These days, miniature golf courses remind me of summer nights. Of the smell of cut grass, of newly watered lawns. Of the sounds of laughter across carpeted greens, of the sounds of putters hitting colored golf balls. Of tiny pencils. Of how hard the last hole-in-one shot was, of how remote the chance at a free game. Of velvety dark skies overhead, with flashes of lightning on the western horizon.

Our church youth group spent many Sunday nights playing miniature golf: it was the carrot at the end of the Bible study stick.

Our church was too little to have a year-round youth director, so each summer there’d be a new one, a young man between semesters at the Perkins School of Theology, always earnest and prayerful, and always having been deemed “safe” by the members of the hiring committee. The girls in the youth group would always have crushes on that summer’s iteration; from the youth director’s arrival in May until he left at the end of August, we were the most religious, most fervent believers ever to participate in the Methodist Youth Fellowship. We’d try to pray the most, sing the loudest, wear the best cross-on-a-leather-cord that any seminarian had ever seen. We’d carry our Good News Bibles around, carefully marking the verses the youth director told us to, all the while pushing down memories of second grade Sunday School and Mrs. Breneman’s admonition that it was Simply Not Proper to write in a Bible.

And then, the end of the summer arrived and we could backslide all the way until the next spring, when it all started over again.

Abandoned Miniature Golf Course
Slaton, Texas

photographed 2.16.2013