Keely Pt. 5

Annika Sorrenstam announced she is retiring from golf at the end of this year. On Letterman she did the 10 Reasons Why List. My favorites: "So the only putts I'll have to worry about is my fiance." And, "I just want to have a nice job where I can sit in a cubicle and not be stuck on a golf course all day."


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We make a date to return to the Time Pod two weeks hence. I’m calling it a Time Pod because it gives you something to visualize even if what you are imagining is not very accurate. In reality it’s a matter of tubes and chemicals and a sort of hypnotic state. Keely runs the whole show and as I’ve said earlier, we never actually leave the room. At least, I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell. Ask Keely.

You might also wonder why me? Why do I get to journey through Keely’s life before anyone else? Well, the fact is I’m 97 years old and although I’ve got a few body parts that are substantially younger, a hip, a knee and a liver – hooray for that liver – the rest of me is probably not going to last much longer. That I’ve missed a great deal of her life by living in places abroad was also one of Keely’s considerations. She gets to show off her accomplishments to someone who has only heard about them.

I spend the next two weeks in a state of eager anticipation. I try to keep up my usual routine of journal writing in the ether zone and telereading in Spanish.(I love that I can hologram anywhere any book ever written) but my mind keeps racing to the idea of going back in time. Even the Denver Broncos second consecutive undefeated season behind Elway 3's record setting QB performance can’t hold my attention. I’m nervous as a teenager about to get his first aerocar license. When finally Keely picto calls and tells me to go to the pick-up port in the yard I set a sprint record for 90 year olds in doing so.

We take our places at The Institute, hook up all the falderal and as I’ve said before and hopefully will again, Away We Go.

This time we stop first at one of Keely and Jackson’s early concerts. K and J are on stage doing their fusion thing and the music is awesome. I can see Keely’s brother, Carson, in a backstage booth turning knobs and pushing buttons on a console to record the performance. He’s on leave from the Avalanche to rehab a knee he tore up against the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup finals. Avs weren’the same without their “enforcer” and lost 4 games to 2. Carson still has that big brother attitude about Keely and when he’s not with the Avalanche he travels with her as a personal body guard. He can be, as you might expect from a hockey player, quite intimidating.

We drop in on a number of concerts as Keely’s career develops. The venues get larger and the audiences more enthusiastic as she and Jackson build on their series of number one hits. We stay at each spot just long enough to see their closing, bring-down-the-house numbers and then we move along. We are in London in some sort of amphitheater when Hsub reappears. He is suddenly just there, on the stage, only a few feet from the performers. As he materializes into full reality, Keely, in the pod, says to me, “don’t worry Grandpa, I’m going to try something.” And then, like snap your fingers, she’s gone.