(Appeared originally in Sunday editions of The Times and The News-Star, September 15, 2019.)

The sentences were so fantastic, so completely foreign and novel, that it was hard to tell if he was even speaking English.

Caught me completely off guard.

Innocently enough is how it happened. Bunch of us were eating sandwiches. Nothing going on when I asked him about the picture he’d sent from his phone to mine the week before from Bethpage Black, a rather famous public golf course up north, although this has nothing to do with golf unless you need some clubs delivered from Provo to Hot Springs, which we’ll get to in a second…

Bethpage Black is in Farmingdale, New York, less than an hour from New York City, or more precisely Harlem, where he’d been only a few hours before he’d played Bethpage Black, which is why I was having trouble grasping the way life plays out sometimes.

The PGA Championship was played in May at Bethpage Black, a public course where people sleep in the parking lot and then pay upwards of $200 to play the next morning after a night in “the Bethpage Inn,” which, again, is the parking lot; that’s really what they call it.

My friend — we’ll call him Silverado since he drives a big pickup — is very good at golf so it did not surprise me when a picture popped up on my phone from his phone number, a picture of a sign that is actually posted at Bethpage Black. The sign reads this way:

“WARNING (That is honestly in all capital letters and red. Serious business.) The Black Course Is An Extremely Difficult Course Which We Recommend Only For Highly Skilled Golfers.”

Just sayin’. It could have added, “But If You’re Not Good And Still Want To Blow $200-Plus And Lose 47 Golf Balls Over The Next Five Hours, Be Our Guest.”

This was not problematic to my friend, who is skilled and has no vices other than golf. Long story short: He got on Bethpage early and shot a 78. The PGA winner this year shot a final round 74.

My guy is good.

So in between bites of my sandwich or maybe during a bite I ask him about why he drove from north Louisiana to New York and he says, chewing, “Well…”

And here we go.

His business was slow during the summertime. (He chewed and swallowed.) His wife was and is pregnant but caught her second wind early in her second trimester and had the energy to keep up with their other little ones and the one on the way. Soon and very soon she won’t have that. Seizing the moment, she said, “Go make some money.”

And so he did. The ingenuity of the American working male never ceases to amaze me.

There is a business now, with its own app and everything, that works this way: people who need stuff delivered — a pet, a chest, a trailer — will pay you or I to deliver it. We go online, bid on it, and if we have the winning bid, we get to work.

That’s what Silverado did. He discovered someone in Arkansas or Kentucky, I was chewing and forget which, needed a custom-made glass casket carrier — I know, I laughed too — hauled to Harlem in New York City. My guy did that. Got a lot of stares on the drive. Then he played golf.

Meanwhile he checked the app and found a lady in Brooklyn needed a cat delivered to Washington, D.C. So he did that and a couple of other jobs on the way back to north Louisiana.

One of his first jobs was delivering two dogs and a miniature mule from Kentucky to Ohio. His truck actually broke down on this trip and left him sitting at a rest stop in the shade with these three animals on leashes, a quartet that drew odd looks from the trucker community. Being a miniature and smaller than the dogs, the mule was unrideable. So while his truck was being fixed he rented a car, delivered the animals, returned for his truck, and made a couple of other pickups and deliveries on the way home.

When he called me this week — I nearly pulled a muscle reaching for the phone when I saw it was him — he was between Mobile, Alabama and Olympia, Washington hauling a barbecue trailer; he’d had to make an emergency stop in either Wichita or Augusta, Kansas to get four new tires and two springs on the thing because I guess they don’t make barbecue trailers like they used to. By the way, Mobile to Olympia is a 5,400-miles round trip if you’re keeping score at home, which he’s not because he’s in the Pacific Time Zone and his wife is still in Central, and pregnant.

His plan on the way home was to drop off four 35-pound boxes and an antique bicycle in Colorado, then bid on a 6-pound puppy and an antique RCA television that someone wanted taken from Amarillo to Dallas.

Like Robert Frost, my man has chosen the road less traveled, and that has made all the difference, at least in cash flow.

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