At anything off-color, Dan grew shy and pebble-kicking. The Six Footers admired him as “too straight an arrow.” When he literally blushed, they seemed not unexcited, watching somebody so handsome redden, laugh, then hide his face behind two palms while bowing forward.

Quiet, he reigned at their group’s dead center. If any Packard or golf cart broke, Dan was first under its hood. The joke ran: he could fix an engine without getting any oil on him. Dan wore his snug, pressed clothes like some proud, poor boy—quietly defending his one good school outfit.

People always included young Mr. R——, though his family wasn’t from Falls. He was token Elsewhere. Dan seemed more mysterious and attractive, being uninitiated. Locals took him aside to explain the genealogy behind a recent land deal—some webbing of tribal traits and 1790 betrayals so complex, you could see he hadn’t a clue. It didn’t matter. Around here, nobody new ever truly knew. Two hundred and fifty years were involved; strangers could never catch up with that many genes and so much ownership.

Dan R——(no last name, please, though it’s thirty-nine years later) showed one immodesty. He had a charming, actorish way of planting knuckled fists onto his hips. He had this lovely way of letting his well-made head fall back as he laughed. He laughed often and—if the things he said were the things that, at church, on fairways, they all said then—Dan said them in so ripened a baritone, and with such banal complete conviction, it made him seem even more a man.

Originality has never been required for admission to a country club. Originality would soon lose this guy his membership.

My dad was himself a chopper and clown on the links. His own ambitions for his game made him far less good at it. Dan R——played golf to relax. Golf worked my father’s every nerve. “That darn Dan,” Pop shook his head. “Guy consistently shoots in the low seventies.” My father watched the younger man’s natural swing; Dad’s groans sounded close to lust, not the simpler vice of envy.

“I swear, Dan. I keep telling the pro—person can’t learn it. Guy either gots it or he don’t, and—Dan?—you’re loaded with factory options, damnit. Maybe bottle it? For us mortals, pal? Sell me a six-pack at cost, what say?”

“Well, thanks, Richard. I do really usually try hard, I do. And sometimes, I admit, I’ll get m’balls to set down at least near where I wanted ’em.”

Be careful what you wish for, Dan R——.

If this were fiction and not the blunt, hyperpictorial, and unlikely truth, I would assign “the Dan character” some personal peculiarities. These would separate him from his leggy, same-ish junior partners’ crowd. Maybe I’d make him a bit accident-prone? or give him some slight endearing limp, a major stammer. Fact is, he was too able-bodied.