AUGUSTA, Ga.—No promises for Pulitzers, but at least we are here.

Designated Writers left the gravitational pull of Louisiana Monday morning and arrived in Georgia Monday evening, safe and mostly sound with a numb butt. It’s 680 miles if you’re keeping score at home and choose the 285 bypass instead of battling through downtown Atlanta—which is a jump ball call; it was brisk until you tried to get back onto Interstate 20 and then it slowed for about 30-minutes’-worth. Would it have been better to have ventured through downtown, which was 10 interstate miles less?

Only the Interstate Gods know for sure, just as only the Golf Gods know for sure whether Tiger Woods is worth all the overwhelming buildup he has been given—through no fault of his own, except for being great, then injured and confused, and now for being middle-aged and middle-of-the-pack. This buildup is because of the media, which I am a part of and which I am embarrassed by. Sigh…He is a balding middle-aged golfer who no one is scared of any more on Sundays. Sam Burns, who is a pro and who would be a senior this year if he’d had stayed at LSU, beat him three weeks ago.

He could definitely win. He loves the course and has been a champion four times here. But if he does not win, it does not mean he is not good or that he failed. It means that he is 42 now and that no one is frightened of him and that it is a harder game professionally than you can imagine and that there are lot of guys who can play good golf, including Sam Burns, who won last weekend’s Web.com Tour event—bravo Sam!—but won’t even be in the Masters field.

And by the way, if you are leaving from Ruston, count on 10 or 11 hours, depending on Atlanta traffic and bathroom stops. It took me 12 Billy Graham sermons and four bathroom stops, which matches my average on any given go-to-bed, get-up-in-the-morning nights. How was I so lucky? Only my bladder and colon know for sure.

I hope the weather holds. It was 86 degrees at Augusta National today. I do not know that for sure but at the Flying J truck stop in Madison, Ga., where I stopped for gas, that is what it looked like the limping patrons who walked in had been cooked at.

Designated Writers recognized them immediately. It wasn’t because they had on their Masters patron badges or their Masters hats. It was because of their limping. And red skin. Walking the hills you can’t see on television, and sunburn, will do that.

BUT, it was well worth it. I asked them about what kind of time they’d had.

“Beautiful land,” the Lead Limper told me, smiling a winner’s smile. “Great day.”

I didn’t use exclamation points because he didn’t, but from the look on his red face, he’d meant it.

More discussion revealed that he was from Sweden. I didn’t ask his name because I knew it was either Ludvig or Liam or Oscar or Hugo. Possibly Axel or Noah or Arvid. What’s the diff? He and his friends had come to America in general and to Augusta, Ga., in particular to walk a piece of land spectacular, and they were not left wanting.

The Masters rarely disappoints.

She was four and I was 41 when I met my future step-child and when she met me.

She was little hefty, quite frankly, something that surprised me because her mother weighed 99 pounds, and that’s if she’s wearing a concrete suit. “How did you HAVE this thing?” I am thinking?, as any person with a sense of anatomy would.

What I saw in her was a precious chunk of baby fat with hair thick, full, and long. A smile honest and welcoming and, one distant day, even more beautiful after braces. Feelings easily hurt, as the feelings of small people often are.

And I saw a little-girl kindness to other little people.

But I had never been around little girls. Only little boys. What was this thing?

Not long after I met her, her mother called me one morning, very sick with a violent something you don’t even want to be in the same time zone with, and asked if I could give our favorite now-five-year-old-without-a-driver’s-license a ride to school. So I came over in my Jeep and she climbed up into the seat in her flannel skirt and leggings and long hair combed and her little jacket on, and her little legs just stuck straight out once she sat, her black Mary Janes two feet above the floor mat.

She bravely waved to her sick yet hopeful, bathrobe-wearing mother while we backed out of the driveway. Then, as we headed toward school, she started to cry. Not violently. Just silent tears down her chubby little face.

Wouldn’t you have done the same?

Some guy you’ve known for just a few months is taking you to school, not your mom who almost always takes you and not some person you’ve known for all of your five years of life. Instead it’s this…person. Plus your mom is sick. “Will she be able to come get me after school?” you are thinking. “Will she burn the Hamburger Helper tonight? Does this man even know where to take me?”

I would have cried too. And almost did.

But we made it, somehow. I spoke softly on the short drive and told her that her mom would get her after school, and she was about to see all her friends, and that Look!, we were almost there!, and she bravely walked into her school, met by a beaming teacher as she slid, sort of parachuted, out of the Jeep. We both survived.

Silly things I remember:

Us playing on the floor of her room while her mother worked and her having to push her hair out of the way time and time again: “This HAIR!,” her little mouth would say, exasperated, a phrase she picked up from her mom…

Her being in the fourth-grade play as the dog in the Lewis & Clark adventure and doing a great job on her featured song, “I Tell You It Was Ruff”…

Our writing notes to each other on empty cardboard toilet paper and paper towel tubes and putting them in weird places for the other to find, because we are juvenile like that. (A lot of them, sort of our Greatest Hits, hang in the laundry room)…

Me proudly watching from a Sheraton as she and Casey, my peeps, my son and her step-brother, laughing as they walked up the block to a Lady Gaga concert in St. Louis eight summers ago in a sea of black and makeup and heels and fishnet…

The rhyming chants from her dugout in little-girl softball games, so inventive and so mean. Little girl softball is not for the timid! Who knew?…

The first time she sang in church, a Mother’s Day solo, without her mom even knowing she was going to do it, or even knowing she could sing, and her mom crying but me not crying because I am A Man and because she’d secretly told me, so I’d had time to prepare…

And finally, knowing I will cry at her wedding in May, even though I’ve had time to prepare for that, like since she was four. But, that’s not time enough.

And of course, at the same time, it is time enough. She is a kid but an old soul with a solid companion, and I actually wish they were getting married last week. Very happy for everybody involved. One day they will understand how fortunate they are, and they will be overwhelmed to the point of tears, as I will be on their wedding day, because I have lived longer and I “know.”

As things happened, the decades between us would make things work out better than we could have planned. It gave us just the right amount of experience to love each other as each of us needed and wanted to be loved. We’ve come a long way since that cool autumn morning in the Jeep.

Technically, her mom is my favorite springtime bride. But this little chunk of goodness hits the tape at almost the same time, a photo finish of which her mother would approve.