SYMBOLISM

I like the photo on the left. Of course, its subject is golf. What's there not to like about a sport that gets you outdoors, surrounds you with natural (and not so natural) beauty, allows you to participate when other sports have left you behind, and encourages betting, drinking and carousing? Ok, I wasn't serious about the last three. I could have added smoking a big old cigar. That's the one that got me to drop out of league play twelve years ago. So that must be pretty serious if the other three didn't get me to stop playing.

But once again, I'm sidetracked. That happens to me more all the time. I especially like it when I go into another room or open a drawer and wonder what I was doing there or looking for. And glasses. Thank goodness, after a couple of laser eye surgeries, I don't have to fool with them. Except for sunglasses which I'm constantly misplacing.

The picture is not about that either. Plus, I've run out of other rabbit trails, so if I go back to the title; this entry is about symbolism. I can't begin to understand the implications from the picture. Oh, losing one's head is there, I guess. But he looks pretty happy to me to having lost it. Close to the hole? With a little guy sticking something in his back? Poke him--he's done, I guess.

Maybe it is his father who has pushed him so much that the kid rebelled. Who could know?

And then the others. The Jack-in-the-Box guy. The cart in the distance. They all must stand for something. But I'm as lost here as I was in Prof. Benzinger's class when he asked me, grad student in a predominantly undergrad 400- level class, to explain the poet Swinburne.

I especially liked it when teachers explained symbolism and acted as if everyone should see it and if you didn't then something was wrong with you. As an undistinguished writer, and long time student, I know that sometimes a rose is just as rose is just... Or in the case of the photo a smiling head near a golf hole is just a smiling head near a golf hole..