Saturday, September 13, 2025
Memorial of Saint John Chrysostom, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Golf and heroes
To the king of ages, incorruptible, invisible, the only God,
honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
Jasper and Miles like to play miniature golf. In the spring we found Duke’s in south Austin, where they dunked their balls in a waterfall and knocked them out in the street (only occasionally). Yesterday we went to the world’s only Memorial Minature Golf and Military Museum in Buda, just south of South Austin. No waterfalls, the street was far away, and each hole here is dedicated to either heroes or battles of World War II. When Miles got to hole #4 he shouted, “Grandpa, it’s Pearl Harbor!”
Hole #1 is titled Blitzkrieg, hole #2 Dunkirk. Hole #10 honors “women of war,” with a statue of Rosie the Riveter and nearby memorial rose garden, and Hole #17 recognizes African Americans fighting for freedom. Each hole also has a short, readable story-on-a-plaque, including a vocabulary word for all of us. Here’s a complete list with pictures.
Margaret and I were too big to fit into the playground replica of a fighter plane flown by a young Texan, complete with seat, instruments and a tunnel slide escape hatch. The ribbon-cutting for this unexpected and amazing place came in 2022, and it has garnered national publicity since.
Hole #9’s vocabulary word is “cryptographers.” I think my dad was one of those, and a few weeks ago at church I met another, a greeter in his eighties, who told me he was a cryptographer for three years during the Vietnam War. On Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day he wears his military decorations.
Hole #14 commemorates the Flying Tigers, planes flown in the Pacific Theater of WWII. Margaret’s dad was a navigator in one of those Flying Tigers. Both our dads survived the war (of course … we wouldn’t be here otherwise) but didn’t talk about it much. There is certainly a lot to say, though, stories full of heroism and perseverance, and much suffering alongside the glory.
I will show you what someone is like who comes to me,
listens to my words, and acts on them.
That one is like a man building a house,
who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock;
when the flood came, the river burst against that house
but could not shake it because it had been well built.
We topped off our day with a Mexican lunch at Chuy’s, a popular restaurant in Austin, full of people talking loud enough to be heard over everyone else. Miles and Jasper talked as loud as anybody though, while they ate their burritos, beans rice and orange sherbet push-ups. It was a fine day of history and golf and food.
The golf course closes between 2 and 5:30 every day in the summer when the temperatures are nearly always in the upper 90s. We got there early, but everyone was still sweating halfway through the holes. Kind of like we would have been walking a trail through the Burmese jungle in 1942.
From the rising to the setting of the sun
is the name of the LORD to be praised.
(1 Timothy 1, Psalm 113, John 14, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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