����Yesterday was one of my famous six hour lunches with My Secret Boyfriend, Eddie. I had even more fun than usual because his REAL girlfriend, The Luscious Dawn, was on vacation down here and so we were a threesome.

����Eddie even let me play with his balls--but maybe I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, maybe I should give you a little background ...

����Eddie being My Secret Boyfriend is a running joke. Over a year ago I helped him put up a web page and afterwards he took me out for the first of what has now become our ritual long lunches down in Vermont.

����We're both self-employed in home-based businesses, both know the terrors of cabin fever, both live near a teensy tiny village.

����Now one of the glories about living in a very small place is that everybody knows you and cares about your life. One of the pains in the butt about this is that everybody knows you and cares about your life.

����So ... within half an hour of me returning home from my first lunch with Eddie, I got a phone call from my mom-in-law telling me that word was out that I'd spent the better part of the day with Eddie, we'd slipped off somewhere for the afternoon together, And There Was Talk.

����I almost peed my pants I was laughing so hard.

����Forget satellite communication, forget the internet--if you REALLY want to see how fast and how far information can travel, just stock a community with a bunch of folks who have nothing better to do than spend the day on the phone sharing nuggets of gossip. Yep, it's an easy way to measure the speed of sound, folks.

����I have always enjoyed having guy buddies, the friendships are quite different from the ones I have with my chick friends. So, I just went on having lunch with Eddie, letting folks gab, and pretty much always refer to him as My Secret Boyfriend. The Old Biddy Brigade has lost interest in us now because they've come to the sneaking suspicion I am making fun of them.

    Me?

����Now, about Eddie's balls ...

����After the three of us spent a few hours on the restaurant deck, enjoying the sounds of the lake, the beauty of the sun drenched mountains, eating, gabbing and imbibing a litre and a half of good red wine ... well after that Eddie decided we just HAD to go to the local golf course and hit a bucket of balls on their driving range.

����Now, if you're having one of those days when you're saying to yourself, "Jeepers, self, I just haven't had nearly enough humiliation in my life lately," then I can confidently say that a golf driving range is where you want to be.

����Especially if you are a grace challenged individual such as I am. Especially if you have half a litre of wine sloshing about in your veins, additionally impairing questionable physical co-ordination.

����Oh yes, you can find humiliation and lots of it at a place like that.

����So we motor over, Eddie gets his bucket o' balls, and he hands Dawn and I each a driver and some of his balls. He and Dawn know how to do this and each of them gives me clear instructions, mimes the stance, even hit a few practice shots for me to see. Looks easy enough.

����So I adopt the stance, clutch my club as I've been told, bend my knees slightly, keep my arms straight, swing with all my might and ... I'm looking up in the air for the graceful arc of the ball, just like you see on TV and ...

����My ball dribbled a short distance along the grass. If a worm had stuck his head out when my ball was passing, he would have gotten SUCH a bruise.

����Now on driving ranges they have these very cool thick rubber mats with really flexible rubber tees so if you swing too low and miss the ball, hitting the ground instead, the blow is cushioned. But you can still really give your wrists a big owie. Don't ask me how I know this, I just do.

����But the worst thing, the absolutely worst thing, is when you swing for all you're worth, you look up in the sky, then lower your expectations and scan down along the grass, and THEN realize you didn't feel the vibration of the ball hitting your club ... so you look at the tee, and There Is The Ball.

����Fine.

����No wait, I'm wrong, because even you know what? There's an even worse thing. It's when you take a break, and you look back along the driving range. And there are these really old guys, some of them look like they were there when Moses parted the Red Sea, eh.

����Some of them look like maybe they have a walker or a respirator stashed there in their golf cart, and at least one of them has a belly on him that would guarantee lifetime work as a mall Santa if he wants to underwrite his green fees.

����And each and every one of these guys is hitting the ball with a mighty THWACK and sending it arcing through the sky to land very, very close to the pin which is way, way off in the distance.

����Fine.

����Yep, I think yesterday I pretty much got rid of any humiliation deficits that might have been building up in my life.

����Eddie is just oh so keen to play a few holes of golf with me. I'm thinking he has a deep, heretofore unsuspected sadistic streak. I was saved yesterday because I was wearing my jeans. Thanks to a fairly rigid dress code, there was no way they would let us on the course proper to play. WHEW!

����Now which of Eddie's lunch partners do you think will somehow ALWAYS, by some flukey co-incidence, wear jeans? Yep, you got it, it would be ...