It’s six fargin’ degrees below zero as I trundle to the light rail station tonight. I’m bundled up in “Big Blue”, my below-the-knee length parka lined with down, thinsulate and cashmere, and a collar that zips up under my nose, and I’ve got on ear-muffs and a woolen hackers cap from Ireland. Big Blue also has a hood which I seldom use because I think hoods on coats make you look like you’re in third grade, or like you’re a dork, or a third-grade dork, which may be the dorkiest of all. In this cold, however, I have no shame and I also figure no one can recognize me with the hood pulled up over my cap and ear-muffs and fastened in front of my face anyway.

In this kind of weather I board at the LRT’s terminus in the Warehouse District because there’s almost always a train waiting there to start its run and it’s nicer to wait in the train car rather than waiting for it a couple of blocks farther down the line. Tonight there is a train waiting, but when I try to get on the doors won’t open. Then the driver speaks over the PA: “This train is not in service.” It looks plenty serviceable to me, especially when it departs — empty — a few moments later. There is no other train in sight at the moment as the lights of the Ghost Train disappear toward the Nicollet Mall where it will no doubt tantalize other commuters before leaving them in the cold as well.

With the train’s departure, however, I now have an unobstructed view of the front of a bar called Sneaky Pete’s, immediately on the other side of the track. The front of the establishment features large plate glass windows and on one of the windows, positioned immediately under a neon Blue Moon Brewing Co. sign and hard up against the window, is a large flat-screen TV, facing the tracks. No one in the bar could possibly watch this TV, but people outside can. The TV is tuned to The Golf Channel, and it is showing scenes of PGA pros in their short-sleeve golf shirts practicing at Waialea Country Club in Hawaii for this week’s Sony Open. I watch slack-jawed, with frost from my moustache thawing and dripping onto my lips, as Anthony Kim and Geoff Ogilvy and others roll puts across a High-Def green that could be called emerald green if emeralds took steroids, and just looking at it makes me wiggle my toes deep inside my mukluks.

Somehow the January wind starts to feel softer and, I swear, I think I can smell coconut oil wafting toward me on it. The angle of my shoulders, until now hunched up against my neck, drops by about six degrees and I loosen the hood and lower the zipper at my neck a couple of inches as I eye a bunker shot from a beautiful white sand hazard. No, wait, it’s really a snow bank as the clanging bells of the approaching train take me out of my reverie.

Is it too early to get my clubs down out of the garage attic?

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