Fore

What was the first question everyone asked when I told them that last weekend I was going to the Professional Golf Association's BMW Championship, in the Chicago suburb of Lamont, Ill.?

"Do you play golf?"

Well, no. I did once spend a frustrating afternoon at a driving range, though. I also don't play football, baseball or basketball -- or indeed any sport with a ball -- but that hasn't kept me away from big-time football, baseball or basketball games.

But never mind. I understand the question, since I imagine a lot more people play golf regularly than those other sports. And on Sunday, spectators around us at Cog Hill Golf & Country Club talked about their golf games lavishly, mostly in bemoaning how poorly they play compared to Tiger Woods, Steve Stricker and the other pros moving down the fairways.

All of the chatter was very hushed, of course, and that was what I liked best about my first PGA tournament. Unlike other pro sports events, a golf match is all but silent. The quiet was very restful, and part of why the tournament was an enormous pleasure. The day was gorgeous and the golf course well-tended, and I could see myself happily spending a peaceful afternoon there regardless. Watching pro golfers work their magic was like a bonus.

The moviegoers

When you are relaxing and shopping for books on the South Side of Chicago, as Ereck and I were Saturday afternoon, and you suddenly realize that Andrei Tarkovsky's three hour and 41 minute epic Andrey Rublyov is playing that night at the Gene Siskel Film Center, in the Loop -- well, you go.

My mistake was in misreading the showtime. I thought it was 6:30. So we sprinted downtown, hampered by the fact that I drive a pickup truck and am therefore banished from Lake Shore Drive. We struggled to park amid festival traffic, and then in the interest of time ate a rushed, largely uninspired dinner at a Corner Bakery. It's a shame to dine at a chain in the great culinary capital that is Chicago. But we were out of options.

Then we hurried to the theater, where the snide young box office attendant (is there any other kind at an art house?) informed me that the film started at 7:30. He did so by wordlessly hooking his thumb in the general direction of the showtimes posted on the wall. We morosely killed an hour at the Borders down the block.

But never mind. The film was awesome, in an older sense of that word, and the filmgoing experience was wonderful. I dread going to films in Madison because the audiences are consistently nattering and awful, even at the estimable Cinematheque. The Film Center audience was reverent, respectful, silent.

Before the movie I noted with satisfaction that many of our fellow filmgoers had arrived alone, and were reading books before the lights went down. That's my kind of audience.

Queries

If a certain new upstairs neighbor of a certain blogger placed a really, really big pile of flattened cardboard boxes on the lawn in front of the apartment building...and if said pile was, predictably enough, not picked up by recycling workers because it was not (per the city's guidelines, which are clear, and reasonably well publicized) either in a recycling bin or tied into bundles...and if weeks passed and pentateuchal rains came and made a giant mess of the pile of cardboard, which also killed a sizable patch of grass...

Would the blogger be smarter to approach the neighbor, or the landlord about the still-rotting pile of cardboard? Bear in mind that the blogger might be growing weary of the years-long symposium he has been conducting -- for an ever-renewing crew of neighbors -- in the subtleties of Madison waste removal, which is actually not that subtle.

Or is the blogger better off simply quitting the rental racket, buying a house and moving to a neighborhood where people don't leave their trash on the lawn?

Good word

"I went through a depression after 9/11, and the start of the Iraq war and all the missed opportunities this country had...But I found when I put on Judy at Carnegie Hall, I became completely optimistic and was reminded of all the hope and glory the U.S. once represented."

-- Rufus Wainwright

Good word

"(The graffiti in cottages was all part of the fun: On the toilet wall at Paddington Station was written: 'I am 9 inches long and two inches thick. Interested?' Underneath, in different handwriting: 'Fascinated, dear, but how big is your dick?')"

-- Christopher Hitchens

Close encounter

Last night my country band the World's Greatest Lovers played a gig up in Princeton, Wis., a private party that was a self-styled hoedown, complete with barn dance and barbecue dinner. A great time.

But driving back to Wisconsin, pedal steel player Adam Davis and I had a frightening experience. Drummer Scott Beardsley, who lived for a time in nearby Green Lake, warned us as we were leaving to watch out for deer. I took the warning seriously, because you hear just awful stories about deer and cars.

And sure enough: At about 2 this morning, Adam and I were on state highway 23 just west of Montello. He was driving. Suddenly, 100 yards or so down the highway I saw...something. A strange, unidentifiable something in the middle of the road. Then an oncoming car swerved in the distance, and I realized what I was seeing. It was a young deer, looking startled and darting back and forth in the highway. My index finger shot forward. "Look out!" I yelled. "Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!"

Adam slammed on the brakes and somehow managed to avoid being hit by the car that was following us a little too closely. Fortunately we were moving slowly when we finally hit the deer. It was more like a tap. Looking even more startled, the deer scampered into the brush.

Terrifying. I'm glad it was only a tap. Hope the deer's okay.

Lazy river

Although I have visited Townsend, Tenn. hundreds of times, till earlier this month I had never gone tubing there.

Which is something. The hamlet just outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park bills itself as The Peaceful Side of the Smokies, which is city officials' coded way of promoting the fact that Townsend largely forgoes the garish, Wisconsin Dells-like attractions of nearby Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. But Townsend does seem to have a lock on one popular tourist activity: Floating down the Little River in giant inner tubes.

There are tubing concessions all along Townsend's main drag -- which runs alongside the Little River -- and the arguably most popular one, River Rat, is just down the pike from my family's place. As our vacation unfolded, Ereck and I drove past River Rat again and again, and by its competitor across the street, River Rage. We agreed we would tube. (Ereck is a native of the area and an experienced tuber.)

But I was apprehensive. Tubing seemed vaguely hazardous. "Do you get a personal flotation device?" I asked Ereck. "The tube is your personal flotation device," he counseled.

Finally, as the vacation was drawing to a close, we went. We paid our $13, grabbed our yellow tubes, made our way down the path to the river and hopped in. And I'm here to tell you:

Tubing is delightful.

I somehow had envisioned it as an almost violent experience, all white water and rapids. In fact the pace was glacial because the drought had made the river quite low, as the yellow T-shirted concessionaire warned us. "You'll drag in parts," she said.

But I loved the pace. I loved slowly drifting and spinning and relaxing. I entered a trance-like state as I journeyed through my ancestral hometown of Townsend. I looked at birds, and greeted a guy as he hosed off his deck. I listened to dogs barking. I studied a cow grazing near the river, and the cow calmly gazed at me. I marveled at the shimmering patterns of light reflected from the water onto the undersides of leaves. It was a gorgeous day. And the periods of drifting alternated with brief interludes of fast water, which were exciting enough.

After a couple of hours -- and too soon -- we came to the rendezvous spot: the swinging bridge where a River Rat employee driving an old school bus collected us and brought us back to our truck. "Did y'all have fun?" queried the apple-cheeked lad. Yes, we did.