Table Of ContentFor my family
A hole-in-one is amazing when you think of the different universes this white
mass of molecules has to pass through on its way to the hole.
—MAC O’GRADY
Miniature: diminutive, minuscule, small-scale, pony; bantam, baby, baby-
sized; toy, compact, dwarf, dwarfish, pygmy, midget, nonoid, elfin,
Lilliputian, Tom Thumb.
—Roget’s International Thesaurus
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, “How tall they’ve grown!”
For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore!
—EDWARD LEAR
CONTENTS / SCORECARD
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
The Ticket Booth: Prologue
Front Nine
1. The Rocket
2. The Castle
3. The One With The Hill In The Middle
4. The Colored Light Thing
5. The Horse
6. The Swinging Pole
7. The Water Hole
8. The Wishing Well
9. The Windmill
Back Nine
10. The Outhouse
11. The Covered Bridge
12. The Barrels
13. The Airplane (formerly The Clown)
14. The Purple One
15. The Ferris Wheel
16. The Weird Blue Pipe Thing
17. The Paddle Wheel Boat
18. The Clown Face
The Ticket Booth: Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Rules
1. Ball off carpet, place at point of exit, add one stroke.
2. Ball in water, place on green, add one stroke.
3. Maximum six strokes per hole.
4. Have fun.
5. Be kind to others.
6. Go ahead and pet the dog. He’s tame.
7. This is a memoir. Every event is true. Because I don’t remember exact words spoken twenty to
thirty years ago, I based the early descriptions and dialogue on “most likely” scenarios, for
example, what customers probably looked like and what they probably said given the
circumstances. I had my family read these portions of the text to make sure they agreed on
accuracy. However, and by the way, the dialogue and descriptions of customers from the later
chapters are not from imagination but in fact completely accurate. These are taken from
extensive notes and tape-recorded dialogue, because I’m the kind of person who would hide a
tape recorder in the ticket booth just to hear what people sound like when they reminisce about a
place like Tom Thumb.
THE TICKET BOOTH: PROLOGUE
The state of Wisconsin looks like a hand. Set the book down. Hold up your
right palm. Stick out your thumb, and lo, you have Door County, a thumb-
shaped peninsula of tourism lapping into Lake Michigan, where summertime
visitors can drive on crowded roads and buy cherry pies, cherry liquors,
cherry-painted shot glasses, and stay at overpriced cherry-themed motels. At
the top of your hand, between your extended fingers, in the northernmost part
of the state, sprawl lakes and rivers and other water-soaked lands generally
too overrun with mosquitoes to be habitable except by extremists. I have
heard that religious monks in Italy would slap leather whips across their
backs until they bled, believing pure suffering could bring them closer to
God. Or they could just spend some time in northern Wisconsin, say, five to
seven minutes. The suffering is the same; the insects more deft at drawing
your blood.
Across the center of the state, and the palm of your hand, are the fertile
plains: fields of corn, alfalfa, and glowing soybeans, and pastures of reddish
brown slow-moving cows, separated into farms by dots of broken-down silos,
collapsing barns, and graying farmhouses. The winter is long and the climate
absurd. No paint sticks to the sides of these buildings. As you drive up
Highway 22, you can play the game “Abandoned House/Not Abandoned
House,” looking for signs of human life between the abundant fields of
abundant grains.
Also abundant fields of geometrically correct pine trees.
When my ancestors and yours came to the United States, there were
thousands of acres of trees in Wisconsin to be sawed down and milled into
lumber, and so they did. Then all the trees were gone. In the 1930s the U.S.
Department of Agriculture looked at the bare sandy ground and paid people
to plant more trees. Pine trees, they decided. Perhaps feeling glee at its
success in organizing a military for World War I, the government encouraged
planting in tidy columns, lining up the trees as if for inspection. Red pine, red
pine, red pine. A steady ten feet apart. Row after row after row. Ten, hut! The
trees look bushy on the top, rough and scaly on the bark, and completely at
attention at the base. The forests of Wisconsin are for people who like their
wilderness organized, who admire the beauty of crossword puzzles. While
driving down state highways you can stare at the space between the rows and
recall early lessons in mathematics, how parallel lines never intercept but
only appear to converge near infinity.
Along the roadsides, like wildflowers, are strewn the carcasses of freshly
killed deer. They bloom red and white and brown, all year long.
I tell you these things so that you will stay away.
Don’t go to Wisconsin. Don’t consider buying land in Wisconsin.
Maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, say, ten, fifteen years ago. If
I could have stopped people from clamoring for land, real estate prices would
have stayed the same. Property values wouldn’t have risen. Taxes would not
have gone through the roof. My schoolteacher-parents would have money left
over at the end of the summer after paying their enormous property tax. Their
income from their miniature golf course could be used for other things, like
hiring local kids to mow the lawn, or paying a handyman to paint all the
hazards, replace the carpets, or rake the leaves. My parents are sixty-seven
and seventy-six years old; maybe once in a while they’d like a day off.
Maybe they’d enjoy working less than twelve hour days, seven days a week,
all summer long, just for the right to live in their house, which just happens to
be on a lake, which means their taxes keep rising as people keep bidding up
the value of the plots of land that surround them. Maybe—just imagine!—if
their taxes were lower, my parents could even make a profit. Maybe they
wouldn’t have had to sell Tom Thumb. So maybe it’s actually my fault for
not speaking up earlier, telling everyone how terrible it is. Maybe I could
have prevented the whole darn thing from crashing to an end.
The problem with Wisconsin: the lakes. Don’t ask me about the lakes.
Don’t ask me about swimming through the clear water. Don’t ask me about
floating over the surface in a canoe. I’m not going to tell you how beautiful
they are. I’m not going to use words like sparkling or blue, or you will be
clamoring too.
You see, yesterday I found out that the world is coming to an end. But if I
told you that, you would probably think I was being overly dramatic. Of
course I am. This is miniature golf. Everything I say about the topic is going
to sound like an exaggeration.
The news arrived in the form of a red blinking light, which meant I had
missed a phone call. I was driving up Vine Street at the time, heading home
from the YMCA where I swim.
I had just crossed Hollywood Boulevard in my fifteen-year-old Honda.
The sidewalks were crowded, as usual, with afternoon sightseers. It looks
most days as if every tourist in town has dropped something on the pavement.
They walk slowly in clusters, canting together towards the earth, searching
for the stars of their favorite entertainers. But they won’t find them here.
