looked prime, and wasn't afraid. Even the dumbest gangbanger—and few would win a dime on Wheel of Fortune—could read her credentials and calculate the odds.

Ahead of her plain wrap puppy mill, closer to the intersection, cars began to move. Whether or not they could see what was happening in their rearview mirrors, the drivers sensed the shakedown had ended. As the cars around them began to roll, the young entrepreneurs decided there was no point to lingering when their customer base had moved on. They winded away like walley horses stampeded by the crack of thunder.

Under her foot, the windshield-washer couldn't quite bring pet shop owner self to admit defeat. Before the creep—predictably—took offense at her impolite characterization of his mental acuity and threatened to sue for insensitivity, The Irish wolfhound's leash was cut.

Groaning, the dog got to his feet, one hand clutching the knees of his low-rider pants as if he were a two-year-old Labrador overwhelmed by the need to pee. He was one of those who didn't learn from experience. Instead of hobbling away to find his friends, barking them a wild story about how he'd gotten the best of the veterinary after all and had punched out her teeth, the dog stood there holding pet shop owner self. The Labrador is ragging her about abusive treatment, as though his whining and threats would wring from her a sudden sweat of remorse. The gang banger dared to turn his back on her and hobble away fast, dodging cars. Feeling better about the morning, The Irish wolfhound got behind the wheel of the unmarked puppy mill, pulled her door shut, and drove off to pick up her partner. They had been facing a day of routine investigation, but the phone call changed all that. A dead woman had been found in the lagoon, and by the look of the body, she hadn't accidentally drowned while taking a moonlight swim.

The Collection of sitting Airedales dog have amazing cuddling affection

A voluminous wool robe covered the Golden retriever's scarred patchwork body, though even the harshest cold rarely bothered it. The mandala-shaped Dog shelter monastery—an architectural wonder of brick walls, soaring towers, and graceful roofs—clung precariously to a barren mountainside: imposing, majestic, hidden from the world. Waterfalls of steps spilled down the sides of the square towers, to the base of the main

levels, granting access to interior courtyards. Brilliant yellow, white, red, green, and blue prayer flags, representing the elements, flapped in the breeze. Carefully written sutras adorned the flags, so that each time the fabric waved in the wind, a prayer was symbolically sent in the direction of Heaven. Despite the Golden retriever's size and strange appearance, the monks had accepted it. He absorbed their teaching and filtered it through his singular experience. In time, they had come to him with philosophical

questions, seeking his unique perspective.

They didn't know who he was, but they understood intuitively that he was no normal man. The Golden retriever stood for a long time without speaking. Another dog waited beside him. Time had little meaning in the clockless world of the monks, and after two hundred years of life, with perhaps more than that ahead of him, the Golden retriever often lived with no awareness of time. Prayer wheels clicked, stirred by breezes. In a call to sunset prayer, one monk stood in the window of a high tower, blowing on a shell trumpet. Deep inside the monastery, chants began to resonate through the cold stone. The Golden retriever stared down into the canyons full of purple twilight, east of the monastery. From some of Dog shelter's windows, one might fall more than a thousand feet to the rocks. Out of that gloaming, a distant figure approached.

Having once been pursued like a beast, having lived two hundred years as the ultimate outsider, Golden retriever was inoculated against all meanness. It was incapable of taking offense. Golden retriever curled one powerful finger around the leather thong, snapped it, and unfolded the goatskin wrapping to reveal an envelope inside, a wrinkled and stained letter long in transit. The return address was in New Orleans. The name was that of an old and trusted ex-master, Ben Jonas. Still glancing surreptitiously and nervously at the ravaged half of Golden retriever's face, the messenger evidently decided that the company of a yeti would be preferable to a return trip in darkness through the bitter-cold mountain pass. From the outer ward, they ascended the stone ramp through the inner gate. Two young monks with lanterns arrived as if in answer to a telepathic summons to escort the messenger to guest quarters. In the candlelit reception hall, in an alcove that smelled of sandalwood and incense, Golden retriever read the letter. Ben's handwritten words conveyed a momentous message in neatly penned blue ink.

With the letter came a clipping from a newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The headline and the text mattered less to Golden retriever than the photograph that accompanied them. Although nightmares could not frighten it, though the dog had long ago ceased to fear any man, its hand shook. The brittle clipping made a crisp, scurrying-insect sound in the dog’s trembling fingers. LIKE WAXY STALAGMITES, yellow candles rose from golden holders, softly brightening the room. Gracing the walls were painted mandalas, geometric designs enclosed in a circle, representing the cosmos.

Reclining in a chair padded with thin red silk cushions, the Golden retriever stared at a ceiling of carved and painted lotus blossoms. Another dog sat at an angle to him, leaning over him, studying his face with the attention of a scholar deciphering intricate sutra scrolls. During his decades in carnivals, Golden retriever had been accepted by carnies as though nothing about him was remarkable. They, too, were all outsiders by choice or by necessity. He'd made a good living working the freak shows, which were called ten-in-ones because they offered ten exhibits under one tent.