We're growing older.  Some of us belong to those country clubs we only dreamed about playing back when we roamed the green expanses of Hanson Park.  Weasel's younger brother actually tried making it as a pro and works today in the golf industry.

Weasel organizes and runs The Cragin.  Bear cleans asbestos out of old buildings.  The Leech was missing for several years and turned up again at the 25th anniversary.  We still think it was because the statute of limitations ran  out.  Spar, The Booming Hunter, and the rest are going about their lives, too.  None of us live in Cragin anymore.  There's not a Palmer, Nicklaus, or Player among us, but we still golf.  Cragin is still in each of us.

We remember hitting across the baseball diamonds.  We remember rising at 4:00 in the morning and running across the park, the stares of the commuters as we got on the bus, the clubs we hit our best shots with.  We remember the first time we reached a par 3 with one shot, the first par we got, the first birdie, the first eagle, the first time we broke a 100.  It was how the game grew in us and how we grew in the game.

Time and distance really have separated us.  Except for The Cragin.  Since that first one in 1974, we have gathered every year.  From wherever we are, we come to Hunter Country Club in Richmond, Illinois in July.  1998 was our 25th anniversary, but who's counting? We're mostly Polish, can't count, can't spell our own names, and are getting to the point where we can't remember a damn thing anymore, but who cares?  We come to have a good time, and once a year we get to act a little less like adults and a little more like the young kids we once were.

We chip in for trophies and gag prizes.  We gab, smoke cigars and laugh at our graying balding pates and paunchier stomachs.  Some of us started bringing our own kids.  Some of them are out out on their own with their own friends and golf partners, but they keep coming back each year, too

The Cragin has been the way we have kept in touch.  It is what still binds us after all these years.  Golf does that.  So does a whole neighborhood of friends.

Me?  I finally to play a country club course.  I still get up early in the mornings in summer to shoot nine holes at a city course.  I still think there's no finer sunrise in the world than the one that touches the second green on the course I play on the shore of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin.  Sometimes, when I'm alone out there, the dew of morning glistening, my footprints left behind me on the fairway, I remember those days.  The Weasel, Bear, and Me.  And I can almost imagine their footprints with mine.