me high over California, seemed an idea whose time had come. The ancient and ongoing duty of theland to receive the dead aligned with the burgeoning craze in the golf business led, by a post-modern devolution, to my vision of a place where one could commemorate their Uncle Larryand work on their short game at the same time—two hundred acres devoted to memories and memorable holes; where tears wept over a missed birdie comingled with those wept over a parent’s grave. A Golfatorium ! It would solve, once and for all, the question of Sundays—what to do before or after or instead of church. The formerly harried husband who always had to promise he’d do the windows “next weekend”in order to get a few holes in during good weather, could now confidently grab his golf shoes and Big Berthas and tell his wife he was going to visit his “family plot.” He might let slip some mention of “grief work” or “unfinished business” or “adultchild issues still unresolved.” Or say that he was “having dreams” or was feeling “vulnerable.” What good wife would keep her mate from such importanttherapy? What harm if the cure includes a quick nine or eighteen or twenty-seven holes if the weather holds?
So began the dialogue between my selves: the naysayer and the true believer—there’s one of each in every one of us. I read my poems in L.A., chatted up the literary set, waxed pithy and beleaguered at the book signings and wine and cheese receptions. But all along I was preoccupied bythoughts of the Golfatorium and my mother dying. When, after the reading at the Huntington Library, I asked the director where would she go if she had four days free in Southern California, she told me “Santa Barbara” and so I went.
T here are roughly ten acres in every par four. Eighteen of those and you have a golf course. Add twenty acres for practice greens, club house, pool and patio, andparking and two hundred acres is what you’d need. Now divide the usable acres, the hundred and eighty, by the number of burials peracre—one thousand—subtract the greens, the water hazards, and the sand traps, and you still have room for nearly eight thousand burials on the front nine and the same on the back. Let’s say, easy, fifteen thousand adult burials for every eighteen holes. Now add backthe cremated ashes scattered in sandtraps, the old marines and swabbies tossed overboard in the water hazards and the Italians entombed in the walls of the club house and it doesn’t take a genius to come to the conclusion that there’s gold in them there hills!
You can laugh all you want, but do the math. Say it costs you ten thousand an acre and as much again in development costs—you know, toturn some beanfield into Roseland Park Golfatorium or Arbordale or Peachtree. I regard as a good omen the interchangeability of the names for golf courses and burial grounds: Glen Eden and Grand Lawn, like Oakland Hills or Pebble Beach could be either one, so why not both? By and large we’re talking landscape here. So two million for property and two million for development, the club house, the greens,the watering system. Four million in up-front costs. Now you install an army of telemarketers-slash-memorial counselors to call people during the middle of dinner and sell them lots at an “introductory price” of, say, five hundred a grave—a bargain by any standard—and cha-ching you’re talking seven point five million. Add in the pre-arranged cremations at a hundred a piece and another hundredfor scattering in the memorial sandtraps and you’ve doubled your money before anyone has bought a tee time or paid a greens fee or bought golf balls or those overpriced hats and accessories from your pro shop. Nor have you sold off the home lots around the edges to those types that want to live on a fairway in Forest Lawn. Building sights at fifty thousand a pop. Clipping coupons is what you’d be.Rich beyond any imagination. And that’s not even
So began the dialogue between my selves: the naysayer and the true believer—there’s one of each in every one of us. I read my poems in L.A., chatted up the literary set, waxed pithy and beleaguered at the book signings and wine and cheese receptions. But all along I was preoccupied bythoughts of the Golfatorium and my mother dying. When, after the reading at the Huntington Library, I asked the director where would she go if she had four days free in Southern California, she told me “Santa Barbara” and so I went.
T here are roughly ten acres in every par four. Eighteen of those and you have a golf course. Add twenty acres for practice greens, club house, pool and patio, andparking and two hundred acres is what you’d need. Now divide the usable acres, the hundred and eighty, by the number of burials peracre—one thousand—subtract the greens, the water hazards, and the sand traps, and you still have room for nearly eight thousand burials on the front nine and the same on the back. Let’s say, easy, fifteen thousand adult burials for every eighteen holes. Now add backthe cremated ashes scattered in sandtraps, the old marines and swabbies tossed overboard in the water hazards and the Italians entombed in the walls of the club house and it doesn’t take a genius to come to the conclusion that there’s gold in them there hills!
You can laugh all you want, but do the math. Say it costs you ten thousand an acre and as much again in development costs—you know, toturn some beanfield into Roseland Park Golfatorium or Arbordale or Peachtree. I regard as a good omen the interchangeability of the names for golf courses and burial grounds: Glen Eden and Grand Lawn, like Oakland Hills or Pebble Beach could be either one, so why not both? By and large we’re talking landscape here. So two million for property and two million for development, the club house, the greens,the watering system. Four million in up-front costs. Now you install an army of telemarketers-slash-memorial counselors to call people during the middle of dinner and sell them lots at an “introductory price” of, say, five hundred a grave—a bargain by any standard—and cha-ching you’re talking seven point five million. Add in the pre-arranged cremations at a hundred a piece and another hundredfor scattering in the memorial sandtraps and you’ve doubled your money before anyone has bought a tee time or paid a greens fee or bought golf balls or those overpriced hats and accessories from your pro shop. Nor have you sold off the home lots around the edges to those types that want to live on a fairway in Forest Lawn. Building sights at fifty thousand a pop. Clipping coupons is what you’d be.Rich beyond any imagination. And that’s not even
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