Fun exhibits up out of the blue

Sometimes you go looking for enjoyable and discover it.

Other instances, enjoyable finds you out of the blue.

The latter occurred to me on a uncommon blue-skied afternoon throughout these current “May Gray” days. I used to be on a run at a park and had slipped right into a meditative state of inattentiveness once I was almost skulled by a booming tee shot.

No, some knucklehead was not hazardously hitting golf balls. Rather, it was a sport of Frisbee golf — correctly known as disc golf — that I had crossed paths with.

More exactly, I had inadvertently crossed the impromptu fairway and a drive to make Rory McIlroy proud — a drive that jogged my memory of a Frisbee I noticed fly a full 100 yards within the Rose Bowl Stadium in 1975 within the inaugural Canine Disc World Championships as Ashley Whippet raced like a four-legged comet from one finish zone to the opposite to make a stunning high-jumping snag — prompted me to duck, lest it catch me squarely in my canine enamel.

This was truly the second tee shot from this twosome that got here my means. The first one didn’t buzz my bill-hatted head; it took purpose at my shoetops. Specifically, it landed on its rim and a cross-breeze held it upright because it rolled like a wheel off its axel for a bonanza of additional distance.

Unfortunately for “Lennie” — my imagined identify for the thinner of the pair as a result of he and his greater companion “George” dropped at my thoughts the twin protagonists within the novel “Of Mice and Men” — I had not but realized they had been enjoying disc golf. Instead, I assumed it was an escaped toss. Hence, embarrassingly for me and aggravatingly for Lennie, I intercepted the Frisbee pondering I used to be doing him a kindness.

More aggravating for Lennie, I threw the disc again to him — and thus backwards up the green and away from whichever tree or gentle pole was the designated gap.

More embarrassing for me, my toss resembled a tiny UFO piloted by a drunk alien. Had there been a sand lure, it could have landed in it.

I retrieved my errant throw and made a gimme-putt-of-a-toss to Lennie who had walked nearer. Only then did I notice they had been enjoying disc golf and I had ruined his monster drive. I apologized; Lennie graciously mentioned none was wanted; and all three of us shared fun.

If I needed to guess their ages, I’d say George and Lennie had been each of their late twenties — or maybe about ten or twelve, for each had been carrying baseball caps backwards and each had been barefooted. I do know this for sure: in case you are barefooted within the grass with a ball cap on backwards, particularly if the solar is beaming brilliant and heat, you’re no doubt having enjoyable.

A short time later they switched from disc golf to enjoying Frisbee catch whereas working go patterns as in soccer. When I ran by George made a toss to me. Thank goodness for my bruised ego I caught it, however as soon as once more my return fling flew like spit right into a headwind.

Somewhere in Camarillo I may hear my outdated Star colleague John Grennan, a scratch disc golfer, laughing at my ineptitude.

Laughing at my very own ineptitude, and silently cursing it too, I pleaded to George: “I need a mulligan!”

Reaching again to my Wham-O boyhood, I turned and coiled and uncorked a tennis-backhand-like fling that sailed straight and much.

Ouch-O maturity! My triumphant toss introduced a brand new embarrassment: Fun discovered me, however so did a barely tweaked again.

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Star and might be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His books can be found at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.