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.